Shifting Culture
Shifting Culture
Ep. 304 Erin Moniz - Knowing and Being Known: Expanding and Redefining Intimacy
In today's episode, we're exploring intimacy - a concept that's far more complex than most of us realize. My guest, Erin Moniz, has been studying how we connect, disconnect, and misunderstand relationships in our current cultural moment. We'll dig into some critical questions: What does intimacy actually mean beyond romantic relationships? How have cultural messages - both inside and outside the church - distorted our understanding of connection? And what might a more holistic approach to knowing and being known look like? Erin brings a unique perspective as a college chaplain who's counseled countless emerging adults navigating relationships. We'll discuss how technology impacts our connections, why friendships matter as much as romantic partnerships, and how the gospel offers a different framework for understanding human relationships. This isn't a prescriptive how-to conversation, but an exploration of our fundamental human need for genuine connection. We'll challenge some assumptions about singleness, marriage, and community, and hopefully provide a more nuanced view of intimacy. So join us.
Rev. Erin F. Moniz (DMin, Trinity School for Ministry) is a deacon in the Anglican Church in North America and associate chaplain and director for chapel at Baylor University, where she disciples emerging adults and journeys with them toward healthy, gospel-centered relationships. She is a trained conciliator, mediator, and conflict coach. She enjoys content creation, playing music, being outdoors, and narrating the inner monologue of her two cats. She lives in Waco, Texas, with her husband, Michael.
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It's going to take more than just me and my personal disciplines to push back against the false selves and to push back against those things. I'm going to need people. I'm going to need to be surrounded I'm going to need to be intentionally connecting with people and telling them who they are and then telling me who I am, so that it begins to really stick and really push through the lies, and that's the gift I believe, of the Gospel for us today. Hello
Joshua Johnson: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, Today we're exploring intimacy, a concept that's far more complex than most of us realize. My guest, Erin Moniz, has been studying how we connect, disconnect and misunderstand relationships in our current cultural moment, we'll dig into some critical issues. What does intimacy actually mean beyond romantic relationships? How have cultural messages, both inside and outside the church, distorted our understanding of connection? And what might a more holistic approach to knowing and being known look like Aaron brings a unique perspective as a college Chaplain who's counseled countless emerging adults navigating relationships, we'll discuss how technology impacts our connections, why friendships matter as much as romantic partnerships, and how the gospel offers a different framework for understanding human relationships. This isn't a prescriptive how to conversation, but an exploration of our fundamental human need for genuine connection. We'll challenge some assumptions about singleness, marriage and community, and hopefully provide a more nuanced view of intimacy. So join us as we dig deep and figure out what does it really look like to have intimacy in our lives. Here is my conversation with Aaron Moniz. Aaron, welcome to shifting culture. Excited to have you on. Thanks for joining me. So glad to be here. Thank you for the invitation. Yeah, I'm excited to dive deep right away, because we're talking about intimacy today, and because we're talking about intimacy, we just have to go, go deep, right? We have to get intimate. I appreciate,
Erin Moniz:I appreciate the jokes. Yeah, that's great.
Joshua Johnson:Well, my, my question is, you start your your book out, which is great with the the problem of intimacy. Is there a intimacy problem today? What have you seen? What have you found? What's the problem with intimacy?
Erin Moniz:Oh yes, yes, the answer is yes. There's a big one, and it's not just in certain spaces. It's across the board. In terms of I work with college students, so I get a real front row seat to really just how heartbreaking and difficult and chaotic it can be, just for, I mean, emerging adults specifically, but I think for everyone navigating intimate relationships, whether that's romance and dating and marriage or roommates, singleness, friendships, family, it's it's all in the mix, but But the problems really stem from just messages that we absorb from both the culture. And then what I try to demonstrate is that these messages have not been met with a really distinct counter cultural message from Christendom so much as we've taken some of these cultural messages and sort of baptized them and been maybe a little, maybe fallen asleep, a little bit on some of the ways that that's affected our discipleship. And so we've got a situation where Christians are not necessarily leading the charge in terms of healthy, sustainable intimate relationships any more than anybody else. So
Joshua Johnson:what are these cultural things that we have co opted within Christendom that we have put on to the church? Yeah,
Erin Moniz:at the top there's a lot, but at the top of the list is romance, idolatry, and that's a phrase I love, but I stole it from Peter Volk, who really thoughtfully kind of identified this, this sort of pull that we have to towards romantic relationships, not necessarily for benign reasons, but because somewhere deep down we have attached our relationship status to our identity and value. So if I'm on the dating apps and somebody ghosts me. I'm not going to try to Google, like how to be good on the dating apps or best life hacks for how to get a date. I'm going to I'm not going to jump to sort of practical solutions. I'm going to say, what's wrong with me. I'm going to ask a different question. It's going to go straight into, am I valued? Does anybody want me? Why doesn't anybody want me? And so at the core, there's these, these question about our identity and value and romance. Idolatry exists in sort of the larger North American western culture, but sadly, it also exists in the church, and this is why we can only talk about singleness as a season. We don't, we don't have a. Picture for a flourishing life that doesn't have sex, and for Christianity, we would say sex in the confines of marriage at the center. But we're making judgments about people's identity and worth, whether we realize it or not, oftentimes subtly, without necessarily knowing that's what we're doing. But in an effort, a well meaning effort, I think, to see people in healthy marriages, we've been anemic about a theology of intimacy that's actually much more biblical and inclusive of everyone, regardless of their circumstances, because not everyone gets married, not everyone stays married. We have widowed and divorced people in our churches. We have single folk. It's a larger landscape. So our rhetoric is, is really showing up as as not not healthy enough for everyone. The
Joshua Johnson:first couple lines in your book is a quote from somebody that, as you were sitting in a conference, hearing the speaker as she was going to live a celibate life, she says, I can live without sex, but I can't live without intimacy if we have romance idolatry. It is that romantic relationship, that sexual relationship where we think that's where intimacy comes, that's where our identity and value comes. What does it look like then to dig down to what intimacy is. So give us a definition of what intimacy is, if it's not just a a naked sexual relationship, like fully like known and being seen in all of who we are in a sexual relationship?
