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Jeff Keuss on What Young Adults Want from Church · Future Christian

• 0:07
  >> Loren: Welcome to the Future Christian podcast, your
• 0:10
  source for insights and ideas on how to lead your church in the
• 0:13
  21st century. At the Future Christian
• 0:16
  podcast, we talk to pastors,
• 0:18
  authors, and other faith leaders for helpful advice and
• 0:21
  practical wisdom to help you and your community of
• 0:24
  faith walk boldly into the future.
• 0:27
  Whether you're a pastor, church leader, or a
• 0:30
  passionate member of your faith community, this podcast
• 0:33
  is designed to challenge, inspire, and
• 0:35
  equip you with the tools you need for impactful
• 0:38
  ministry. And now for a little bit about the guest for
• 0:41
  this episode.
• 0:43
  >> Martha: Welcome to the Future Christian podcast. Today,
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  Loren Richmond Junior is in conversation
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  with Doctor Jeffrey Keuss
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  Jeff is an author, a professor of
• 0:54
  christian ministry, theology and culture,
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  and the director of the University Scholars
• 1:00
  program at Seattle Pacific University.
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  In addition to his work at SPU,
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  he is a visiting professor of practical
• 1:09
  theology at Fuller Theological
• 1:12
  Seminary Northwest and a regular
• 1:14
  contributor to the kindlings Muse
• 1:17
  monthly podcast on theology and
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  culture. His books include Defiant
• 1:23
  hope, act of love, and your
• 1:25
  neighbor's hymnal. What popular music teaches us
• 1:28
  about faith, hope, and love.
• 1:32
  A, uh, reminder before we start today's conversation,
• 1:35
  please take a moment to subscribe to the podcast,
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  and resourcing the future of the church continue
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  and reach more people.
• 2:00
  >> Loren: Welcome to the Future Christian podcast. I am Loren Richmond
• 2:03
  Junior, and I'm pleased to be joined today by doctor
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  Jeff Keuss Thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the
• 2:09
  show. Anything else you'd like our listeners to know about you?
• 2:12
  >> Jeff: No. It's great to be with you, Loren, and looking forward to talking about her book
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  and our research.
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  >> Loren: Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Share, if you would, just a little
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  bit about your faith background, what that looked like in the past, and
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  what that looks like today.
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  >> Jeff: Yeah, I, uh, grew up in a
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  very moral, very, um,
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  ethical household, but it wasn't a christian household. My
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  parents were, uh,
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  early sixties college dropouts who happened to
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  move to Hawaii to live on the beach.
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  Then, um, I was born in
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  Hawaii, lived, uh, in pearl City outside of Honolulu,
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  uh, moved to Guam for a time when my parents, uh, started
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  serving as some schools in the south end of, uh,
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  Guam. And, um,
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  I grew, uh, up really questioning a lot
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  of things. I was a kid who was very curious, had
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  parents who were very interested in politics
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  and in community building and in
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  right and wrong. Um, ended up going to
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  church when I was young with a next door neighbor.
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  Um, went and started participating
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  in Sunday school learning stories,
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  um, but then eventually, um, you know, just kind of
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  wandered into academics in high school, became kind of a
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  nerd, did, uh, a lot of my ap
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  classes, started reading the idi ching,
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  started reading Carl Sagan, started reading, uh,
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  buddhist texts, started reading Aristotle is kind of
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  a kind of these nerdy high school kids, uh, very
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  involved in athletics as well. So team sports was a
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  big part of my life. Uh, but then it was in my
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  sophomore year in high school that I got involved in the ministry of young
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  life, uh, outreach, evangelical ministry, uh, that
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  I became part of and had this radical encounter
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  with not just the idea of Jesus
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  Christ, but the person of Jesus Christ. And
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  saw the lived example of people
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  who were thoughtful, intelligent,
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  engaged, um, who were also followers of
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  Jesus. And it didn't square because I kind of thought Christianity
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  was for people who just didn't think, um,
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  had this arrogant idea that Christianity was people
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  who basically shut their minds off and were just kind of following
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  things. Um, and that wasn't the story of the people I
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  met. And so all the stereotypes kind of get thrown out the
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  window. Um, you know, I went to the high school
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  that Jimi Hendrix went to high school with Bruce Lee, went to my high
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  school, Quincy Jones went to my high school,
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  big inner city, predominately black high school.
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  Um, so I was formed by, you know,
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  by Jimi Hendrix as much as anything else. And I
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  had young life leaders who weren't scared of music, weren't scared of movies, weren't
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  scared of big ideas, weren't scared of big books.
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  Um, and they deeply loved each other.
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  And that transformative experience of being
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  around thoughtful, intelligent, civil
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  people who cared deeply about each other changed my
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  life. Uh, so I became a Christian my
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  junior in high school, and changed the trajectory of my life.
