Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 297 A.J. Swoboda - A Teachable Spirit
A.J. Swoboda is back on the podcast for the third time. This time we are sitting down to talk about A Teachable Spirit. He hit on something that I think is sorely missing in this world today: being teachable. In a world often drawn sharply into polarized camps, where dialogue seems overshadowed by ideological extremes, cultivating a teachable spirit becomes more than a virtue, it becomes an act of quiet revolution. But what exactly does it mean to approach life, faith, and community with genuine humility and openness, even when our convictions run deep? Our conversation explores what it truly means to possess a teachable spirit, how to stand firmly in our beliefs while also actively listening to, honoring, and learning from those who are different than us. We’ll explore themes of humility, empathy, wisdom, discernment and the careful balancing act of maintaining convictions while remaining open to growth and change. This is an important conversation, so join us as we unpack the practice of discerning truth in a fragmented world, and how holding our beliefs can transform both our inner and outer worlds and enable us to have a teachable spirit.
Rev. A. J. Swoboda (Ph.D., Birmingham) is the associate professor of Bible and Theology at Bushnell University. He served as a college pastor on the University of Oregon campus for nearly ten years. For another decade, he planted and pastored an urban church in Portland, Oregon, called Theophilus, which continues to worship today. He leads a Doctor of Ministry program around Spiritual Formation and Soul Care at Friends University. He has taught at the London School of Theology, LIFE Pacific, Southeastern University, and Multnomah University. He is the author of over ten books, including Redeeming How We Talk (Moody), After Doubt (Brazos), and the award-winning Subversive Sabbath (Brazos). He hosts the Slow Theology podcast (w. Dr. Nijay Gupta) and writes the widely read Low-Level Theologian Substack. A.J. lives and works on an urban farm with his wife and son in Eugene, Oregon.
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It is actually because of those deep convictions that allows me to have conversations with people that I disagree with, because I can be confident in what I know and I know what is an in or out issue. For me, I don't have to be afraid because I have deep convictions that that shape hospitality. You cannot have true hospitality without deep convictions.
Joshua Johnson:AJ, welcome back to shifting culture. So excited to have you back again.
A.J. Swoboda:Gosh, I this is three times. We should just build it in that we do this like all the time. That's right. It's great.
Joshua Johnson:You have something coming up with me, Jay Gupta, in the fall, right? Yes, have you you both on at the same time, which would be fantastic. And then you both would be on four times because I've had DJ on three times. So wow,
A.J. Swoboda:this is crazy. All the forces of the universe aligning at once. Be careful. I don't know if zencaster can handle all of this power.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, I don't know. Yeah, I don't know, but it's good. I think your new book a teachable spirit is one thing that we're kind of missing in this world today, like you hit on something, you hit on a nerve that I think is really important in today's age. And I don't think people are are talking about it. I don't think people are opening themselves up to learning from strangers and enemies and other people and knowing that they could actually be humble and open themselves up to others. Why? Why this book? Why a teachable spirit? Why is it important for you? Yeah, yeah,
A.J. Swoboda:there's, there's a story. Not too long ago, about about a year and a half ago, I was watching the news, which I don't know if I'd recommend anybody do anymore, but I was doing that, and there was a story of a woman who had kind of gotten caught up in kind of a political scandal, sort of sort of situation. She had kind of partnered herself with some fairly kind of nefarious individuals, and she got caught, and she realized that she had made a big mistake and that she was wrong, and she was on this she was in the courtroom, being essentially she was She was in her trial, and she is standing before the judge, she has an opportunity to speak to the court, and she in just real tears. And these were, you can tell when somebody's, you know, crocodile tears versus real tears. They were real tears. And she was publicly saying to people, I'm sorry I messed this up, and I'm going to learn from this, and I'm not going to do this again, and I ask for grace and forgiveness. It was a very moving moment, actually, to watch this woman recognize her own mistake. And that evening, I made the double mistake of getting on social media. So I watched it, and then I got on social media, and I was sort of hoping that this would be a moment where people recognize like nobody was hurt. She didn't do anything that harmed people, but that people would recognize this is a humble image of somebody recognizing that they made a mistake. And I watched for the better part of one hour as pretty much everybody just dunked on this poor woman. And I mean dunked, I mean just shamed, tarred feathered, and I I was so distraught by this experience, because it Joshua basically showed me what our culture has descended into, and that is that we've become a culture that demands that people repent, but the minute that they do, they are tarred and feathered, which basically means that we've created a culture where we are now weaponizing people that are willing to learn, people that are willing to actually be humble enough to learn something. We do everything in our power to shame them, which basically means it is not safe to be a learner in our world anymore. You use the word humble, and I'm the more I talk about this book, the more uncomfortable I am with that word. In some sense, humility is a very important virtue, but there is a form of humility that is a dangerous humility, and it's a form of humility that says to the Christian, you know, you shouldn't have any convictions, just receive everything that everybody has to tell you that is not the kind of humility. Scripture invites us into we are called to have convictions, a compass of thought. We're supposed to, you know, have deep rooted convictions, but in that continuously being open to learning more and more and more. So I That's the heart of the book. Is that Christians should be the most teachable people in the world. And, well, that's a scandalous concept, because a lot of the people that we know as Christians, you. Who have the mics are not showing us that it
Joshua Johnson:seems to me like what a disciple of Jesus looks like. Being a disciple means that you're learning from this rabbi, this this teacher that is going to teach you it's a teachable spirit is being a disciple
A.J. Swoboda:even the word by the way, even the word disciple in the New Testament methods, is often translated as simply a learner. To be a disciple is to be a learner, right? Imagine, imagine that. I mean, imagine if that shaped our identity as Christians. Yes, our primary teacher is Jesus but he has a lot of TAS you know, he uses a lot of people to teach us.
