Catholic vs Protestant: What We Got Wrong About Each Other Artwork

Grown-Up Church Kids

Grown-Up Church Kids is a podcast for anyone who grew up in church and is still figuring out what to do with it.

Hosted by Dwan Hill and Shama Mrema, the show blends honest conversation, humor, music, and storytelling as they unpack faith, culture, and the realities of growing up in and around the church. From choir stands to church politics, from deep belief to hard questions, nothing is off limits.

It’s real, it’s reflective, and it’s for anyone who’s ever asked:

What do I keep, what do I let go of, and where is God in all of it now?

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Grown-Up Church Kids

Catholic vs Protestant: What We Got Wrong About Each Other

May 03, 2026 • Dwan Hill

0:00 | 1:14:57

In this episode of Grown Up Church Kids, Matt Maher joins Dwan Hill and Shama Mrema for an honest, eye-opening conversation about Catholic vs Protestant beliefs, church unity, saints, the Eucharist, and what it really means to follow Jesus. If you’ve ever wondered “Are Catholics Christians?”, struggled with church hurt, or felt disconnected from faith after growing up in church, this conversation bridges the gap with clarity, humility, and depth. From misconceptions about praying to saints to the meaning of communion and the beauty of liturgy, this episode explores how different traditions can still point to the same gospel. It’s not about winning arguments. It’s about rediscovering faith, unity in the Church, and a deeper relationship with God beyond performance, denomination, or tradition. If you’re a grown-up church kid trying to make sense of faith today, this one’s for you.

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Grown Up Church Kids is more than a show, it’s a full-circle moment where Sunday Morning Meets Real Life. Bringing together community, conversations, shared stories, and songs that shaped a generation, this is a space for Grown-Up Church Kids to reconnect with their roots, redefine their journeys, and celebrate the faith together.

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00:00 One Church or Many?

01:06 Welcome to GCK

02:11 Catholic Curiosity Begins

05:48 Meet Matt Maher

06:14 Are Catholics Christians?

10:06 Do Catholics Worship Saints?

15:07 Is Heaven Closer Than We Think?

19:47 The Eucharist Explained

25:07 Why Catholics Believe This

30:31 “Catholic Then Saved?”

37:29 Why Church Kids Walk Away

41:35 Social Media & Faith

47:13 Is There Only One Church?

49:20 Why Young People Want Liturgy

57:04 The Problem with “New” Theology

01:01:11 How to Grow in Faith Daily

01:08:46 Unity Over Division

01:12:37 Final Thoughts & Music

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So I think there's only one church. And the reason I think that is because I don't think Jesus is coming back for a harem. I think he's coming back for a bride.

SPEAKER_02 0:10

So for some odd reason, I put in my mind, oh yeah, whatever Catholics are, we have gotta get them saved.

SPEAKER_01 0:18

Union Eucharist, you all believe that you are participating in eating and drinking the body and blood of Jesus. True or false? Yes. True. There it is. You've heard it from Matt Marr's mouth. Well, hey everybody. Welcome back to Grown Up Church Kids. My name is Duan. I get to host this show with my friend Shamma. Glad you're back with us today, man.

SPEAKER_02 1:15

It's good to be back.

SPEAKER_01 1:16

Um, this is where um Sunday morning meets real life, and there's more of us than you think. I mean, I think I've realized by doing this is that there are church kids everywhere. Everywhere. I mean, we bump into them um obviously at church, but also at school. I met Shama at a choir room, which by the way, if you haven't checked out choir room, you gotta check out choir room. It's a great place to sing and to meet friends and have a great time. So I've met a lot of great church kids friends there. Um, and then we have a lot of friends that have come on the show, artists and speakers and musicians and all the things. And it's been really fun to see really the connections in the unity and the similarities that we all have uh about growing up in church, whether you grew up Baptist or Pentecostal or Pentecostal or Pentecostal. We've had a lot of Pentecostals. We've had too many Pentecostals. We need to balance it out. Actually, I think today is a good opportunity to balance it out. We have a guest, uh, a friend of mine who is kind of gonna talk about um the Catholic side of growing up in church. Now, I have a lot of questions. Me too. I've heard a lot of weird things about Catholics. They just they do stuff a little bit differently. So that's coming up uh with our friend Matt Marr. Uh, he's gonna sing some songs with us and answer all the questions we've always wanted to ask a Catholic. But before we get there, I will say shout out to uh I believe it's David C. Cook and the Action Bible. Oh, yeah, yeah, that's the Bible. I just bought for Christmas my son the Action Bible. Yeah, it's the whole Bible but comic book form. And he read the whole Bible in like two weeks. That's awesome. And I was really proud of him, man, because he could be doing Pokemon or whatever. Yeah, yeah. He chose the Bible action, like the action Bible. Right. He came to me and was like, Dad, Moses is crazy. I was like, Yeah, he's that's kind of a crazy story, right? He would have never got that from you know the sports book, right? So anyway, shout out to Davis C. Cook, man. Get the action Bible for your kids. I think it's great resource.

SPEAKER_02 3:12

I think that's that's encouraging because I I think for a long time my relationship with the scripture was like it was associated with punishment. Yeah, you know, uh, which is not that's not good, not good. That's not good. You know, I was writing. Yeah, we can pray. We'll pray for you later about that. I've since healed. Yeah. Um but I think the the excitement of scripture and seeing it in my kids' lives. Yeah, to me, I'm like, okay, that's that's what I want, that's what I want them to see.

SPEAKER_01 3:41

I mean, my son came to me, he said, Dad, I read the whole Bible. I took a picture of him with his Bible. It is special, man. It's like, wow, you get the seed of the word of God in there in a way that they can understand and appreciate. It's really great. It's awesome. So when your kids get to that age, they can check it out. So another thing I get to do with my kids is they come to choir room and sometimes in the back row sleep. But one of the reasons that we started the choir room was I wanted my kids to experience like gospel choir rehearsal. And so uh, you all that are watching, you all can be involved in the choir room as well. Basically, there's no audition. You can show up and sing. You don't have to learn or read any music. I teach all the music by ear. You get to sing all the classic gospel songs and some brand new songs, and there's always a surprise guest. Um, we usually meet here in Nashville. You never know where we'll pop up, though. So hop on the email list um at choirisback.com or the email description below or the YouTube description below. And uh you can come hang out at the choir room. Um, also, we're doing a live recording of this podcast, the grown up church kids show, uh, coming up pretty soon. You can get the information in the description as well. And uh we'll love to see you all either at the show or at an upcoming choir room. Uh, I think that'd be a lot of fun. Uh we're coming up on four years. Four-year anniversary is coming up next. And so we're really excited about that. Hope to see you guys there.

SPEAKER_02 5:02

Thanks for watching Grown Up Church Kids. I hate to interrupt the show, but I have announcements. That's right. We have to do announcements here, and we can't pass out bulletins. So we have to you have to turn your attention to the screen. I'm assuming you only have one screen. But if you're a first, second, or third time visitor, thank you. Welcome. We have a free gift for you. Also, if you've been here more than that, we still have a free gift for you. Go to grownupchurchkids.com. Sign up. We want to send you something. Everybody loves free stuff. Can I hear you say free stuff? I'm just kidding, I can't hear you. It's a video. But we know you love free stuff, so go to grownupchurchkids.com so we can give you something. I I wish I had more announcements. I love taking up your time, but let's get back to the episode.