Erin Moniz:Yeah, no, I really try to get at this in the book, and I present a very sort of basic definition for intimacy that speaks of it as sort of a generative reciprocal relationship where we are. In fact, I'm going to butcher my own quote here, but
Unknown:to do but basically, it's about us
Erin Moniz:drawing each other to Christ and to our true identities and value and who we are, and we're doing that for each other. So intimacy actually serves a function in, I believe, our sanctification, but really what it means to be human, what it means to understand ourselves and understand what we're doing in the world, and that's a very Christian lens. But I think there's something echoed in that, in the way people pursue healthy intimacy in relationships like marriages and friendships and family, that they're looking for a stability of self that comes through these external ways that we know and are known with each other. And so intimacy is a lot broader than just sex and married. My students were the ones that taught me that they were coming into my office, and bless them, it's been 80% of my time as a college Chaplain talking about their dating woes. But that wasn't everything. They also came in with a lot of questions about friendship and roommates and boy, a lot about family. I mean, 20 somethings trying to move from being a dependent to independent, how to navigate that adult relationship with their parents? Some, you know, just in a in just sort of a normal sense, where it's just sort of the average, rocky transition, some with trauma and toxicity that's mixed in. And I couldn't find a, find a single resource that would really inform me on all three of these, these planes of romance and friendship and family. That's when I began to realize, oh, I need to open my definitions a bit more. And so intimacy sort of became the term I landed on, even though most of us use it synonymously with sex, but there's just more to us, and so we had to go, go broader.
Joshua Johnson:Really helpful for me to think about intimacy in a broader sense of it is with, you know, my family. It's with my friends. It's with my church family. Could be it's, you know, with my wife. There's all sorts of places where I need intimacy. If I am not known, or if I cannot know other people, we're missing something. I think there's, there's this one you say a great breakup line in in college is like, I just need time to be with the Lord. I need to be single to be with the Lord. I think you it's a good like, hey, it's my time. Now, it's a classic. It's a classic line. I think I might have heard that when I was in college, absolutely,
Erin Moniz:if someone hasn't been broken up with by Jesus, like, exactly, you know, I just, yeah, I don't know how long you've been a Christian, but, like, that's, that's a, that's a classic.
Joshua Johnson:So the question then, is, we need each other, not just Jesus. Jesus is important, like we need Jesus, but we also need one another. So even in those moments of being single, how do we move towards intimacy with people and not just say, I'm gonna relegate myself, you know, to a hermitage in the woods with Jesus. Yes,
Erin Moniz:and this, this is often a misconception, something that we're all navigating. I try not to make too light of it in the book, because I feel that same tug myself, the the sort of binary that like to to really work on myself and be with Jesus, means that I need to just. Push out all of these other relationships, and what I believe a theology of intimacy restores, is this idea of like, well, let's think about the location of Jesus, right? Let's think about where is the presence of God? Well, obviously God is everywhere. And I do this in my book, where I kind of talk about how that's true, not necessarily helpful. But if we're really getting down to brass tacks of where scripture locates the Lord. He's the resurrected Christ is sitting at the right hand of the throne. But the Paraclete, the Helper, the Holy Spirit, is in all of us, and that Holy Spirit presence in each other means that my relationship with God is indelibly tethered to my communion with other people, and in a way that isn't just tangential, but really gets into it's that knowing and being known, that exchange of intimacy and vulnerabilities that can be difficult. So for for for single folks, for folks who are not in some of the sort of relationships we might take for granted and say, Oh, these are my people. I've got my husband and or I've got my family nearby, some of some of those things for folks who are more detached, uh, for folks who are more isolated, really, we, we need to rethink, I think, a theology of friendship, friendship has been really relegated to not even really being an intimate relationship. Like, that's, that's sort of a weird category. When you really start talking about, like, is friendship and intimate relationship, and what do we mean by that? And some of the romance idolatry has hyper sexualized everything, so it can be really difficult to draw close to someone platonically and even have, like, a physical connection that is not sexual, but to be able to to have deep connections with others. There's a book called The other significant others, not a Christian book, but it's one that that I think speaks to this. And it's interesting that Christians aren't writing about this, but someone else is. But it shines a light on these platonic, intimate relationships that have no sexual component, but are deeply a part of this person's life, in a way that that a spouse or a close family member would be and, boy, I just don't hear sermons about that, and I just don't see that in Christendom. And I just, with all the dating books and all the things coming out, I would love to see more about how we do this in a healthy way in the church. Well,
Joshua Johnson:isn't that what Jesus did? He modeled that. He modeled it like that's what he did.
Erin Moniz:It's, it's stunning. It's really right there. I got to be honest with you, Joshua, there were, there were moments in my research where I was like, I'm an idiot. I've been a Christian for forever. I'm a professional Christian as an ordained minister. And I just, I just looked right through some of these things, and boy, yeah, it was, it was a wake up.