Joshua Johnson:Yes, so is learning then just about acquiring knowledge when we really have knowledge at our fingertips right now, so is that what it means to be a learner to be teaching
A.J. Swoboda:yeah so so I have this weird this this weird experience now being an educator at our moment in time when chat GPT has come to us all. I am on the forefront of seeing what chatgpt is doing to a whole new cohort of students. And basically what it's doing is, it is, it is giving students the right answers without teaching them how to think. And the result of this is, by the way, when I can read, when I can read a paper, I can tell within 12 milliseconds if the student actually wrote this, because no undergraduate student would ever begin a phrase or a sentence with the phrase upon reflection that this is, I mean, this is clearly not a human that's written this. I'm actually, for the first time, desiring my students to write really bad papers. Joshua, because at least bad, badly written papers are written by a student. I do not believe that having all the right answers is in the end the whole bit of learning. And I think we can draw that from letters like Paul, like like James, the letter of James that says, you know who has all the right answers the demons do. And the demons know who God is, and they know you know all about God yet they're not formed into the image of Christ. So no, there's a huge difference between information and being formed by the person of so
Joshua Johnson:what do you think is a couple of these differences? What does the formation then look like, or learning look like, if it's not just acquiring knowledge of knowing the right answer. Well,
A.J. Swoboda:certainly, certainly part, part of the answer to that question is, is that there is some knowledge that is only available through relationship. There is a there was a guy a number, a number of years ago by the name of Michael Polanyi. He was a scientist back in the 1920s I want to say, and he wrote about what he called personal knowledge. And personal knowledge is, for him, the kind of knowledge that only comes through real deep personal experience with somebody. If I asked you Joshua to tell me about my wife, you could do a Google search and find out a bunch of things about her. You could find out where she was born, what her birthday is, you could, you could tell me, you know, probably what her son, our son's name is, how many chickens she has, all these sorts of things. You wouldn't be able to tell me about her. Character you wouldn't be able to tell me about the kind of person she is. You wouldn't be able to tell me what her favorite desserts are and and why those desserts are connected to her story. And, you know, a Google search could permit you to go and find just about anything you want to find about the biographical details of Jesus Christ. You could find out where he was born, when he was born, you know, what he would have looked like, these sorts of things. Those are all important biographical details. But you and I both know there's a huge difference between abstract knowledge and personal knowledge. To know Jesus is not the same as to know about Jesus although it is important that those two are connected because if, if I don't know about Jesus then I have a much greater chance to misrepresent who he is. So I do think there's an intimate connection about information and personal knowledge, but they are not the same, and learning from the master, entails not just receiving his information, but actually becoming like him. You
Joshua Johnson:mentioned when you were talking about humility, that we have convictions as believers, that we we usually stand on them, and a lot of those convictions I think in some pockets of Christianity creates a spirit of pride or arrogance of saying I have my convictions and you don't really have anything to teach me so I need to make sure that I don't Have heresy or bring in something that is not scriptural. What then is the the posture and how do we like stand in our conviction but be open to learning and continue to move with other people?