SPEAKER_01 5:47

All right. Uh, here at Grown Up Church Kids, we like to invite friends. Uh grown up, we would call them guest speakers. They would come for like a four o'clock uh Sunday afternoon service, and that's a special meal with some, you know, special sermons for special songs. We might get all of that today. I don't I don't know. Might get some special food. I don't know. But uh, if you have ever wondered about the Catholic Church, if you've ever been curious about what happens in the steeples and the sanctuaries that are a little different than what we're sitting in right now, if you've ever had questions about the Eucharist or you're wondering like, are Catholics even Christians? Have you ever thought that? Are Catholics even Christians? I mean, I feel like people say that about Pentecostals too. So it's kind of a common question today if yeah, if who's who's going to heaven? But more than that, I want you to meet my friend. I've got to hang out with this person a lot over the past few years. Um he's on the board of the choir room. Um, but you know him from songs like Because He Lives and I Need You and songs that people are singing all over the world, and you probably knew him to be a Catholic, or maybe you didn't, but we have the one and only my friend and our special guest speaker for today, brother Matt Marr. Hey. What's up, man? It's good to see you guys. Do you have an official title in the church that we should recognize? Because we've been introduced introducing people like Bishop and Apostle.

SPEAKER_02 7:17

It's like this guy's Catholic, Matt Marr.

SPEAKER_01 7:20

Matt. I've always wanted to ask you this, Matt. Do you ever feel like you are like the Catholic mascot for Protestant people? Because even the way I introduce you, I I I basically introduce you as like this is my Catholic friend. It's kind of like when people, like white people, they know one black person. Like, I know black people.

SPEAKER_02 7:44

You have one black friend. I'm a lot of people's African friend. I'm like, come on now. You gotta be more Africans.

SPEAKER_01 7:51

You gotta be more, but you know what I mean? Like, I I when I see you in the space out in the world, yeah, normally if there's a Christian event, they're like, Matt Marr's coming, so now we're a diverse We're ecumenical. You know what I'm saying? Do you ever feel like that, or are you okay with it?

SPEAKER_00 8:06

Uh, I mean, I would say I I've been doing sort of what I what I would call ecumenical ministry, which is really like I felt God said to me like 20 over 20 years ago, go hang out with all of these Christians in different denominations and go be who you are, and um just go be among amongst them. And uh you don't have to do anything. I don't want you like just be yourself. And so I've that's always the lens with which I viewed why I'm showing up, like on my best days, right? It's like I just want to show up and and be helped be a visible sign of unity because that's when believers from different backgrounds, different denominations, like when we get together, each one of us is a visible sign of unity, or there or the possibility of it, right? But I've never thought in any way because my everyone's story is unique, and m I I'm aware of how like particular mine is, and I think God, you know, crafted it specific for the gifts and talents that I have and and what he's kind of purposed me to do in my life.

SPEAKER_01 9:28

Um you do it very well.

SPEAKER_00 9:29

Oh, that's very kind of you.

SPEAKER_01 9:31

And as being your friend, I've learned a lot, not through official interviewing, but just conversations about what it means to be Catholic and comparing that to a Protestant church. And there's a lot that I want our friends to learn about today because I feel like there's a lot of misconceptions and assumptions and stereotypes, yeah, probably on both sides. Yeah. But I have some hot topic questions. I was gonna say, if you want to hit the rapid fire ones, I gotta hit the rabbit because there are things that I've always wanted to ask Catholics that I'll be honest, man. Sometimes I think Catholics just they don't read the Bible, man. It's just like, let's start with saints. Let's start with saints. With saints.

SPEAKER_02 10:11

Well, it is diabolical. He could ask these questions at any other time, but he was like, well, I want after we get three cameras and some mics set up.

SPEAKER_01 10:19

I want, I want, I'm gonna ask the questions that everybody wants to ask. Okay, question number one yeah Do you worship saints? Do Catholics worship saints?

SPEAKER_00 10:31

So, first of all, the same way I worship God, no. I I worship God as in Father, Son, and Spirit singularly alone at the highest altar of my heart. I I think when it comes to saints, when it comes to the Blessed Mother, I think the thing that Christians have to ask is are people who are made in the image and likeness of God worth celebrating? And are the things that God does in their life, which is despite their humanity, but because of his grace, the incredible things that God does, is that worth celebrating in the life of a person? Wow. And do we so believe that God's glory was demonstrated in that life that as they worship in heaven, says in Revelation 5 that the saints gather up the prayers of us here on the earth and offer them up to God like in bowls of incense. So is it so wild to think that someone in their whole life, because of the passions they have and the things that they loved, that that part of who they were went with them to heaven. And now they're worshiping God day and night, but as they worship God, they're also praying for the church here on earth. Wow, wow, and some of them are praying for specific things.

SPEAKER_01 11:58

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 11:59

So it's not, I don't worship Saint Francis like I worship Jesus, but I talk to him all the time, just like I talk to you.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 12:08

I think of St. Augustine all the time. Why wouldn't I? He came to Christ in his late 20s, he had an ill a child illegitimately, but like he dropped some real serious bars. Okay, and that I'm still quoting in my songs. And I so I just look at the saints as my as my friends, the same way that I look at my friends who are the saints here on earth, the people of God. But they're there. That's that's first of all, thank you.

SPEAKER_01 12:39

I've never thought about framing it like celebrating someone's life and their their life even after life, their their afterlife life. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I guess what I what's interesting to me is in Protestant churches, we never talk to dead people. No, but they're not dead. Well, that's what I'm that's my I'm getting I'm getting to that point. Like you know what I'm saying? Like after the funeral, yeah, it was like looked down upon. Right. I mean, I take that back. I take that back. Because there are some there are some black people who be like grandmama's looking out for me. That kind of stuff. Yes. But never like prayer or like conversation, the way you just described it.

SPEAKER_00 13:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 13:19

So that's helpful because I I think I think that frames it up differently than the stereotype that people give Catholics, like they're worshiping a saint rather than having a conversation.

SPEAKER_00 13:30

Yeah, I think some of it is probably a lot of uh like piling on of guilt and shame. And so the idea of like you guys made it, we haven't yet, um, which is true. I tend to think of it as just I just think the veil's a lot thinner than we even know. When my dad died, uh I had to go clean out his apartment, and I found all these letters he wrote later in his life asking Jesus to purify his heart, to give him the love that he had for him when he was younger. And this is a man who was divorced, who had been sober for 20 something years, but had wrestled with a lot of demons, struggled with a lot, struggled with anxiety, struggled with depression. And so after he died, a couple of months later, I was making a Christmas album, the out Christmas album I made, and I kept seeing a red cardinal outside my window whenever I would be working on a song. And so I looked up, and in in Christian symbolism, when you see a cardinal, it's a representative that someone on the other side of the veil is praying or thinking of you. And so I just I just know that my dad's a lot closer. I just think heaven's a lot closer than we understand. So, but I don't think of it as like I can't talk to Jesus. I can only he's like dad's like, sorry, you I gotta I gotta sign to you, you're my case. Uh like like it's like we get a social worker or something. It's not that, it's that um Christianity by its essence is a communal faith because God is a communion of three persons. So one of the earliest icon paintings is of the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. It's an Orthodox painting of the Trinity all sitting around a table together.

SPEAKER_01 15:42

Yes, who painted that? I mean, it it's an ancient Greek Orthodox icon. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 15:48

And but I think the gift of that for us is that God is a family and that God in his identity of who he is wants his bride to also be part of that family, but then he wants our experience of him and of our faith here on earth to be that of being with a family. And so when we worship on Sunday, it we're not just worshiping with people in a building, we're worshiping with all of heaven. And so to me, it just makes sense that God would just want us uh to to be those crazy Christians who think that we're that all all the saints and angels are with us.