Joshua Johnson:Yeah, that's crazy. Like, we don't have it as you've been working with college students and you've been seeing people, I mean, you look at someone like Jonathan Haidt, anxious generation, he's like, Hey, we're on our screens too much. We just need to play together as kids, and we're going to actually stop being lonely and anxious, and we're gonna be okay. We know that there, there is a lot of loneliness and detachment. There is like we're missing each other somehow. What have you seen through you know your work with college students are what is happening? Why are we more lonely? Why don't we get this intimacy thing, right?
Erin Moniz:Yes, and there's so many factors that play into this. I mean, the pandemic rewired a lot of us. Rewired our social development. Of my college students, depending on what in what stage of their development interrupted, they're struggling to come into adulthood with with, I think, fewer tools in their tool bag for how to connect and communicate. And I see, I see that, and each new generation that comes through, each new class that comes through, it's always, it's always a new thing to watch and to try to work through. But in many ways, we have these cultural values that really stemmed from sort of these North American patriotic values of like personal freedoms and an independence which, you know, I'm I'm very much for but those are not static. They're dynamic, and they've morphed over time to become values of autonomy and entitlement. It's really hard to be intimate with someone and be sort of unencumbered and like detached, but, but technology swoops in and says, oh, we'll, we'll fix that. We'll facilitate that for you. Let's provide a way for you to have this kind of intimacy. And Sherry Turkle writes about this beautifully and alone together, but, but this, we're facilitating this intimacy. You can know people, you can connect with people. And I don't want to, I don't want to demonize technology here, because I use it to connect with people in ways that are really fruitful for me. But in some ways we were, we were sort of seduced into thinking, Oh, I can have relationships. I can. I can send nude pictures, I can. There's, there's salaciousness that can be mediated by technology, and I can still remain very much detached. And that just isn't true. That just that isn't the case. And so we plunge. Into more and more loneliness. It's a bit like salt water. Really. What's happening with technology? We're drinking it and drinking it and drinking it. Keep getting thirsty, and we're like, it's wet, it's water. Why isn't this helping? So we just have a lot of those things that are just a little bit easier to to use, a little bit more user friendly, and are marketed specifically to us, instead of putting in the work, because vulnerability is hard. Yes,
Joshua Johnson:it is hard, and it's messy and it's difficult, and it can be very it could hurt. I've had conversations with lots of people it's like, I tried to be vulnerable. I got hurt. I'm never going to do that again, like they just put that shield up. And how do we then build intimacy. How does this work? How do we say I want to move towards other people. I'm done being alone. I'm done being alone together with others. How do I how do I build this? How do I move towards people? Yeah, yeah.
Erin Moniz:I give talks on this all the time. And I like to start with a very interesting, just little, little chart where it's got the x and y axis, you know, and it's a, it's, it's sort of intimacy and trust building. And I talk about, if we're, if we're really going into intimacy and like, our vulnerability is just shooting off the charts, but we haven't done trust building. That's a real dangerous place. So for a lot of my students that overshare or rush in or participate in hookup culture, things like that. They're projecting a lot of vulnerability and intimacy into a space that might backfire, and often does backfire because there hasn't been trust building in another sense, and this has been part of my story. You can be building trust with someone but still keeping them at arm's length, and so you're just not allowing the you're not measuring that risk of vulnerability as trust is being built, the ideal, of course, is to have that on a really great trajectory of your your risking. Little bit. Of course, social science has taught us this. This is a very, sort of reduced idea, but this, these are the basic fundamentals where we where we sort of measure trust building and vulnerability. And so I have this little chart. My students all nod, and they're, you know, taking notes, and then I'm like, so this works, but also, why doesn't this work? Because if it was just knowing these things, well, we know this. This isn't, this isn't rocket science, like we Why don't we do this? What's getting in the way? And so I should take whatever sort of marker I have and just write in big smearing letters across the chart shame, and this is why I believe that While anyone can have healthy relationships, I believe there are plenty of people who are would not consider themselves Christians or following Jesus, who have wonderful, healthy relationships, but at the end of the day, the stuff that really gets in our own way, the things that really work on us and make it difficult to get past a certain sort of boundary level where we have to keep ourselves sort of safe, because there's really no way to keep keep building trust without dealing with the mess of our sin and brokenness. There's a layer of intimacy that I think only the gospel provides access for because only the gospel provides the tools to deal with my shame and my brokenness and the crap that I bring to my relationships. And so in many ways, there's this, there's this picture given to us by social scientists, but at the end of the day, it's the gospel that's gonna make it possible.