A.J. Swoboda:Yeah, well, two sides to that answer, it is, by the way we're recording this just after Holy Week, and I. Yesterday, our my pastor at my church preached on the Emmaus road road experience. These two disciples, you know, encounter Jesus. They don't know it's Jesus. They don't recognize him. And they basically say to Jesus, Hey, what are you doing here? And and Jesus has a conversation with them, and Jesus says, What things have happened in Jerusalem? And they tell him. What's so funny about this story, and many commentators have pointed this out, is that Jesus knows the answers of what's been going on in Jerusalem because he was the one being crucified in Jerusalem. He is plain dumb. He meaning he is letting them preach the gospel to him, and he knows the gospel, and he knows what happened to him the couple days before. What's interesting is, you've got the guy who knows everything willingly listening to two disciples who know almost nothing. What's cool to me about that, as Jesus plays dumb there, he's not dumb. He's playing dumb. He's, he's, he's drawing out what's inside of them is if the God of the universe, who knows everything? Can be that humble to learn and listen from other people. How much more can we and should we to have all the knowledge and information is not the end of being a teachable person. You can still listen to other individuals even if you know it all. This is, this is Christ likeness in my in my opinion, the second point to that is you're absolutely right. I'm anti heresy. I think heresy is not good when we I'm I am pro orthodoxy. I think that bad theology, in the end, deeply harms people. It really hurts it sets up the possibility for spiritual abuse, it misrepresents the way of Jesus, and in the end, is a pathway to Hell. I believe 100% that orthodoxy matters. Unfortunately, commitment to Orthodoxy for many of us, tends to play itself out as a kind of closed mindedness, and I'm not convinced that believing in Orthodoxy means I don't have permission to learn from experts or culture or my enemies or friends or children or my parents. So what we need is what John Wesley called a compass for thought and for Wesley, who was a voracious reader, people have studied Wesley, you know, he spent 25 you know, 250,000 hours on horseback riding between towns, preaching the gospel everywhere he went, and when he would go, he would be reading all these books, biographies, biology, chemistry, science. I mean, he was into history, and he'd preach on this stuff. I mean, all this stuff would come out in his sermons. But he said, even for the most voracious learner, in one of his sermons, he says, we still need a compass for thought, and that is the boundaries of good thinking, the boundaries of good things. This is why scripture and in Christian tradition and history are so important, because they establish for us the boundaries of what are in or out ideas. You know it. I actually think the only way to have diversity of thought is that you have to have actual convictions. Because with convictions, it creates space for differentiation if, if I'm committed to my deepest convictions, for example, Joshua, I'm very conservative when it comes to topics of things like sexuality and gender, very conservative. And I someone say that I'm stuck in the mud, you know, I'm stuck in the ancient world, and that's fine. You can say all sort of things you want, but it is actually because of those deep convictions that allows me to have conversations with people that I disagree with, because I can be confident in what I know and I know what is an in or out issue. For me, I don't have to be afraid because I have deep convictions that that shape hospitality. You cannot have true hospitality without deep convictions. Yeah. Interesting. The only, the only way that you can actually be a missional hospitable Christian in this world is to have a few things that are dying, the hill issues for you. So
Joshua Johnson:then, what does hospitality look like? If like I have these convictions, but I'm still going to invite and listen and be be open. How does how is that hospitality?
A.J. Swoboda:Isn't it interesting that God in the Garden of Eden in Genesis three? Isn't it interesting that out of nowhere, in a good, holy Tove world, that is good out of nowhere, there's the snake that comes to deceive who let the snake in. Why didn't God kick the snake out? Why is the snake allowed to be in the Garden of Eden? Is God all powerful? He just got done creating the whole universe in seven days. This is a very powerful God who can do anything in all things, and yet God allows a serpent into the Garden of Eden. I think that that is an image of God's power. God's power. You know what? You know what a weak person would do. A weak person would end all the enemies would just like, there wouldn't be anything other. And a weak person would say, there's nothing else that can exist other than people that obey perfectly everything I'm saying. The God of the universe creates an environment. It, where the rebellious can live, where a snake can wander through God's good garden, where, after Genesis three, the humans are not immediately killed because of their disobedience. That is true power. True Power is God allowing rebels to live and be cared for. It was actually, I think it was Stanley Harris, I don't remember who it was, but who said that actually the doctrine of hell, hell is God's most extreme expression of hospitality, that it is God permitting those that eternally want to rebel to actually have a place to themselves. My Joshua, my point, my point is it is not strength to end the voices and the existence of people that disagree with you. It's actually a sign of strength. And because we as Christians can have deep rooted convictions about who God is about, what truth is about, the human body about these things, it is because of those things that we are allowed to create space for people that disagree with us. All around
Joshua Johnson:us, I love that we have convictions, we're confident, so that then we could actually stand in a place where we could invite people to other than
A.J. Swoboda:that. We all just, I mean, we could all become Amish and go live out, you know, away from culture. And I guess that's an option, and one I've been tempted by to want to do. But the minute you approach the world that way, and the minute that you pull yourself away from culture, you're no longer salt in the world. I mean, you're no longer existing as a missional agent in a world where Christ is communicating his love to a world that has rebelled. So, yeah, I mean, in the end, I don't remember who it was who said it, but only false gods demand forced homage. And the idea is it takes a weak God to force everybody to love him. It takes a powerful God to invite people to love him, but create space for people to rebel. That is true. Power.