SPEAKER_01 16:35

I think that's a great bridge for Protestant churches because we say that in our church. Let's let's say worship, let's worship with um all of heaven. Yep. We'll say that in our churches, but we won't think saints. We think only angels. But I think of cloud of witnesses in Hebrews. I think of um consider those who've gone before you. I think of um one day we'll all so I I think there's more bridges there than maybe we considered. Do you have a a burning question?

SPEAKER_02 17:01

Or the the just to add, the so the neighbors that we have that are Catholic, yeah, their kids around the same age as my kids.

SPEAKER_04 17:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:10

And uh and occasionally they'll mention, oh, today we're celebrating Saint So and so.

SPEAKER_05 17:14

Yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:15

Or today is this, or they'll be like, hey, we're coloring a picture of Saint So-and-so. And uh and I think that was the first time that I thought, oh, they're really they're four, five, like they're really dialed into the ones who've gone before them. And when we were at the Catholic store kind of joking about that, of like, who would we who do we have? You know, Piper, Joyce Meyer, you know, and I'm like, no, I think that there is, yeah, we need to, I like, I like the idea of like, no, we need to tap into those people who we when you said they're dead, you're like, no, they're not. Yeah, I was like, yeah, yeah, there is something to celebrate. Like my dad passed, and when my kids ask me about it, sometimes I'm like, I don't want to have to talk about my dead dad. But you know, but I'm like, no, that's there's beau there's beauty in that to go like, no, that was a great Christian and a great man and a great father. You didn't get to meet him, right? But but there is there's still something to celebrate because one day you will. And uh I don't know why we even from I'll say for me, like I think of death and this uh as this almost this like this untouchable subject of like I don't want to start, I don't want to tear up today. But there is there is a part of it that's that is that's that you can grieve, but there's I think there's more to rejoice about it. And I like that approach of like, yeah, you can you can read about these people who've gone before us and we can celebrate their you know celebrate their lives as opposed to being like ah so sad what happened to them. Yeah, yeah, it's sad, but that's the the man maybe like the tiniest part of their story versus Yeah, there's a young saint who's just canonized names Carlo Acutis, and he was basically they they managed the patron saint of online gaming because he loved playing video games.

SPEAKER_01 18:55

He was a teenager, patron saint of online gaming.

SPEAKER_00 18:59

And I think about I play thought I got to there because I play I play uh I I play Xbox with friends.

SPEAKER_01 19:05

Yeah, you do, Matt Marr.

SPEAKER_00 19:06

And occasionally I'll be on there and I'll I will think of him when I'm interacting. If I'm like playing a game and I'm interacting with strangers because it's just this reminder um to your point, life is short, eternity is long. The family that awaits us, and the our the experience of communion with Christ and worshiping God for eternity that awaits us is so much greater, and the lives of the saints, I think, live as reminders and as testimonies to that reality. Matt, Matt, Matt, Matt. Communion? Yeah. I was like, okay, we're gonna have to tackle this one.

SPEAKER_01 19:48

Communion, Eucharist, you all believe that you are participating in eating and drinking the body and blood of Jesus, true or false? Um yes, true. There it is.

SPEAKER_00 20:00

You've heard it from Matt Marr's mouth. So, but I think there's a couple of caveats to that. Yes. Um Catholics believe that um at Mass the bread and the wine is is transformed through the power of the Holy Spirit, not the power of a man, um, into the real presence of Jesus. Body and blood, soul and divinity. But it's his resurrected presence. So it's not the body and blood of a carpenter, like of a human being from 2,000 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 20:33

Got it.

SPEAKER_00 20:34

It's the risen Lord's presence.

SPEAKER_01 20:36

Wow. That is really helpful, actually. Yeah. That is very helpful.

SPEAKER_00 20:40

Um, a great resource that I think dives into the sort of the theology of it is um there's a book called The Lamb's Supper by Dr. Scott Hahn that I read that really reshaped and reformed the way I look at the uh Eucharist. Um the uh the symbolism of communion and its tie to the Passover and what the Passover did and how the Passover translates from the Last Supper through the crucifixion. Amazing as seen as one singular act, amazing, right? So Dr. Hahn has another book called The Fourth Cup. In a Passover meal, you drank four cups. When Jesus says, This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new covenant, it'll be shed for you and for all. I will not drink of the this again until I inherit my father's kingdom. Um that's the third cup. So, what Dr. Hahn, who is a Presbyterian, who basically the Lord kind of led him through a conversion into Catholicism, what he sort of stipulates is that the fourth cup is the wine that Jesus drinks on the cross. And then when he is sit fit, when he says it's finished. He's saying the old covenant's finished, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:03

Yes.

SPEAKER_00 22:04

But the but then you have to ask yourself, but was he also instituting a new one? Which, if he wasn't, why would he say, do this in remembrance of me? If he was like, hey, I'm ending the need for any sense of remembering, for any sense of recollection. You don't have to remember anything anymore because I'm gonna fulfill it all here and now. Why did he use a very uh specifically Hebrew understanding of covenant, which is the whole concept of remembering? That's right. Is that you recall the covenant and it's like it's physically active, right?

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 22:45

So it's Jesus' presence. We're not just reenacting something, we're actually transcending space and time and participating. We are at the Last Supper and we are at the cross and we are at the banquet in heaven. All at the same time. Because the work of God transcends Jesus died for sins we haven't committed yet. I can't fathom this. I don't understand how God could have done this. He his saving act pierced the veil of linear time. Wow. It stretches all the way from the beginning to the end of salvation history, which is why when he went down into the grave, he ripped Adam and Eve out from the that that's another icon that exists, and he's pulling them out of the grave on Easter morning. Wow. So that's the Eucharist. So when Catholics are participating in receiving the Eucharist, that's that's what they're participating in. It isn't it isn't like uh a souped-up passion play.

SPEAKER_01 23:50

Right, right, right, right.

SPEAKER_00 23:51

If that makes any sense, it's something, it's something utterly more, and it entirely relies on the power of God. Wow. It it's not something that human beings can just conjure up themselves.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Like, like, you know, buying elements from Lifeway bookstore and putting buying stale elements from Lifeway Christian bookstore.

SPEAKER_00 24:12

Well, and and that I'll encourage you, and I'll encourage your viewers to do this. There's videos you can go look online. There's been miracles over the past 2,000 years of like priests who were struggling with their faith in this, yeah, and all of a sudden the host bleeding. Or it literally turned into a heart muscle. And it's still at a church somewhere in Italy. Crazy, man. So there's that, you know. I always tell people you have to remember this, it's 2,000 years worth of people believing this. This isn't like uh some con man who managed to convince a small sect of people in like Podunk, Missouri. Right. There's nothing wrong with Podunk, Missouri, but just it before the internet. This has this truth has persisted for a long time for a long time. Yeah. Yeah. And so um at the same time, I totally understand why people just don't get it.

SPEAKER_01 25:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:16

Or or like I sympathize for that because I I just I don't think it's something, I don't think you can reason your way into it.

SPEAKER_01 25:24

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 25:24

I think it's well, you said this earlier. Fate's a gift, right?