Joshua Johnson:So if we're dealing with our shame and our sin and our messiness, sometimes this is what, what I think is that I'm going to say, whenever I get healthy, I could move towards other people, but we're never going to be perfect, and so there's always going to be brokenness in us. So what is the then, the role of doing the work that we need to do to find our true identity, so that we could be rooted, we'd be stable, that our identities are not in all this, these other things, and that we're dealing with our shame and our sin, but then still trying to move towards others and being in a community that brings about some of this vulnerability while we're dealing with our mess. Yeah,
Erin Moniz:there, the temptation again is to go back and say, I'm just going to go over here and work on myself, and don't hear me say what I'm not saying in the sense that I believe there is a certain measure of personal responsibility, where I'm going to go to therapy and work through the stuff that is mine. And I'm going to, you know, get input in ways that are important. I'm going to practice spiritual disciplines that connect me back to to God in the story of God. But what I found to be incredibly powerful is the fact that as broken people coming to these relationships with mess and we have to think about boundaries, and it's important that we don't just put a label on all possible relationships this way. But I believe at the end of the day, there's this weird mechanism given to us by the Holy Spirit. That That means that I am, I am brought towards sanctification and righteousness and goodness and being a grace giver and a grace receiver when I'm in relationships with other people, especially intimate ones, where we are moving towards this together as an intentional part of why we're together, our marriages, our friends. Chips. I think when someone who really, who really knows you, who really knows what a jerk you are, a piece of crap you can really be, and they look at you and they say, this is, this is not who you are, friend, come back. I know you. I know you. You don't you don't need this. This is not who Christ like you are free, you are full, you are adopted, you're beloved in it. And of course, yeah, I'm sort of using churchy language there, but there's something really just solid and concrete in that organic moment. And I'll now that I've been researching this for my own life. I've been trying to shift my relationships. I'm like, Am I that person for others? Am I saying that in my relationships? Am I doing that daily in my marriage and my friendship? So it's still, it's still a, you know, a discipline, but the reframe has has completely changed that
Joshua Johnson:take me into the gospel of intimacy. And what is that? What has God shown us of how to be intimate and how He, God himself, has been intimate with us and wants to know us.
Erin Moniz:It's important for all of us to take a moment to remember that things like marriage and friendship and family are not just products of the social evolution of humanity, that these things came from somewhere, that they were, that they came out of the imagination of God. And so in my research, I looked for theology of intimacy in Scripture. Um, you know, we sort of fall to the same sort of texts about certain types of behaviors. There's a great, I mean, like, it's like, oh, that tells me what to do. Excellent. Let's just stop there. But while behaviors are important, I was looking for something a little bit more underlying. And boy, this was another I'm an idiot moment when I was just like, wow, it's everywhere. It's literally everywhere. It's all throughout Scripture. It is woven into the story of God communicating God's self to God's people. And it starts in Exodus. The very first time we see a shift in language from from Yahweh, referring to to God Self as like I am, or the father, or I am the God of your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, and suddenly, for the first time, as we're wrangling with Pharaoh and Moses is being taught what to say, he names himself as a parent to Israel. These are my children. Something ancient gods didn't do, something very out of character, something intimate. That is a bit of a shock, and then that just begins to build throughout the rest of Scripture. And so we see God using the motif of Mary and usually jilted spouse. That's a lot in the mind prophets, right? It's like we're cheating on God and He's mad about it, right? There's all of this imagery, and these motifs are being used as God's trying to explain to the people, like, this is our relationship. And then, of course, the familial language we have everything from that moment when God sort of designates himself as holy parent, all the way to Jesus, saying, This is how you pray Father who art in heaven. And then he just does a mic drop in John 15 when he's like, you're not my servants, you're my friends. And so there's this language baked in for a real important purpose of of God's people and ourselves constantly being drawn back through these ideas of relationships, and not simply as metaphors, but but really as invitations for us to to know God and and, but that there's sort of that vertical plane, but then you realize it plays into this horizontal plane as well, because it's not just me saying, oh, God's a father. I have a father. That makes sense, that's nice. I can kind of see how God would be a father, because I have an earthly father. That's part of it. But it's not just mere symbolism. It's not just mere metaphor, so much as there is something about what God is communicating through these intimate relationships that says, and this is going to give you what you need to do this with each other, I'm going to be the perfection, but my gift of the Holy Spirit means that everything that you're doing with your friendships and your marriage and your family are shadows that point back to me, but also are tools that allow you to be my people in these relationships, even broken as you are. So there's a symbiotic relationship between how we understand intimacy with God and how we understand intimacy with each other, that was so much more fundamental than I ever thought it would be. We usually talk about these sort of things as sort of a serving suggestion, like, like over here, like, here's, let's talk about the gospel and study scripture over here. And then, like this, this week we're gonna have someone come talk about relationships and, you know, our bodies and these things, and it's, it's, it's been unmoored, at least for my college students, for sure, it's, we've, we've just detached these topics from the fundamentals, and I think that's really key to the problem.
Joshua Johnson:Then what does it look like to integrate them?
Erin Moniz:Yes, buy my book. No, I'm not. I'm not trying to project anything new in this and trying to be really, really intentional about the language, because this isn't anything we don't already know as Christians, the the gospel, the centrality of the gospel in our faith is already something that many of us would be able to give a yes to. Would be able to understand, would be able to say yes. This is a big. Part of my life. This is important to me, and yet there needs to be a reframe, sort of a re capturing, a recentering of the gospel and how we think about our intimate relationships. And what that will do is it will begin to expose some of the myths and narratives that have seeped in, that that have, I think, distorted what we do so. So in the short answer is, we have to get back to the gospel, but in doing so, I hope this book is a catalyst for more content other books. I don't have to write them. I don't care who writes them, but I would love to see more, more ideas centered in this sort of gospel idea of like, how do we do this? Well, with friendships. What do we do with singleness? How do we how do we manage loneliness together? Let's have healthy Christian marriages. Let's figure out what to do with our families. Let's have healthy church. So I this is a bit of a primer, but ultimately we come back to the gospel, and then we learn what is what does that then lead us to in these relationships? And I think the answers will be really apparent as we begin that journey.