Joshua Johnson:So good. I want to go back and say with the Emmaus road story for for just a bit, when Jesus was introduced to the disciples, this this person, they didn't know who he was. They called him foreigner, stranger. So as we're thinking about learning from strangers in this moment, Jesus wasn't known to them. He was stranger. He wasn't a part of what they thought a person should be. But then, after Jesus received them, listened to them. Jesus then unfolded the scripture, and they were learning from the stranger, this foreigner, and their hearts were burning. They were like, Oh yes, oh, I see that. I see that. Is there a place, even in that story, as you reflect on it, where they're open to learning from a stranger, they're open to the foreigner that they can show us something, Yep,
A.J. Swoboda:yeah, Mike, you know, you bring up learning from strangers. I'll come to the Emmaus road story in just a moment. You know, my generation was shaped. I still remember as a kid drinking or eating my cereal in the mornings and looking at the back of, this is the 1980s looking at the back of the milk carton. And there were the images of kids that had been kidnapped. You know, that's led to a whole culture of Stranger danger. Strangers are terrible, terrifying, scary people. You should stay away from them. Is there some truth to that? Absolutely, we need to be cautious about strangers. You know, my son kids have got it such a weird gig right now, because we tell them, Don't, don't, take candy from strangers, and then we do Halloween, and they've got to be so confused. They've got to be so good poor kids. They don't what strangers do I listen to. But all that to say, you know, as a kid, I was taught strangers are bad. You know that strangers are and that's shaped a whole generation of people. You know, my parents grandparents talked about living in small towns where everybody knew each other, that every stranger was a friend, and you wouldn't lock your doors at night and and these sorts of things. So there is, there are some cultural elements to this to get in the way of us learning from, from people that we we don't know, to the image road story. It's interesting for ancient Jews, in large part, it was a scary place to be a stranger, to be a foreigner. Um, there. There has been a good deal written about how an ancient Canaanite culture, Babylonian cultures, these sorts of spaces, strangers were, in large part, ostracized. They were in many cases killed. And then the Jews come along and live a very different ethic. They have all these laws around caring for the stranger, the widow, the orphan, the foreigner, all these sorts of things. So if you were a Jew, you would have looked very weird to the world, because you made space for the foreigner, the stranger. In fact, there's clear connections in like the Seder meal, the Passover meal, that you're always supposed to make room for the foreigner to come to the table. And that's so interesting. And so when Jesus is walking along, they think he. Stranger. So what do they do? They don't know who he is. What do they do? They do what they've been reading their whole life. They let the stranger in, and as they let the stranger in, it turns out, in Luke's Gospel, the word epigenosco is an interesting Greek word. It basically is. It means to recognize somebody. It's connected to the word genosco to No, but epigenos goes to above no to recognize or to remember again. And in Luke's Gospel, the word recognize is always connected to a meal. So they always recognize Jesus as they eat together, okay? And they recognize that it's Jesus and and for many of the early church fathers, this was intended to set up an ethic that when you make room for the stranger, you may actually be making room for Jesus Himself. And you see a little bit of this in the book of Hebrews, that by entertaining strangers, that you may be entertaining an angel, you know, by loving a stranger, you may be caring for an angel unknown to you in a world where tribalism and political and ideological fragmentation is happening, where we see the other team as evil and our team is awesome. Basically what happens is we never listen to the person that is on the other side, the stranger does not get any doesn't get any voice in our life. And I think the way of Jesus invites us to a deeper way than that. Some of the greatest discoveries in the world have happened because somebody listened to somebody, they didn't know that we had a conversation with somebody on a bus that we didn't know. We can learn from strangers, and we don't have to treat them like they're possibly all kidnappers, like we all thought as kids. Actually, strangers can offer us epiphanies and lessons and and in some instances, can be an epiphany of the living God.
Joshua Johnson:Well, some of these, these strangers that we have, we don't know them. So we were afraid of strangers. We're afraid of our we. We see them as enemies. We see them as somebody the other because we're not close to them. We don't know them. We have no proximity.