SPEAKER_01 25:27

Yes, yes. And so much that you said today has made me love the Lord more and appreciate him more. Yeah. It's not a competition, it's it's uh it's it's an affirmation, it's uh it's a beautification of what God is doing in his global church. Yeah. And it seems like the enemy to make us at war with each other for things that aren't essential. And I I it makes me really sad that there are people who won't even talk to Catholics or Catholics that won't talk to Protestants because they know that they don't go to the same church. But it happens to be Baptist and Pentecostal, and it happens to Presbyterian and Methodist too. It's like crazy. That's not what we should be doing.

SPEAKER_02 26:08

You're saying that Jesus isn't coming back for a harem. You're right. Yeah. I think about it, what you were saying about like closed doors, where I'm like, the my mom, I the door of Catholicism for me was my mom was like, I was a Catholic, I became Pentecostal. So I was like, all right, close that door. And you know, I knew Muslims, I was like, all right, I'm gonna close that door. And I just closed all, you know. Yeah, and so yeah, I never thought to, hey, what I should talk to somebody who believes different than me and see what they're doing.

SPEAKER_01 26:41

There is error in the world, yeah, but doesn't mean you can't ask your friends questions. No, you no, you should you have to be able to to ask hard questions, and you know, we talked before we recording about uh the the movement and revival of charismatic Catholics, yeah, which to me seems like an oxymoron. Yeah, for sure. I have friends, you've told me stories where this is the doorway into Catholicism for some people is charismatic experiences, and the doorway into charismatic experience for some people is the Catholic Church. So even things that seem separate in my background are brother and sister in other people's background.

SPEAKER_00 27:24

Yeah, and I think it's like for I I tend to look at the sort of all the spiritual gifts of the church and how God in different ages uses different gifts or different charisms. And you know, the the gifts of the charismatic renewal, which sort of happened almost as a precursor or during the Jesus movement and during the 60s, during all that social change. Wow, um, what in some ways was needed. You know what I mean? And it feels like maybe what's needed now is more of the contemplative side, more of the the side of understanding that tradition is something that gets passed down um as a love. It's like I wanna I wanna raise you up in the same love that I have for this and the same way that we do this with great intent and great love. You know, the thing I'll say too, just really quick about communion, because it it's a hard thing for me to talk about um because it it is such an it's a very personal, it's an intimate thing, and it's hard to get all the words out into a like a digestible sound bite. Um, a lot of people's experience of communion is a very personal experience of it's just it's me and God time. The thing that I understand is that for Catholics, communion is ultimately about two things it's about union with God and it's about union with each other. Amen. And so Catholics can get uh criticized a lot because it's not an open table, but it's it's it's not done out of a spirit of trying to exclude people, it's done out of a spirit of saying, like, we want it to be what it is. Yeah, and so it's for people who all sort of kind of hold this affirmative thing together, um, we're participating in it, and we want people to be there who aren't, yeah, even if you can't. And there's plenty of stipulations on me as a Catholic of whether or not I'm in a current state at which I can receive. So there's a lot of Sundays where even I can't receive it. Wow. And people will go, well, that's ridiculous. That's that's too um that's too high a standard. And I would say, well, but that's why mercy exists. It's not like God's withholding mercy from me. It's just about trying to acknowledge the state of your heart and the state of your relationship with one another. So I think so so some of it for some people when they come to church and they're like, Well, what do you guys believe about communion? I I just felt like that was important to add. Very important.

SPEAKER_02 30:03

So my mom grew up in a village in Tanzania, Moshi, and she was raised Catholic.

SPEAKER_00 30:08

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 30:08

Her name was Teresa Tennessee, and uh she got saved in college. She got saved, and uh, so part of her testimony that I've heard my whole life, she became she became Pentecostal, yeah, was that she was Catholic and then she got saved. So for some odd reason, I put in my mind, oh yeah, what whatever Catholics are, yeah, we have got to get them saved and Pentecostal. Um and said then I started interacting with Catholics. I'm like, wait a second, why were we thinking that? Why were we thinking that? And I'm some wonderful neighbors, yeah. Shout out to the Roars who are incredible people and Catholic. And I don't know, like that's one of the misconceptions. I want to hear some of the misconceptions, but have you like even it sounds so weird? I can't believe I just said that to you that my mom was a Catholic and then she got saved. Yeah, no, but the light came on.

SPEAKER_00 31:05

Yeah, I mean, I I think what I would say is that I think for anybody, regardless of whatever denomination they've grown up in, there usually comes a moment in their formative adult years, early formative years, where the lights come on and they um realize who Jesus is, what he's done for them, what he's offering them. Um and there's there's this sort of moment of decision, you know, that happens. Um I think that you can grow up in pretty much every denomination and be immersed in a in a way of living that um all all the things are there, it's like all the parts of an engine, but the but the spark hasn't hit yet. It hasn't quite turned on for what for whatever reason. Um you can grow up in um a uh a practice of faith that on paper is supposed to be beautiful and incredible and all these things, but the experience you have growing up in your childhood is incredibly incredibly abusive, manipulative, um uh destructive even. So you know, it's like we were talking about earlier. It's like anytime you start adding human beings to the equation, it just gets really complicated. So I I always say to people, um a lot of the decision to to follow Jesus, um, a simple way of I think looking at something that and it's mostly based on observation from 20 years of hanging out with a lot of uh Christians from different backgrounds Pentecostal, Baptist, uh Presbyterian, you know, evangelical. Um a lot of people think of uh following Jesus as literally turning away from the world and following Christ. And some of that's the language that we use in our hymns, right? So it's like I've decided to follow Jesus, no turning back. The cross before me, the world behind me, for someone who's who's making a decision to follow Jesus, when they sing the world, they're not just thinking of an abstract term, they're thinking of their lived experience of the world in their life at that moment. And like for your mom, for whatever her experience of growing up in church was, and it could have been just this environment where uh parents told kids to stop talking, be quiet, sit still, don't say anything. And you're a kid, it's natural. You fidget, you're a mad, you know what you mean, you wander, you you run around, and all of a sudden a parent can scold you in church, and then you have this, you have this like wounded memory in your heart of when I'm in this building, God doesn't want me to be who I am, and yet never gets addressed, never gets confronted, never gets looked at it going, okay, this is a lot of complex things. How do we peel apart this and say, okay, that was wrong? Um, you know, God doesn't want that. So, but fast forward to when you're a young adult and you encounter the gospel for the first time, it's like if you haven't had any positive experiences growing up in this world, all you associate it with is essentially trauma. But then somebody offers you the gospel and you didn't know that, oh, I can hear the gospel in this church because my experience of this church has been incredibly painful. Then part of your acceptance of the gospel is turning away from it. For me as a Catholic, it wasn't so much turning away from the religion of my youth or of my childhood as much as it was surrendering my life to Jesus. So it was less about rebelling against the world or against a system of the world or a structure of a power or something, and it was more about obedience. And so my journey in holiness has been about trying to learn how to surrender more in my life, which is why I write so many bleeping songs about surrendering. People are like, does this guy, does he have a problem with surrendering his life to God? It's like probably because so much of my experience in my faith is like learning how to surrender more to God, learning how to be more obedient to um to the gospel. And so some of it's just that difference of like what what what kind of gospel were you preached? Because I think those are both part of the gospel. It's just one gets overemphasized. So one emphasizes turn away from the world, and it isn't just turn away from sin, because everybody has to do that, but it's like it's rejecting man-made or man, man, what what get what's gets sort of seen as a man-made system.

SPEAKER_01 36:18

So you're saying the world can actually be I should put it this way, you're saying that the kind of church you grew up in could be a kind of world that you turn away from.