Joshua Johnson:Why do you think that Christians have not been good at this, if it is so foundational to the gospel and who God is at its core? Why have we been bad and why have non Christians been actually pretty good at it, not like secular like marriage books are really good at building, like, intimacy through knowing each other. Like they're good at it. Christian marriage books haven't quite been that good at it. So why do you think we've been bad at it? Oh,
Erin Moniz:gosh. And I, you know, it's, this is this is where my I hear, like my, my mentors voice in my head, like, careful, Aaron, careful, don't just start. Because I've read so many of these books. Joshua, I've read so many. Anytime my students are like, I'm reading this. I'm watching this, you know, YouTube. I'm like, Okay, let's, let's hear it. Let's read it. So I've consumed a lot of what they have consumed in this and I write in my introduction. I'm like, I'm not naming names in this book because it's just too much. This is too broad a topic, but I but I do. I do kind of, kind of put my finger in it, because there's a couple of things that have been happening that I think have been key to derailing this in our in our content, in our sort of large cannon of content about Christian relationships, one would be the fact that we are always in a caught in a loop of historic reaction. So I touch on this very briefly in the book. But my friends who are historians could really tease this out, the idea that so much of these narratives are created in reaction to something. So right now, our purity culture. 2.0 is in reaction to hook up culture. And hook up culture, very much is in reaction to purity culture. And purity culture really evolved out of reactions to the sexual revolution. Sexual Revolution was pushed back against the rise of Christian fundamentalism, which was a pushback against the Enlightenment age, which is, you know, which was critiquing the Victorian sexual ethics, and so we've been caught, right? We've been caught in this, in this loop, and not for nothing. We're trying to make relevant responses to very timely and culturally relevant moments. So, but what that does is it shapes and forms our content, because the questions are are sort of projected upon us. So purity culture, right? Was not a bad idea. Don't, don't, don't. Turn off your podcast. Christians, it was not a bad idea to begin with. We wanted people to follow what we saw as God's ethic for our lives and not get entrenched in licentiousness and things that we thought would be damaging to us, but the way we went about it was really shaped and formed by trying to react to a very specific way that the culture was projecting the sort of sexual freedom. And so what we did was we locked down behaviors, and we did that any way possible, which meant our methods were really flawed and did a lot of damage. And then purity culture, just Yeah, has been kind of spiraling out ever since. But we get caught in these loops. And I think sometimes there's some really well meaning people who've been well meaning in writing their books and creating their content, because they really want people to build their relationships, but we just don't have a robust theology of intimacy, and so we're stuck. We're stuck with that the other problem, and Christians, we just, I think we already know this, but let's just say it out loud, the non Christian books you're talking about, like the marriage books, they're coming out of social science, the Gottman Institute. People who have studied this, people who have the receipts for like, we know what actually makes relationships work. Not only have we not used the tools available to us and Chris and dumb, but we have really doubled down on three main topics, purity, modesty and gender roles. And boy, we can't say enough about purity, modesty and gender roles. We got. We are we are there, and this will fix it. This will take care of everything. Everyone just needs to know their plan. So we need to project purity. We need to, you know, you know, Project modesty. Not that there isn't a merit to things like modesty, but it is. It is not making healthy relationships. It is just this old, tired thing, and we just don't know what else, I think, to put our hooks on. And so we've just been caught in a loop.
Joshua Johnson:So let's solve the crisis of culture right now, right now. Let's do it right now. So if, if everything we've been doing is a is a historical reaction to what's happening in the culture, and we're having pendulum swings one way and another. Now, if we're like, hey, there is gender fluidity like crazy right now, like, yeah, there's all sorts and that brings about all sorts of things. So we're going to be talking about purity, where we modesty, gender roles. We're just going to combat it by going hard the other way and going back into fundamentalism. Is what it looks like to me. Yeah, and that's a big pendulum swing. And they're like, We got to go the opposite to combat it. What does it look like to to have a nuanced view that does produce intimacy, knowing, being known, being loved by God, and like moving towards something that's not just about behavior modification, but it is more robust and than that, I don't know if behavior modification has worked right. So, yeah, what is, what's? What do we need to do that's different than behavior modification? Because I think that's what we're trying to get back to right now. Yes,
Erin Moniz:no, absolutely. 100% agree with you, and it's so so many things that we need to do here. I'll land on two that I'm seeing and facing even within myself, as I, as I work through this and prepare material to talk with people about. The first is that behaviors are important. We want to behave well in our relationships. That's that's a good thing. But if we start with behaviors, then all we have is we're building off of ways to try to get people to do the right thing. And boy, we've really been tanking on that, because there isn't a lot of substance there. Because again, when something happens to my relationships, I'm not going to some practical okay, how do I fix this? How do I get better? What's you know, what can I work on? We go deep into our identity and our shame and our self worth and those messages. And I think we got to start there. I think we got to start a few layers down and say, what is driving our behaviors, what is what is about? Why do I want to date? What do I think about loneliness? Like, what what am I seeking? Why do I sometimes, in