A.J. Swoboda:What's weird about that, though, Joshua is my generation was told, don't talk to strangers. Okay, today's generation of kids are all given iPhones and strangers live in their pockets. We have a very like. It was like, don't talk to strangers. Now it's like, we believe everything strangers that aren't around us say. So we spend our time like reading and listening to podcasts of people who will never meet, and we base our life now on the voice of the stranger. I am not suggesting by any stretch of the imagination that we just believe everything the stranger says. I actually argue in the book, our problem is not that we don't listen to strangers, it's that we listen to strangers that we're not in the room with and we don't listen to strangers that are in front of us. So we'll listen to a podcast by somebody we don't know, but the guy in the bus. I'm gonna put my earbuds in so I don't have to talk to
Joshua Johnson:him. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. So then, if we're listening to people that we don't know, and we're listening to strangers, and we'll shape our lives from it, where does discernment come in? How do we discern how we are? Are teachable? What is the boundaries of our good thinking?
A.J. Swoboda:Yeah, certainly, certainly number one. Certainly number one would be for a good Protestant like like myself, I would have to say that number one an endless hunger to have one's life shaped by the word of God. I mean, that is with without that we become people without compasses for thought, and we will just accept uncritically every last thing. My son said to me when he first got into elementary school, one of the things he heard was, well, how do you know if something's true? And he said, Well, if it rhymes, it's true. You It's true. If it rhymes, it's true. And I said, wasn't interesting, that doesn't rhyme. And he had to think about that. He's like, Oh, wait, that's true. Maybe it's not true. I said it's not true. To say, Do you believe everything on the internet? You know, if it's on the internet, is it true? Lord have mercy. If we believed everything on the internet, you and I would be we'd be in a heap, heap of trouble. Number one, Joshua, is there has to be for anybody that wants to be a good learner and follow Jesus at the same time, our heads and our hearts must be saturated in God's word all the time. And that is non negotiable. I think. Number two, this is where the relations, our relationship to church is really important, because the community in which we find ourselves is going to help us discern. You know, for example, in my church, we've got a number of doctors, a couple scientists. We have a a brilliant person in our church who is doing their PhD in in in English, Chinese literature. You know, what's awesome about being in a community with people like this is that I could, I could take any of these people out for coffee and wrestle out with them stuff I've been hearing all week in the news, or things I've been reading people who know more than I do. We do tend to become our communities. And I think our communities are discernment, are. Are one of the main ways that we can discern up from down, right from left. Otherwise, we are going to believe everything that we read on the internet, or we are going to believe everything we listen to in a podcast. I think a community is very, very important for shaping, for shaping discernment. And I would say, I would say thirdly, this is going to be the good charismatic in me. Joshua, I think that if you're following Jesus, you have the Holy Spirit inside of you. And what that means is, I think the Holy Spirit's really good at communicating and and poking at our at our hearts, to say that there's something off about that. And I'll that'll happen to me often. I'll be reading a book, and I'll read a paragraph, and there will be just this weird sense of, like, I can't even name it, that's just off. There's an attitude or a spirit in that that is not the way of Jesus. And, you know, I think in the past, I would just say, ah, that's just me being a, you know, X, Y and Z, whatever. That's No, I actually think to be a good learner, you got to lean into the work of the Holy Spirit. What did Jesus say? The Spirit would come and lead you into all truth. The teacher is inside of you, right? And the Spirit wants to guide and correct and teach or form us. I think Scripture, community and the indwelling work of the Holy Spirit teaches us how to be good
Joshua Johnson:learners. Yeah, the teacher is among us. I think sometimes here in some Christian circles, that the power dynamic is in such a place where, if the pastor actually just goes astray, oh, people will, will, will follow and say, Yes, that is that is truth, and that's the place that I'm going to go. I'm going to follow that, that powerful person, whoever it is, what's the dynamic then within a community where we're all just either saying yes or there's division and strife, like, how do how do we work things out when there's power dynamics at play?