SPEAKER_00 36:29

I think it gets interpreted as a world, which is why religion becomes such a bad word, which to me I always find hilarious because I'm like, okay, eight billion people on the planet, right? There's a lot of religions.

SPEAKER_01 36:41

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 36:41

Like Uncle Webster in the in the in that book looks at Christianity and says it's a religion. I'm like, we spend so much energy trying to convince people that this isn't a religion. Which I'm going, but we go to church a specific day every week. We we tell specific stories, we pray specific prayers, specific programs, specific programs belongs. That's what a religion is. No, it's a relationship. No, it's a religion. No, it's a relationship. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 37:14

And you belong before you believe and you behave and you right. I gotta hit all the buzzwords. You're killing the buzzwords. Right.

SPEAKER_00 37:20

And it and and to me, it becomes like, oh, I I do think that we have to confront any uh within ourselves, as grown-up church kids, you have to control you have to constantly confront the things that you were brought up in to ask yourself, what can I let go of as I become more mature in my faith?

SPEAKER_01 37:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 37:44

What's essential, what's not essential? I mean, that's a scary question.

SPEAKER_01 37:48

I I remember my my parents were great. They allowed us to ask questions. My dad has a has a doctorate degree in ministry and theology, and he he was so willing to let us ask hard questions. But the environment I was in was not like my dad. I mean, you don't question the preacher, you don't question the Bible, you don't question anything really. You just basically do what they tell you to do. And I feel like there's a lot of people who grew up in church who because they weren't allowed to ask questions, they threw everything away. Yeah. It's like I can't wrestle, wrestle with it equals sin.

unknown 38:28

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 38:28

Versus wrestle equals um the word you use, like being aware and being awakened to some things that are essential and some things that are not essential.

SPEAKER_00 38:37

Yeah, and I think to your point, like that's that's less of a religious phenomenon and that's a cultural phenomenon. Like you guys were talking earlier about just like childhood and stuff. I was like, I grew up in the age of like free-range parenting. Like, there's so much about my childhood that was just literally unsupervised. And um, and so even my experience of church, it's like I would I'd leave the choir off because my mom's sang in the choir loft in the back of the church, and occasionally I would just kind of sneak down. And um, you know, after church, you're just running around outside with kids, kids are running everywhere, doing every every every kind of thing. Someone said bowling. I remember yeah, going to a bowling alley when you you were a kid was wild because you'd been like next to a there was no smoking section, like they had a like there's no smoking section. It was just like smoke them if you got them. So you're just in this, you're you're in you're in an environment that you probably should be wearing a hazmat suit, and you're like, I'm getting third person cancer uh from this. It was just such a a wild uh environment to be a kid, period, in North America, you know, much less the world. Um and some of it is our relationship with authority like institutions, uh church leaders, parents. Young people had a fundamentally different relationship with authority 50 years ago.

SPEAKER_01 40:12

What was that relationship?

SPEAKER_00 40:14

Don't talk, don't ask questions, just do what you're told.

SPEAKER_01 40:19

Do you think that's the same? When did that change? Because I we I mean we have kids and we don't say that to our kids. I feel like my parents maybe felt it but didn't teach us that. They were they were kind of like their parents definitely said that.

SPEAKER_00 40:38

I think we're in it, is what I would say.

unknown 40:40

Okay.

SPEAKER_00 40:41

Um I I think there's a lot of things that like we're living through right now. So I I one of the things I've been sort of kind of like asking, so uh the talking to God about is like every couple of hundred years, usually in in Catholicism, there's what's called an ecumenical council, and like all the bishops from all around the world and other Christian leaders now would go to Rome and they'd spend several times, several sorry, months or a year, um, and they would deliberate over things that needed to be talked about. They're basically issues that have sort of bubbled to the surface where it's like we have to get together and talk about this. So, probably one of the most famous last year was the 1700-year um anniversary, I believe, of the Nicene Creed, right? So that was written at the Council of Nicaea, I think 325 AD. Bunch of guys got together because people were arguing about whether Jesus was fully God or just or God and man or somehow a hologram of of God and not actually incarnated. Um, and it got contesty. I mean, apparently it came to blows, like people pulling each other's beards. Um but what emerged was this creed, right? So I think it's similarly on a cultural level. We're I think I think in Christianity, I I keep wondering if we're living through a global ecumenical council on social media and everyone's constantly weighing in now on their phones, um, which can be just pretty disorienting and rather distracting. And hopefully, what can emerge from it though are these sort of declarative things like a creed, right? I think when it comes to something like parenting, I think it's a similar fashion where um in real time we're confronting the things that used to be done a certain way and going, we don't want to do that way anymore. And that's what's I think is a lot of what social media is right now. But a lot of parents are just deciding to do it because they're finding other parents, yeah, and they're going, Did your parents yell you like talk to you this way? Yeah, yeah. And and you're going, well, we don't we don't want to we don't want to do that anymore.

SPEAKER_01 43:03

What's it called? Gentle parenting? Is that what it's called now? Where you don't spank your kids and we didn't have gentle parenting. What's the opposite of gentle parenting? Yeah. I I I don't know.

SPEAKER_02 43:13

But it is come it's built into every African parent. I'll tell you that.

SPEAKER_01 43:17

Dictatorship.

SPEAKER_02 43:18

Uh yeah, I remember um yeah, just the idea of I give my kids choices, you know. I'm like, hey, what do you want for breakfast?

unknown 43:26

Right.

SPEAKER_02 43:27

And my mom would say, just make something. My mom, she comes over, she was like, Well, just make something and feed it to them.

SPEAKER_05 43:31

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:32

And I'm like, I this is like a new era, mom. This is a new book. We have this, I could pick, they could pick, and they could. And uh, sometimes I'm like, okay, I don't want to do that too much. But Mariff is like, you know, what would you like when you were a kid? And I'm like, I would ask, I would like somebody to ask we what I would like. Yeah, yeah. So I'm like, yeah, you have to, I guess that's that's part of it of like raising a new generation.

SPEAKER_01 43:54

Yeah. I think when it comes to church and faith, that's definitely different for our generation where You just went to the church your parents went to. Right, right. Yeah. There seems to be there was an assumption that you were the religion of your parents.

SPEAKER_00 44:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 44:09

I don't know if that assumption is still the same. And I'm curious with you, Matt. Um, I don't know much about your childhood and your story. Were your parents were Catholic?

SPEAKER_00 44:18

Uh-huh. Well, my my dad was. My mother actually um, so she decided when she was like, I think 10 or 11 she wanted to be Methodist. And so my grandmother, her mom was uh was basically the granddaughter of a Baptist organist and preacher. She married a guy who was raised Mormon who but who wasn't practicing. Uh, and then they uh traveled around because he was a naval pilot, my grandfather. They settled in um eventually settled in Arizona. My mom was going to a Methodist church. Her brother ended up becoming Mormon, so he still is. And then my mom became a Catholic when she met my dad.