an effort to get close to someone, sabotage myself and push them away? These are all questions that lie with messages that we've that we've absorbed, and distortions of our identity in Christ and our ideas about God that need attention and good news the church like, that's what we do, like that's that we have the gospel, that is a place where we can start, and if we can connect dots for people between thinking about who God is, thinking about who we are because of Christ, and tying that to how we understand our and have healthy relationships, I think it's a game changer. So that's one we need to get back to just doing what we do, I think very well and could could do better, which is really helping people understand the gospel and the kingdom and learning the story of God, so that we can learn who God is, so we can learn who we are and live out of that identity. The other is we've got to wrangle our fear. As a clergy person, I'm preparing it as as we're as we're recording this. I'm preparing a talk to give to the all the clergy in my diocese specifically about issues of sexuality in our churches, and boy, a lot of well meaning, talented, smart folks who are right now just paralyzed in fear about how to do this well. And that's because these are cultural lightning rots right that we are we are ramping up. The culture is turning everything up to 11 on this and it feels so loud and chaotic. And I think for those of us trying to lead, there's there's a real fear mechanism that we we have to reckon with, with ourselves, to struggle to to detach from, to pastor Well, to do this well. And so for the average person just trying to do this. I think naming and recognizing our own fears related to this. These subjects many, many of them having to do with human sexuality and gender, but also just about each other and ourselves. There's, there's a there's an extra amount of fear. I think that's guiding the way we approach these things. And for myself and for others, that's a daily that's a daily discipline. We just we have to deal with. Otherwise. I'll just project that onto the person in front of me. If
Joshua Johnson:I look at at Jesus, and what he did is he, he dispelled a lot of fear. The woman of the wild, she had a lot of fear, and then Jesus went into a deep knowing of who. She was what she did, and her good news was to her village, right, come see the person who knows everything about me, like knows everything about me, and like for somebody that's had, you know, a multitude of husbands that was living with someone that's not her husband at the moment, like to be that be. The good news is, it's crazy. It's like, I don't want ever somebody to know everything about me in that moment, or the woman caught into adultery. Where are your accusers? Oh, I don't then condemn you, but then go and sin no more. It felt like the actual grace and love that Jesus portrayed, move people into a different life. Yeah, and I think the church right now is trying to move people into a different life, without grace and love, to actually like, shift people's orientation towards Jesus. So then, what does it look like to engage the culture, the people around us through grace and love. And I'll give you one more. I think that some people stick with grace and acceptance and don't move towards now, hey, there's a new life in the Spirit. Like, let's move into a new life in the Spirit. So what does that look like for us to move towards those two tensions, but live in the middle of the tension? Oh, yes,
Erin Moniz:Joshua, this is, this is what makes me a very popular person amongst, like, my other clergy when I'm writing this book, or because the Yeah, we push, we push towards both extremes, right? Like, I've got this faction over here who's like, we have to take sin more seriously. We have to call people to prison. We have to tell them that if they're addicted to porn and that's affecting their marriage, that there's like, we we have to say something. We have to guide we have to we have to actually put flags down and say, This is the flourishing life that God calls us to. And then over here, people like, Yeah, but you're using that like a blunt instrument. And people, there's no, there's no room, especially, especially for people in our churches who might be seeking a celibate life. It's like you get everything right and don't get anything wrong, because the moment you do, you're going to trigger all sort of alarm bells for us about about you. Jesus did it somehow. He He did. And I think we just have to, we have to get in and study that Zacchaeus. It's wild. It's wild. Zacchaeus, you know, he, he has a half a second with Jesus who sees him, who calls Him, who says, you and me, we're gonna eat lunch. You know, I'm bringing my friends. Let's go. And something about that moment, and he was like, I'm going to write every injustice I've ever perpetrated against anyone. It's like, who, like, what does that Hagar, who is, who is running for her life towards certain death, like, we can only imagine how bad it was for her based on the fact that she's like, I might as well die in the wilderness, because without the community, she's it's as good as dead. And she meets a God that that does not even really her God, but it's the she says, it's the God who sees me, and something about that encounter sends her back. She goes back willingly into whatever we knew had not changed that drove her to the wilderness. There is something in Scripture that warrants our attention when it comes to asking Christ, how do I do this? How do I do this? Well, and for me, Joshua, I say, You know what I see in terms of taking the sin seriously? I try to go to the sermon on the mount where Jesus is to take sin seriously. We start with us. You start with the log in your own eye. But then, because I want to see clearly to remove the spec from my brother's eye. That part's not gone. That spec is still there. It still needs removal. It still needs my my place in that but I'll have to start with me first, and that's like reckoning with the fear, reckoning with my own prejudices, everything that is going to get in the way of my pastoral approach to another person, and so, yeah, there's no simple answers to that, so much as, like, emulate Jesus, you know, just do it, but, but there is a there's a study, and we can't forget that we have the Holy Spirit, transcending all of our brokenness, doing amazing things, changing lives in ways that are just, we just get to participate in but it's not, it's not ours.