A.J. Swoboda:Yeah, so interesting that you you bring this up. I just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell his outliers. It's a book about success, really interesting book. He has this pair chapter in there, chapter seven. I'm thinking on the spot here. I think it's seven or eight, but it's a chapter about plane crashes. And he makes an observation that one of universal attributes of plane crashes in commercial jet, airliner plane crashes, is that in almost every instance, the most experienced pilot is the one who is flying the plane at the time of the plane crash. And there's all this research on why this is the case, it turns out that that often what happens in planes where you have the most experienced pilot flying the plane in the first seat, the second pilot will not speak truthfully about something that they see because they are deferring to the authority of the first pilot, and they are doing what's called mitigated speech. They don't say, Hey, we're running out of fuel, hey, there's something wrong. Hey, so they don't say it because they assume the first pilot knows it. And this a really important concept, because it means that sometimes power actually gets in the way of truthfulness, that we don't speak truth because we assume that the senior pastor knows everything. We assume the senior pastor or the leader leaders have the right interest in mind, that they are acting due diligently, which I think we should assume, but the fact that we are Protestants, a Protestant has a view of Scripture that's really unique, because to believe in Scripture as sola scriptura, the idea that scripture alone is the mitigating factor of the Christian faith doesn't mean we don't listen to other voices. To believe in Scripture means that the other voices now have a framework upon which to be understood. The fact that we believe that Scripture is the very thing that should hold the church to Jesus means that every Christian in the church that has a Bible in their hands, all of a sudden, is required to hold people in power to what scripture has to say. I think churches that have a high view of Scripture should be places it doesn't always work itself out, but should be places where people in power are held to account and not in a mean sort of way. I'm saying that if a pastor started teaching really wonky things about the Trinity or sexuality or something like this, the people in the congregation who have their Bibles in their hands should be asking good questions. Hey, the Bible says this, what are we going to do about that? Hey, the Bible says this, what are we going to do about that? The Scripture becomes the the prophetic book in our midst that holds people in power to to Christ. That's the way it should work. And this, of course, why the privacy reformation happened was because Luther saw that scripture was not being heard in its time, and he said, we aren't listening to the Bible. So scripture is you'll notice I started with that the number one thing in being a good learner is not that you put your head in the sand and you ignore culture. Scripture. It's that you got your head in Scripture so that you can rightly read culture. So then
Joshua Johnson:let's read culture now, how are we learning then from secular culture of the culture around us, and how do we bring those things in as we're framing things through Scripture? And you know, our boundaries of good thinking. What does it look like when we're looking at and reading culture Yeah,
A.J. Swoboda:I remember years ago, this this I used to be a I still am, but I used to I used to listen to every sermon Tim Keller would ever preach I would I would just devour I mean, it would it would be published I'd listen to it like 12 seconds I just was enamored with his preaching and and he's a good teacher. No, he was great. Yeah, one of the one of the things I noticed most about his preaching. There were a lot of things I noticed, but one of the things I noticed the most was how often he would quote The New York Times. I would always quote The New York Times. He was constantly quoting the New York Times. Now, underneath that is a preacher who knows his audience Keller knows the authorities of the everyday New Yorker. The New Yorker reads, they get up, they read the New York Times. That is their authority. So he meets people where they're at. You know he is, he is doing the work of preaching the gospel through the lens of the average New Yorker who is, it's incarnational, really. I mean, he's, he's, he's meeting people where they're at. How often in Christian spaces do we expect the world to be the missionary where we expect the world to come and speak our language rather than us doing the work of speaking its language I don't think it's possible for us to be effective missionaries unless we have our heads and our minds in the culture of the people that Christ is seeking to save. Going back to John Wesley, one of the things John Wesley would do when He would go into a city this was, you know, 1700s when he 1800s when he would go into a city one of the first things he would do, great revivalist preacher missionary, is that he would first go to the local library. And he would go to the library because, for one reason, he very often, would first go to library because he wanted to see what books people were reading, because he believed, unless you knew the questions people were asking, you could not bring them the answers that their hearts needed. And that brings me full circle to Tim Keller. Why was Tim Keller such an incredible teacher. Why? Why was Jesus Christ such an incredible teacher? Listen to His parables. He tells 38 parables. Every single one of those parables reveals a Messiah who had his head in culture he knew people's worlds. He knew what people thought. He knew what people assumed. He knew what drove people, what got people up in the morning. His ministry was built on the fact that he was aware he was in the world paying attention. In fact, in at the book of Acts, the third time that Paul, this is interesting, the third time that Paul recounts his conversion story. He comments that Jesus had told him on the road to Emmaus or on the road to Damascus. Saul. Saul, why do you kick against the goad the goats? This weird comment. And when you trace out that line, Saul Saul, why do you kick against the goads? It's a line from a Greek play 200 years earlier. And what's going on is Jesus is quoting something from popular culture to Saul to reach him with the good news name one other god that would be like Jesus quoting Taylor Swift to get to get a point across what he's trying to say. It is impossible for us to be effective missionaries without having our heads in the culture around us. So this is not just about being learners. This is as much about being learners as it is about being missionaries.