SPEAKER_04 45:05

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 45:06

Met with a priest two times, two meetings, and then became a Catholic, which is highly unorthodox. Like that would never that would that would never happen. What changed her mind? Um I think my dad. I think he just said, I really want to raise our kids Catholic. Wow. And now a contrast, my my wife, uh Kristen, isn't Catholic. And I was we had I I was never I was never thinking, oh, she needs to become Catholic. I I I was very specific with her upfront in the sense that it was like, look, if we're gonna get married in a Catholic church, and I was like, I I need to get married in a Catholic church. Part of the right in and of itself is that you make a public promise to raise your kids this way. And she just kind of sat there and she's like, Yeah, that's fine, it makes sense. You guys are like the first Christians, anyways. So I was like, Are you sure? She goes, Yeah, you put together the Bible. It's just like she just never, which I think is a lot of it's it's a testament to I think the just the wisdom of my wife. She I think she instinctively knew that she had a journey with God, I had a journey with God. She wasn't gonna conflate mine with hers. Yeah, she wasn't gonna let mine become a reason why she she she should just all of a sudden become Catholic.

SPEAKER_01 46:36

So she currently is not a Catholic. She's not a Catholic. Really?

SPEAKER_00 46:39

Yeah, we go to Mass every week. She, when I'm on the road, if I'm if I'm out on a Sunday, she takes my kids, takes the kids to church still. Uh she worked at our parish school for several years, occasionally gets to lecture. So we agree to reading.

SPEAKER_01 46:57

Would you say that she is in another denomination or just not Catholic?

SPEAKER_00 47:02

Um, I I think, yeah, I would probably say how I tend to look at it is that so I I think there's only one church. And the reason I think that is because I don't think Jesus is coming back for a harem. I think he's coming back for a bride.

SPEAKER_01 47:23

In this church, we have a band that backs you up when you start preaching. I don't know if y'all do that in your Catholic church. Is that part of the one church you talk about? This organist, and you go to that church.

SPEAKER_00 47:33

Come on, Matt. Say more about that.

SPEAKER_01 47:35

What are you talking about?

SPEAKER_00 47:36

Well, I just I mean, Jesus founded one church. He didn't he didn't he didn't found a church of indiv of like two billion individuals. Wow. Okay, so one church in many locations, basically, because Yeah, so I the best way to kind of try to frame it for people is in heaven there's one church, there's one wedding feast, right? We're all invited to uh on earth are in our lived current reality, that is not fully realized. So it's sort of a I think you could look at it as like the evidence of the kingdom being here and now and not yet. That's right. It's not fully realized. That's right. Um but it's also the reason why Jesus, the longest prayer he prays in the Bible right before he goes into the Garden of Gethsemane is that we would be as close to each other as he is with his father. So um, so I've I've just understood that there's one church. I think that the fullest expression of it uh here on the earth is found in the practice of Catholicism. Um it's full of very flawed, imperfect people. It's uh this side of heaven, we're all kind of seen dimly through a mirror.

SPEAKER_01 49:11

That's right. Um and I've heard um that there is a significant rise in our generation of younger who are the quiet revival, they're calling it. Yeah, they are they are going to more liturgical churches, including Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox, yeah. Why do you think that is? Why do you think people are choosing to go to that kind of church at a younger age?

SPEAKER_00 49:35

Yeah, I think there's a lot of reasons. I think ultimately, I think there's a book written by uh two popes ago, Pope Benedict. It's called The Spirit of the Liturgy. He wrote it inspired by a book of the same title written by an Italian theologian named Romano Guardini called Spirit of the Liturgy. Liturgy is a Greek word, means work of the people. Uh what we do on Sundays is the work of the people in the body of Christ around the world as the church. So the work that we do, the hymns that we sing, the readings that we read, the sermons that we preach, the elements that get brought up for communion, uh, whether or not you theologically, where you stand on how it what happens during that, um, all of that is a work. Um but the but the work that it's doing is it's pointing people to the finished work of Jesus. Uh liturgical churches take that work seriously, and over the course of hundreds and hundreds of years, they just made decisions along the way to understand there's probably a ceiling in terms of technology, human expression, uh, human creativity within within the boundaries of what's happening on Sunday, because what we're what we're wanting to do is we're wanting to transcend this life.

unknown 51:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 51:11

We're wanting to get together as the church and worship not just with each other, but actually with the church in heaven. And um, and so a lot of those churches, what's attractive about it is because historically there have been times and seasons where technology starts creeping in, and all of a sudden there's a guardrail and says, you know what, there's a limit. Um, so like in this book, The Spirit of Liturgy, what Pope Benedict talked about was how there was a time with the advent of opera that opera started creeping into church music. And so it would start becoming more and more elaborate, more and more um performative, but not performative in a sense that a people could still participate or still uh be involved with, they would become spectators, and um and so the first thing that people are called to on Sunday is an interior level of worship that they're called to bring with them. And and then it's like then it's the job of like the people on staff at our church to ask how do we cultivate that within everyone? And what what can we do using art and environment and music and sound and preaching and all of it to draw people together so that we together can be lifted up and have an experience of the church in heaven, right?

SPEAKER_01 52:45

Which is from what I hear, which is why Catholic buildings are so ornate in their design.

SPEAKER_00 52:51

They were built to literally make you think you were walking into heaven, right? And people would say, Well, that's preposterous. And I'm like, or incredibly ambitious.

SPEAKER_01 53:00

Right.

SPEAKER_00 53:01

And because they're still doing that, they're still doing that, you can still walk in, and that's the thing. Like, even in this church, there's something about stained glass, is because we don't use it all the time, right? So there's a phrase I heard called conscious excess, which is like when it comes to worship, we should be offering the best that we have. That's right, but then asking be asking the question um is there a is there a limit to how much we get involved? Right. And to the point that it become like we become like I watched a video you guys did, and you talked about you're like, there's a lot of ic iconography, right? The interesting thing about icons in the Orthodox Church is those are seen as a veil. So then it's not about the image or it's not about the art. The art becomes a portal, but the point is that it's not about a person.

SPEAKER_01 53:54

Right.

SPEAKER_00 53:55

So that stained glass, I'm not sitting here, I'm grateful for the artisan who made the glass, but I'm not thinking about the glass. I'm not thinking about the artisan.

SPEAKER_01 54:05

Got it.

SPEAKER_00 54:06

It it it's it's it's become a veil.

SPEAKER_01 54:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 54:09

And so the great thing about what worship can do and what art can do on a Sunday, when it's I think functioning at its best, is when it's it's forgotten about. It's taken for granted. It's not about who it is, it's not about like the the it's not about the people, it's not about personalities, it's not about you know the outer trappings of any of that stuff. It it it the worship transcends the moment. I think that that's what young people are looking for, are these experiences where it's less and less about the personalities because so much of our life now feels like it's about platforms of personalities, and like and people are wanting something that feels more that it it transcends all of this, yeah, and it it pulls me up into something that truly feels eternal.

SPEAKER_01 54:59

I mean, eternal is a great word because what I sense is that there's a lot of temporal, trendy, contemporary things going on that feel very um, they don't feel very founded, they feel very loose and shakeable. And what what I've found attractive about Catholicism and Orthodox and Anglican churches is that y'all have been praying the same prayers, the exact same prayers for a really long time.

SPEAKER_00 55:30

Yeah, because it's been handed down.

SPEAKER_01 55:32

And they're not there's not someone like standing up in church saying, hmm, let me open this service with the prayer I just made up. Or making up as I talk.

SPEAKER_00 55:40

Yeah, and and usually when that happens, it's not during an actual formal part, like it could be at an announcement or it could be before uh a liturgy starts. But once it starts, it is, and that's a big part about it. It it transcends the moment that we're in because it wasn't written in the last two minutes by an AI. Right, it it's been handed down and perfected. So that's kind of shit.

SPEAKER_01 56:08

A lot of people say leave us alone. Leave us alone. He came for every pastor using those AI services.