Joshua Johnson:All right, we got the spirit living with us. It's perfect. We're good, good. All right, yeah, that's that's awesome. You've mentioned many times here in our conversation about identity, especially with college students, or, you know, emerging adults, people high school, college, you are consistently trying to figure out who you are, right? You have shifting identities all the time. Like, I remember that time and I like, I could put on if somebody said something about me, I was like, oh yes, that's who I'm gonna put on this cloak for a little while and try. It on and say, Is this me or is it not me, right? So as you're dealing with people in this place of shifting identities all the time, how do we help people figure out what is their identity and how they could be rooted and stand strong? Because I think once I figured out who I am, I was able to move towards others in trust and vulnerability and openness in ways that I didn't before. And I think it's it is a huge, huge key. I in shifting identities. How do we find our identity? Yes,
Erin Moniz:yeah, that is one of my favorite things, because we all have these sort of unique identities that are part of us. They don't just suddenly become blobs and absorbed into our identity. In Christ, I love the way Paul uses the body where he's like our unity is not the fact that we're all one big eyeball. That's not unity. Diversity is key. Diversity is important. Diversity is essential. There's gonna be a lot of parts about myself that I name about myself that are unique to me, that God's, I believe, loves and by calls and that are just part of my story, part of my brokenness, part of my identity. But at the end of the day, even in the body metaphor, there's something that says, But, but all of that works and can be good because it's drawn up into something more transcendent, an identity that is gifted to us through Christ's death and resurrection. And there's these moments, right? If any wasn't, is in Christ, bam, new creation and and we know this, and we carry the mantle of Christ. And you know that, that our access to the Father is because of this identity in Christ. But for a long time, I was just like, yeah, yeah, great. My duty's in Christ. Whoo, you know, like, all right, cool, cool. I really had to dig into what that really was. And as it turns out, Scripture is really full of this. But my favorite things to capitalize on and chew on are the are in the New Testament and epistles, where we're talks about our freedom, our fullness, we lack, nothing for life and godliness, and said about us in Galatians, that we're adopted, that we're beloved, that we are no longer servants but friends. We are no longer slaves but children. There's all of these identity markers that say you may not feel this way. This may not be your everyday when you wake up, but this is actually who you are, and what a gift. Because if I can remember even for half a second that I am free and full, I'm going to come differently to my life, to my work, to my relationships. And if that's what Scripture says is true about me right now because of Christ, then what I have to reckon with is, well, I don't feel free and I don't feel full. So what is getting in the way? And I believe that is the Christian life. The Christian life now is for me, going to church, studying the Bible, anything I do that's in sort of the disciplines, personal disciplines, category I now have have sort of shifted to say, what about this tells me the story of God? Because when I learn the story of God, I begin to learn who God is. And boy do I have some bad caricatures that need dismantling, that need to need to be dismembered and so so I need to know who God is. Because when I learn who God is really, then suddenly all of that identity in Christ about who I am lets me know who I am. It actually defines for me what it means to be free and to be full and to be loved and to realize for a few moments means that I live completely differently. I do some thought exercises with my students about this, because I feel like it's it's something that is sort of a lifelong pursuit, because we're kind of swimming in a sea of lies and identities that are being sold to us, you know, for profit. But that's also why I believe intimate relationships are the core, because it's going to take more than just me and my personal disciplines to push back against the false selves and to push back against those things. I'm going to need people. I'm going to need to be surrounded I'm going to need to be intentionally connecting with people and telling them who they are and then telling me who I am, so that it begins to really stick and really push through the lies. And that's the gift I believe, of the Gospel for us today.
Joshua Johnson:So if you're telling me we need other people to, like, really help us figure out who we truly are, and say, Oh, that's not you. This is you. Why are our friendships, adult friendships, so important, even when you're married and it's just you and your spouse, why are friendships important to have individual friends?
Erin Moniz:Oh, Joshua, that's another book, right? Somebody needs to write that. That book. We need, like, 50 more of those. Yeah. This is, this is who was the soapbox for me. I'm gonna try to be brief. You know, there's something very particular about a marriage and the vows that we make to each other and the intimacy that we protect with each other. There are levels that we say this is yet you are my person. But in sort of the sort of romance culture that that is always seeping in, we somehow sort of take that person, put all this on them to to be everything. That we need. And to be fair, like my husband, for me, is, like, my frontline brother in Christ. He has access to me, and he can see things probably before anybody else, where he's going to be like, Hey, you're right. Like, like, how are the like, if we're paying attention? And like, taking that role seriously, that's a really powerful and wonderful place to be in a marriage is to be able to have somebody who's close enough they're going to pick up on things early days. But boy, we're not everything to each other. We just, we absolutely can't be, and we have found that there's actually ways to steward this well. And again, Roman's idolatry hyper sexualizes everything. So we're like, Oh, can't be friends with other people, because we'll have sex with them. And they're just like, well, there's got to be something else that maybe not, maybe we, maybe we won't, but, but, but, yeah, okay, let's, let's pay attention to that. But maybe, maybe we can be friends with people. This is really coming down also to, like men and women being friends with each other. And that's, that's, again, another book that's that, well, people have written that book, so keep writing them. But it's, it's the fact that, well, years ago, for my husband, I we lived in an area where we, for nine years, really struggled with friendships, and didn't think about the toll that was taking on our marriage. But it nearly, it nearly destroyed our marriage, and we we were able to catch it and go to therapy and but we didn't see it coming. We thought friendships were important and they're good, and we'd always had good friends, and they'd always we've done life together, and boy, isn't that great, but this set of circumstances where we were it snuck up on us, and suddenly it's nine years, and we don't see each other, and we don't know each other, and we're not we're just these isolated people because no one was around us. We didn't have a church fellowship, we didn't have people who were able to say, Hey, have you guys had a date night lately? Hey, what's, how's Aaron doing? How's, how's Mike doing? There there's really important function. I think it's probably the simplest way I can say it, there's, there's an important function friends play in the health of our marriage. And if our friendships are not making our marriages more healthy, then that's a red flag. But you really need friendships, the two on your own, they're just you can't stand outside of yourself and see things within a marriage. You need other people who are doing that intentionally. And for that, you have to build closeness with others, and it's hard and a little scary, but essential, I would say,
Joshua Johnson:Aaron, if people would pick up your book, knowing and being known, what is your hope for your readers? What would you love the outcome for this book to be? I would
Erin Moniz:love, I would love for folks to begin to start asking questions about their own approach to relationships. I would love to engender some ideas of like, Have I been asking good questions? What is important to me? Why do I want to date? How do I think about my friendships? Have I thought about the fact that my marriage actually has a purpose that is toward being the church actually like Paul, like we love quoting Paul, like this is really about the church. And we're like, isn't that great? But no one really ever sat me down was like, no, no. Your marriage is like a microcosm, also your friendships, also your families. This is your city on a hill. Is that baked in? Like, do we do that between, like, taking our dog to the vet and like, When? When do we do that? Like, be a city on a hill? Oh, it's in everything. It's how we our hospitality, our money, our sex life, everything, it has to be oriented around this. These are the thoughts I hope to engender in people just to get started. It's really not a great how book, it's more of a a what and why. Book which, which was a little is a little tricky, because I know it's just like, tell me what to do, and maybe that'll be the next book. That'll be the next book. Joshua, I'll, I'll tell everyone how they can do this, but, um, that's hubris. That's crazy, but I think we have to start with, yeah, with breaking down, demythologizing things that have slipped into our lives. This book, writing this book, the research for this book, has completely changed my life. In ministry. I do it different, everything differently now I can't unsee it all. That's why I wrote it. I hope it changes lives. I know that that feels a little ambitious to say, but it did for mine, and I hope it changes lives. I believe we can have healthy relationships, and I believe that we can be honest about our shame, and that no matter what your relationship status is, that you're made for intimacy. Amen.