Joshua Johnson:Other than that means we need to be good. Listeners we have to ask good questions
A.J. Swoboda:cautiously. Again, I want to be I'm not saying everything you pick up on Twitter you you you believe. But here's the thing, we have got to distinguish that learning something is not the same as agreeing with it. To learn something is to just hold it in suspension and say, I just learned that. That's interesting. That doesn't mean you've matriculated it into your life and you've accepted it. You're just holding it just as washing feet doesn't mean you agree with somebody Jesus washed Judas feet, no knowing exactly what he's going to do to learn from somebody if I see, here's the thing, Joshua, should my students at the undergraduate level talk about enemies? Should my students read Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler? This is a huge debate, like, Should we read it or burn it? And the debate is, do we listen to our enemies or do we cancel them? The minute you cancel your enemies, I argue, I would argue, the minute you cancel your enemies, you actually give them more power, and their ideas go underground and become more and more power powerful. The only way in which we can defeat the evil, diabolical, diabolical claims of Hitler's Mein Kampf is we need to know what he's arguing. I need to learn his arguments to dismantle them. There's a. Missional component, even to learning from our enemies, and to be able to say, you know, I know what my enemies think, and it's only because I know what they think that I'm able to actually stand strong against what they claim. This. This changes this. This changes the conversation, because learning then becomes a missional activity for a missional church that is called by God to live in in the world. And when you read the earliest Christian Church Fathers, all of them are quoting the heretics all the time. And the fact that they're quoting the heretics is enough evidence for us to know they actually are reading the heretics. They know what they think. And the only way to defeat the heretics is you got to know their their silliness,
Joshua Johnson:so we shouldn't just burn all the books. Lord, no,
A.J. Swoboda:you that actually the when you can that's basically a way of canceling somebody. We've been canceling people for a long time. Cancel culture is nothing new, but to when you burn people's books and you, you know, you you cancel somebody whose ideas you don't like, what you end up doing is you end up sending that person away with their ideas to make those ideas stronger in the dark, and you end the possibility of true relationship having an impact. The guy who taught me this is Daryl Davis. And you can go, anybody who's listening to this can go read about Daryl Davis or an African American man. He has one of the most watched TED Talk videos on the webs. Daryl Davis, African American man, decided that rather than ostracizing and canceling all of his friends that were racists, he started befriending KKK members, and he began becoming their friends. And through becoming their friends, he tells a story, and he has this moment in his talk where he opens up this closet full of KKK robes, of people that left their ideology because in the relationship with Daryl Davis, to me, that is that is the most incarnational form of activity. Jesus Christ comes to the world while we were sinners. Christ died for us. Christ does not come into the world to cancel the world. He befriends each person in the world as a means of changing their heart. So burning a book makes somebody's ideas get worse and harder over time, but befriending somebody who may have ideas that are very, very contrary to the way of Jesus. You may actually be the one through whom God is going to reach, that person that's
Joshua Johnson:good, you know, yesterday, Easter Sunday, we talked about how Jesus made us new, where He reconciled us to God. And through that, in Second Corinthians, five talks that then we are now ambassadors, Christ, comers. We are now reconcilers ourselves, that God is working for us to reconcile people, which is crazy that we get to participate. Now it's our job to participate. So what you were just talking about? Dale Davis, I think that's the participating work of reconciling as a learner of being with people that have ideological views that are opposed to you, yep, but you could be with them and reconcile them back to a place,
A.J. Swoboda:yeah. Inversion. Prophecy has been inverted this I have really wrestled Joshua with this phenomenon of these two parties, the, you know, the Democrats and the Republicans, who are just now increasingly, I mean, further and further going apart. And it's, you know, why is that happening? And I think one of the reasons that that is happening is that what should be the right, the right use of the prophetic voice is has become inverted. And what I mean by that is, when you read the prophets of the Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, prophets, the prophets in the Old Testament do something that none of the prophets of other nations did. Every other nation had prophets. They were false prophets, but they were prophets nonetheless. And when you look at all the prophets of the other nations around Israel, the prophets would always prophesy Doom on the other nations. You guys are going down. You guys are gonna be judged. You guys are gonna fall. And then you read the Hebrew prophets, and then do something weird. They are the ones who are willing to self aim their prophecy on their own people. They critique Israel. It is this the true prophet. One of the marks of the False Prophet is that the other side is always the wrong one. One of the marks of a true prophet is we are needing to repent. And I think what's happened in this ideological age is we have lost the gift of being critical of our own side, and everything is wrong with the other side, and in so doing, we're just moving further and further apart. When what should happen? If I'm a Republican, I should be offering very, very strong critiques in my party, and if I'm a Democrat, I'm all. Offering very strong critiques of my party, but instead, what we're doing is just lobbing on the other side, and this, it's a breakdown of understanding how you should be harshest, hardest on your own people, that that is a profit. A profit embodies that. And that sounds really harsh, but that's what you do with a family that you love, is that you're hard on your family because you believe in your family and you believe in what you're doing. So we now, we don't want the prophetic voice, we want power, and so it's killing us, and it's I fear is not going to end. Well,
Joshua Johnson:no, it's not. How does that practically work?