SPEAKER_00 56:17

No, so like, so you know, because a lot of people will say, well, like, why do you guys just use the same ritual? Like, why do you guys just keep praying the same prayers? And it's like, well, um, because it's actually one of the best ways that you can avoid saying something wrong. Right. It actually becomes a way you avoid heresy. So if you and people make mistakes when they're praying, heresy deserves an organ, is all I'm saying. So I think that you know, that's why you know something like a creed is so important. Yes. And because it anchors you and going, this is what this is what we believe in the moment, but it's what we've been handed down.

SPEAKER_01 56:57

Man, I value that so much because these TikTok theologians are getting on my nerves. These Instagram, I read the Bible and I have an interpretation that no one else has heard before. Mine is brand new, and I'm gonna teach the world something new about Jesus. It's like, bro, you mean you have something better than thousands of years of church fathers, thousands of years of highly intelligent, thousands of years of women and men who have prayed and been persecuted and killed for their faith. You have something better to say than them.

SPEAKER_00 57:31

I'm not trying to throw shit at them, I'm just saying some of this contemporary commentary is just well, and there's a big yeah, and there's a big problem of it too, that it's just it's getting harder to realize because we're in it. But the technology itself is affecting everyone. It's even affecting Christians, it's affecting our ability to pray. It's affecting our ability to truly be countercultural and step away from the world because a lot of those people, the revelations that they got from God were not by being like fully uh enmeshed and immersed and caught up in all the affairs of the world at all times. These were people who were radically experienced radical conversion, went out to a monastery, and literally all they did was read the Bible and pray all day. And you get locked into God on a whole different level when you're living that way. Yeah. And it's that's radical.

SPEAKER_01 58:34

That's radical.

SPEAKER_00 58:34

And so it's I'm sorry, it is probably uh very, very hard if you're pursuing a career as a TikTok influencer to get locked in the same way unless you're going like three weeks out of the month. I don't have a phone. You can't get a hold of me except by carrier pigeon smoke signal or like a long string attached to a coffee can.

SPEAKER_02 58:58

How am I gonna promote the plush Bible toys that I'm selling?

SPEAKER_00 59:03

If I'm not on TikTok, if I'm not on TikTok.

SPEAKER_02 59:05

What you're talking about.

SPEAKER_00 59:06

It's what's more valuable, my my Bible toys or about it. Because it's it's just it it is uh it's a bit of a it's a physiological reality that we're like we're cooking our own brain chemistry, right? We're cooking our our uh our nervous systems.

SPEAKER_02 59:20

One thing that I was thinking of when you were talking was like how the Protestant side like we're obsessed with the new, like a fresh word. Oh, I knew somebody's preaching, and then they God told me something new about this. A rain of words about this story. Yeah, and and uh and I remember saying like I had a rotation of sermons I used to listen to by pastors from different big churches because they all dropped on Tuesdays, and I would listen to them, and I'm like, oh yeah, uh next Tuesday, oh I gotta listen to that sermon. And then I I remember a moment they were quoting these old guys. Hey, Calvin and C. S. Lewis. And then I remember thinking, like, wait a second, why am I refreshing this church's podcast? Like, they're just ref yeah. I I think I need to go back to some old stuff, yeah, and going back and reading and thinking, like, oh, we a lot of those guys tapped it, tapped into it really early. Yeah, but there is this even when you're talking about somebody trying to hey let me freestyle a prayer. Yeah, yeah. It's like there are prayers. There are prayers that are there are prayers already. Um, but yeah, yeah, I think there's there's I don't know, man. I've maybe maybe we need to be use the term anchor too.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:34

Like maybe we need to be anchored in the in the old well, that's my question for you, Matt, because most people have phones, they have Instagram, they have TikToks, they have families, they have jobs.

SPEAKER_05 1:00:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:44

If people want to be more anchored in their faith, what would you advise people to do in their daily or weekly or monthly rhythms that would help them kind of eject from the microwave religion?

SPEAKER_00 1:01:02

Yeah, microwave mentality. TV dinner, church, you know what I'm saying? Yeah, I mean, I think the first thing I would say is just two things, which is the first thing would be read the Bible every day. So I read the lectionary. The lectionary essentially is there's every day around the world, there's a mass, meaning a service, right? The readings for that day are preset. Um it's a it's a calendar that happens in a three-year cycle. And so every morning you get up and there's an old testament reading and a psalm, and um during the weekdays, there's old testament reading, psalm, and a gospel. On the weekends, they add a second reading, and you just show up and do it. And you don't have to do that. I just like the lectionary because it's it's it I feel like it's more uh palatable than but a lot of people will say, I'm gonna pick the book of Acts, I'm gonna read a chapter every every morning, you know, and then I'm gonna do a different book. There's there's tons, there's so many programs, so many apps, so many things. But just if you can find a way to get into scripture for a couple of minutes every morning, and then silence.

SPEAKER_01 1:02:20

We don't do silence in Protestant churches. Well, it's I can remember the last time we sat in silence at a church. Yeah, we don't even like silence on the show. Yeah, that's why you brought out the iPad.

SPEAKER_00 1:02:33

A fake organist to make me feel at home. But I think that one of the things that's but it's kind of being uh stolen from in this moment, and I do think that it's actually an incredible, deep, deep well is just is simply silence. It's like if you have to set your alarm clock ten minutes earlier, get up and do that, be silent for ten minutes before the affairs of the world and the affairs of the day just come start flooding in 10 minutes, you know, read scripture, or it's like five minutes, read scripture, and then five minutes of silence. Like give yourself a little bit of of space because all worship, all prayer, I think ultimately comes from and leads to silence, right? So when we if we were to gaze on the face of Jesus, we would be speechless, and then we'd have a lot to say and sing about, and eventually we'd run out of things to sing and say, and we'd want to be speechless again.

SPEAKER_01 1:03:44

That's a that's a different liturgical goal, man. That's when I go to church at the church I lead at, silence is not the destination. Yeah. In fact, I mean I feel convicted because I feel like I'm trying to lead people to engage more and like do something and respond, which I think there's precedent for that.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:03

But man, to respond with silence is wild. Well, and to lead people into it, which I think is another reason why young people are being drawn to older forms of liturgy because those have kind of baked into them now. They have these spaces of silence. Yeah, and um, and there isn't this uh expectation to fill every hole to your point of like on but see, I but that's but I love that. Is that the opposite of what he's saying?

SPEAKER_02 1:04:36

No, I don't I don't be the gospel church never been silent ever. It's a rumble. Somebody doing something.

SPEAKER_00 1:04:44

I think there's the time and place for it, and I you know, I think a lot of this too, and then one of the things that I'm aware of is that um uh worship services don't develop and grow in vacuums. Yeah, they develop and grow in culture, and so it's like that. I so much I've grown to love about the gift that the gospel church brings to the whole body of Christ. That is not just an experience of church, that is an experience of a people, of culture, yeah, right. And um, and then the gospel sort of baptizes and affirms the parts of that culture that like God loves.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:30

And purifies the part that probably should fall away too.

SPEAKER_00 1:05:33

Yeah, I mean, yes, I think I think to some extent, yeah, yeah, yes, you're totally, you're totally right.