Joshua Johnson:We could do it. We actually can do it. It can be better. We could have healthy relationships. We could reflect the intimacy of God with one another, like, because that's what we were made made for, like we were created for this. We were made for this. We were made for intimacy. And this is why, this is where the places of shame creep up and the places of like, loss of identity, and why I heard so much is because it goes against how we were made, like, it's like the enemy is lying to us, and we have lies constantly because that's, that's the place that we were made for, is intimacy and intimate relationship. Relationship, so absolutely we could get it done. Aaron, if you go back to your 21 year old self, what advice
Erin Moniz:would you give? Oh, gosh, she was an idiot. I love her, but she was making all kinds of poor choices. 21 year old self needed, needed to realize that being skeptical about everything is not a badge of honor. It's not something to to to be proud, like, it's not like you're not better than anyone else because you've asked that question, or you're a little you're a little skeptical. Good for you. Like, people haven't been doing that for 1000s of years. It's yeah, 21 year old me was, God bless her, but, but you know what I preach to her? I minister to her all of like my my students, I try to be the mentor for her that I didn't have. So she's, she's very present in my life. Uh, despite her, she she got out of there alive. And for that, I'm grateful future. Aaron was grateful that 21 year old Aaron kept it together long enough. But, boy, she was fun, but she was she was wild. So
Joshua Johnson:that's great. Anything you've been reading or watching lately, you could recommend, oh,
Erin Moniz:gosh, yes, all of my friends have books that are that are coming out. I think, in fact, some of them are probably behind me here. Beth, Allison Barr's, pastor's wife, Malcolm Foley's, the anti grade gospel, oh, Sheila gregoires, the marriage, the marriage you want to, like, it's, it's these. I can't, I can't get enough of them. But I also believe that many of them have been on your podcast recently. It's great. We all like, have books coming out together. Emily McGowan's household
Unknown:of faith, yeah, she's been on too. Yeah. No, I love it. I love it. And
Erin Moniz:it's truly, we've just turned social media into like we're just promoting each other's books. That's what we are, that's what we do now. But those are, those are fantastic and fantastic people who are writing these books. So, yeah, I'm just trying to support, support the friends, but they write good
Unknown:stuff. So it's easy. Yeah,
Joshua Johnson:it is easy. And your book is fantastic. Is really good. And I think that if we do get some of this right, if we get to a place of knowing and being known, and get to a place of intimate relationships, open up, be vulnerable, have some trust, building, self giving, love and what it looks like to actually be intimate with one another and have friendships. That is not just husband and wife and sexual relationships, but it was all of us. The world would be beautiful. It really would. It would be an incredible place to be and to live. And so really encourage people to go out and get it. How could people get your book? And where else would you like to point people
Erin Moniz:to? Yes, yeah, the interwebs has it all right? So Amazon, it's up for for pre order depending on when, when this episode drops. It comes out May, May 6. You can also get it straight from IV P's website or your local bookstore. If you have a local bookstore, let's support the friends and go get a copy of them. You might actually get it sooner at a local bookstore than than you are on the interwebs, just to throw them under the bus, but, yeah, that's that you can go anywhere books are sold, but, but yeah, let's support local business. And, oh, other Yeah, other books. I try to, in my book, recommend people who are doing this well and, and so I would say I would love to point people towards Julia Gregoire, towards Zachary Wagner, towards Kurt Thompson, Andy colber, people who have their work has ministered to me and should be evidenced in the book and certainly in my ministry. But yeah, yeah, that's a
Unknown:that's a good start.
Joshua Johnson:Excellent. Well, Aaron, thank you for this conversation. It was a joy and a privilege, pleasure to talk to you so fun. I really enjoyed talking to you like, honestly, truly. I love talking to you same.
Unknown:God, just save this is so fun. I love that we got to know each other. Yes,
Joshua Johnson:yes. So thank you so much. It was great and go be intimate with one another. And that doesn't mean have sex with one another, it just means know one another well and deeply, move towards each other in those ways. So thank you. Aaron, it was great. You