A.J. Swoboda:Start, start in your church, and in your church become subversive learners. What I mean by that is in your church, rather than focusing on how the culture around you is horrible, stop preaching sermons about how secular culture around you stinks. Of course, it stinks. It doesn't know Jesus, but your job isn't to hold secular culture to the ways of Jesus. Your job is to hold the church to Jesus and ask yourself the questions, how are we not doing what God has called us to do? Turn the prophecy inward and stop spending all of your time looking at how wokeism is destroying the church, how secular culture is destroying the church. Friend the enemy to us. Being faithful to Jesus, is not wokeism or secular culture, it is that we are not carrying our cross, turn it inward. We have to hold ourselves to the way of Jesus, rather than expecting secular culture to do it on our behalf. And that's not enjoyable to hear, brother, I don't I don't relish saying that
Joshua Johnson:it's what we need at the moment, as what we need in every moment, actually like, what is it? What does it look like? Because, you know,
A.J. Swoboda:Joshua, can I tell you something really cool before? Before I this, this image of teachability, and this word teachability is a really interesting word to me. I remember the first time I was introduced to the idea of being a teachable person. It was Jay Oswald Sanders book spiritual leadership years ago, and he had a chapter in there on being a teachable leader, that every a Christian leader needs to be a teachable person. And that always stuck with me. After reading that. In the last five years or so, I've done a deep dive. I cannot find anybody that's written on that in a full length way. This is like, I think this is the first time the idea of teachability as a Christian virtue has been except, except, I found it in one place. John Calvin. John Calvin preached a sermon on Deuteronomy chapter 10, where God tells Moses to come up the mountain with two blank tablets, and Moses carries these two blank tablets up to Gog. And we're told that God writes on the tablets. And John Wesley, or John Calvin, argued that this is what a Christian's life is to be about, is that we are constantly bringing to God empty slates upon which God can reign. That is. And he had a word for this. You know what? He called it a teachable spirit. That is such a poignant image that our task as Christians is to cultivate the space, to allow God to teach us. And we don't have space. We're busy. We're doing stuff, but the Christian life is dragging up the mountain the blank slates of our life, so that God can do some work on the blank slates. And indeed, to be a follower of Jesus is to be teachable. Because unless you're teachable by Jesus, it doesn't matter. You got to come up with some entries, empty slabs, amazing.
Joshua Johnson:I love it. That's fantastic. I think we could, yeah, we could end there, because that's what you're just summed it all up beautifully, as I was going to ask you to do, and you did it. It was great. I'd love to end then with a recommendation or two, anything that you've been reading or watching that you could recommend.
A.J. Swoboda:Oh, yeah, great question. One thing you can do, by the way, is, is I do a weekly devotional called a low level the low level theologian. And I'm actually writing on all these themes of teachability. So if anybody that wants to read, go subscribe to that. But honestly, you know who I'd recommend is pretty much everything Dallas Willard ever wrote. He he was an intellectual, a PhD in philosophy, and he saw it as his role in life to teach Christians how to think. Well, just spend the next 20 years reading Dallas Ford, that is a good recommendation.
Joshua Johnson:I recommend Dallas Willard as well. That's good AJ, how can people get a teachable spirit? Where would you like to point people to
A.J. Swoboda:anywhere that books are sold? Obviously, I always tell people, if you got a local bookstore, mompa books or get it there if you can your local city. But if not, the interwebs is a great place to get it. And, yeah, and it'll be in, you know, all the places, Barnes and Noble and all this stuff. So yeah, thanks to Zondervan for the great, great work on this project. I'm so grateful for that.
Joshua Johnson:Well, AJ, thank you for this conversation. It was fantastic. And I really hope and I pray that people can start to understand what this teachable speech. Is all about that this day and age where the we have polar opposites, the polarization of culture, will actually then move into a different direction and come back together, so that we can stand firm in our convictions, be confident in who we are, to know Scripture well, to say this is the boundaries of good thinking, but then give voice to people so that we can be reconcilers. And we could say that we could come together again and stand firm in what we know from the Lord. And we could learn from him that we could just open up our hands and say, here are my blank tablets. Yes please, right, and I'm going to learn from you. Thank
A.J. Swoboda:you, Joshua, it's a gift as always, to be with
Unknown:you. You.