SPEAKER_01 1:05:38

There's a few uh resources that my Anglican, Catholic, and Orthodox friends have given me that have been helpful to me. You know, I came up on devotionals from our favorites, like um Joyce Meyer, or you know great, great things. No shade against those, but these are different. One of them one of them is like team.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:01

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 1:06:01

Which is a if you don't have that app, it basically leads through through about nine to eleven minutes of meditative prayer, scripture, silence, meditative prayer, scripture. And a lot of my friends at Crosspoint where I lead right now use that app. Obviously, we're a Protestant church, but they have said that it starts their morning, or you can do it at night too. It starts or ends their day with a lot more intention and focused prayer. Um another one is the Hallow app, which you you work with a lot.

SPEAKER_00 1:06:31

Yeah, and all of those things are great because they get you into an established rhythm. So basically, I think it's Psalm 119, which is says, seven times a day I praise you. That's that was the essentially the scriptural basis for the early monastic movement, which became uh monks and nuns. Wow. And who pray what's called the liturgy of the hours. Right. And so this idea of being in a in a daily rhythm of prayer is goes all the way back to the early, early church.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:07

That's awesome.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:08

And it's fundamentally rooted in the idea that I I just want to be near God every minute, every hour of the day.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:17

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:17

And so as I do the work that I do, I'm gonna stop and check in.

SPEAKER_01 1:07:23

Yeah. Another uh resource that reminds me of that is every moment holy. Great, great book. From Rabbit Room, I think publishers. Yes. And it's basically a book for like daily activities. So though there's prayers, it has prayers. I have that, I have that book. Somebody give me a book. Yeah, prayers for grief, prayers for um having a baby, prayers for washing the dishes, prayers for and that's the kind of stuff, man, I didn't have. Yeah. Specific, this prayer has been written for your daily prayer life. Yeah, and not just your five-minute devotional at the at the top of the day.

SPEAKER_00 1:07:59

Yeah, and it's funny because being a Catholic, they they have a lot of stuff like that. And I didn't know about it growing up. So I remember when I was working at church in Arizona and we had like it was like the announcements, and it was like the blessing of the animals will be this Saturday. And I was like, wait, what? Hold on. We're we're doing who? We're wow, that's and sure enough, like I because they were like, Oh, yeah, you're doing music for it. Wow, yeah, saying the prayer of St. Francis. It was just he preached to animals. That's crazy.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:30

Well, we'll definitely put all those resources in the description. Letio 365, um, every moment holy. Yes, and Halo app are great resources that you got devotionals on and songs on. We got do one with the choir room.

SPEAKER_00 1:08:45

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:08:45

Um, called Jesus Mind Deliverer for the season we're in. Um, we got do one with Lauren Daig let Lauren Daigle recently as well. So it feels like there's a lot of bridge building happening, and you're a big part of that, Matt. Oh, thank you. You are building a very firm bridge between Protestants who don't know anything about Catholicism, and you're presenting it in a way that doesn't seem foreign to us or alien. So thank you. Matt, I could do this for literally days. I have so many more questions, you just have to come back.

SPEAKER_00 1:09:18

Well, and and I mean, I'm I'm a songwriter and I'm an artist, and I and I I don't I like talking about this because I because you're my friend and I love you. Um there's a lot of really smarter people that I'm sure you guys can have on your podcast too who could do a much better job talking about it.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:34

But I think there's something valuable about friends. Yeah, there's a trust and uh familiarity that makes this fun and educational and spiritual all at the same time.

SPEAKER_02 1:09:42

And also there are three Catholic mascots. There's you, there's Steph Schleeder, and there's now Jonathan Rooney.

SPEAKER_01 1:09:49

Jonathan Jesus is a Catholic, he's in there, man. Hopefully, hopefully we get to have him on. But I think uh it's interesting that most of the Christian world is looking to a Catholic actor for their image of Jesus in a show. I think that's very interesting. And I think a lot of people are waking up to the Catholic faith because of his his walk with the Lord and his acting, and I think that's beautiful.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:16

Yeah, I think he's doing a really incredible job, and having gotten to spend kind of time around him, he seems to have a really good head on his shoulders and sort of in in terms of being very aware of how inadequate he is for the role, yeah, but taking the role with a heavy amount of responsibility of like willing to show up to do to do it.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:41

Yeah. And he's a drummer. He came to the choir room, played drums at the choir room.

SPEAKER_00 1:10:45

He can play.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:45

It was crazy.

SPEAKER_01 1:10:46

He played, he played Jesus is just all right. I don't know if that was a good idea, but he sounded great.

SPEAKER_02 1:10:52

He's incredible. Um I have one last question. Yeah, what do we think of the Pope from Chicago?

SPEAKER_00 1:10:58

Um, so I what I would say is um I think I think God has definitely appointed him for such a time as this. And uh I he uh I met him with my family uh last August, I believe. Crazy met the Pope, maybe. Yeah, pretty pretty wild. Crazy. Yeah. In Rome? Yeah, in Rome. There was a group of artists, we were there for an event, and my family and I got to meet, but he was incredibly gracious, and I've been around enough of them now to understand how there's something about that calling, specific, and any leader will tell you this, right? Like uh but but I think specifically about the role of Peter, that there's there's something in there's an anointing in accepting that role that it changes you, right? And the thing that I got though, being around him is a deep sense of um understanding that God called him to this role at this time, and so there was a real peace about it, and he's a just seems like a great guy. Like uh I love the fact that he's like one-handed and catching baseballs and people are chucking pizzas or like whatever, and he just seems so unfazed by it. But I've already just really appreciated um his pastoral sensibility.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:33

We can't have Matt Mar here without having some songs.

SPEAKER_02 1:12:37

Got to.

SPEAKER_01 1:12:37

So uh one song we got to write together called Leave It on the Higher Ground. Yes. And you you drove up today and you said we should do this song, which you've never done, no one's ever recorded, it's not out anywhere. Nope. But I I think it's so appropriate to this conversation because it talks about how we can lay our weapons down and all the fighting has ceased, not because everyone agrees on everything, but because the higher ground of Calvary is where the war has been won. Yes. And I think about all the conflict in the world right now. I think about what's going on in the Middle East, I think about what's going on downtown Memphis, I think about what's going on in everywhere where so much fighting and conflict seems to be the headline.

SPEAKER_05 1:13:19

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:20

I'm glad we got to do this song together that says we can actually lay our weapons down at the foot of the cross. Not because we're weak and because um there is no war to fight, but because Jesus is strong and he has already won the war.

SPEAKER_00 1:13:32

Yeah, it's there's an old term, Christus Victor. Yeah. Which I think is appropriate in the sense that it's if there's a banner that we hold up, it is the banner's Jesus. Awesome, awesome.

SPEAKER_01 1:13:44

And then we got to do When the Saints Go Marching In. Which is so fun for a Protestant and a Catholic to sing together that we both will be marching into heaven as saints of God at that time. So you can check out those songs, leave it on the high ground, when the saints go marching in, featuring my friend, my brother, Matt Maher. Thank you for being here. Thanks for having me. Honored, honored to learn from you, and thank you for all the decades of music and ministry you've given to the world. Not just church, but the world. And uh, we're looking forward to more things. I can't tell everything you're doing, but I know you got more things going on. Check out Matt Maher's website, all his Instagram stuff. Make sure you like and subscribe to Growing Up Church Kids. We have more friends coming. Make sure you check out uh the songs I got to do with him. I think you really enjoy it. And um, you know, we do this at on some of our podcasts, and we end by saying um, God is good all the time. And all the time. God is good. I don't know if y'all do that in Catholic church. I'm gonna invite you into our liturgy today. Yeah, I like this. We say God is good all the time. And all the time. God is good. Awesome. We love y'all. God bless you.