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  And so, um, just to kind of fast
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  forward, um, I am an ordained, uh,
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  Presbyterian minister. I've served a number of churches
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  both in Europe, predominantly in Scotland, and the church
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  of Scotland, uh, but then also here in the United States. I was a church
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  planner at one point in the early nineties. Um, also served
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  in big cathedrals. Um, but
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  I'm also an academic, I'm a theologian. Uh,
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  I did my academic training, um,
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  at Fuller theological seminary. I got my m m div
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  there. Um, later I was at Harvard.
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  Did my, um, degree in industrial organizational
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  psychology at Harvard, um, and also did my
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  PhD in theology and the
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  arts at University of Glasgow in Scotland, uh, where
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  I served on the faculty of divinity there for almost
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  six years, teaching in
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  practical theology as well as ethics. Um, I'm
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  now, um, a theologian at Seattle Pacific University in
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  Seattle, um, which is a Methodist
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  university, um, more broadly economical.
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  Um, and, uh, have been teaching
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  students in undergraduate and graduate programs, both in
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  the school of theology as well as in, um, industrial
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  organizational psychology for quite a while. So I kind of bridge
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  a number of disciplines. I teach and do research in the
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  arts, founding literature, kind of
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  how ideas, um, come out in fiction.
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  Um, I did my PhD, actually, on the victorian novelist George
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  Eliot and kind of the early 19th century views of
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  Christianity in the arts. Um, and I've continued that work,
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  doing a lot of work in research on the arts as
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  well, do a lot of work on organizational structures and
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  leadership development over in the IO psychology
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  department. Um, and I'm also somebody who's
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  very, very passionate about religion. Across the disciplines. I
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  teach a lot of classes that kind of connect disciplinary
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  liberal arts ideas around the, uh, person of
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  Christ. Uh, and some of the book and the research that
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  I do in the book that we'll be talking about today,
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  um, is framed by a ten year longitudinal
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  grant, uh, that I received from the Lilly endowment and
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  the, uh, principal investigator of the PI for this big
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  grant where we're studying young adults
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  asking 22 to 29 year olds, what are they
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  interested in? Where do they want to,
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  um, have conversations of meaning and depth? And in some ways,
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  it's kind of reflection of what I talked about on my own faith
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  journey. Um, I want to know. We're
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  thinking thoughtful, engaged people
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  who are not scared of really, really hard questions.
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  Um, I like to say the kinds of questions we don't talk about around the
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  Thanksgiving table because Uncle Bob will get mad or aunt
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  Jenny will walk away in a fuming rage. So
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  we keep those conversations tamped down. Uh,
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  but if you're 25 years old, you don't want to keep those questions tamped down.
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  You want to have actual real conversations. And not just,
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  uh, behind the house or in the kitchen, where it's safe to have those
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  conversations, but you want to have them at the table,
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  uh, which means that they want churches to have real
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  conversations about real things, um,
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  and not just overly abstract, um, ideas,
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  but actually have them very gritty, very grounded and very
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  meaningful. Um, so the first five and a
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  half years of this grant work, I spent a lot of time,
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  um, in taverns, in pubs, in crossfit gyms
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  and zumba classes, at climbing groups,
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  in places of work, um, sitting in
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  basements, sitting in people's apartments with yeti
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  coolers filled with white claw, with a bunch of young adults, you
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  know, just chopping it up. You know, it's like hey, what are you looking
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  for? What is meaning? What is that? What happens to
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  you? One of the first questions we've asked for
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  five years. I mean, it's a long time to be asking
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  the same question, but the first question we always started with is,
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  what is faithfulness to you? What m does it
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  mean to be faithful? Um, and
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  we asked that question repeatedly of church leaders. We asked that
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  question repeatedly of young adults. Um, and
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  what we found is the question of faithfulness is a really great
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  place to start. What are you faithful to, and why are you
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  faithful to? It's a very augustinian question. You know, we are
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  what we love, um, and what we give our hearts to love.
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  We get changed and formed by that thing.
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  Um, so we need to be very picky about the things that
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  we love and allow to love us as human beings.
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  We're more malleable than I think we realize. Uh, we
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  get. We get framed by the things and the ideas that
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  we give ourselves to. And so faithfulness is a very real
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  question, um, and the fear for many young adults, and we can get
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  into this more deeply as we get into some of the questions in the book.
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  Um, is how churches
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  want to distract us from the things that may sometimes form
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  us to be closer to Christ. Um, and
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  so, um, this is one of the things we found in
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  the book, and one of the things that we really hope to get out to
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  church leaders, get out to young adults, get out to places of work,
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  even, um, because this became a really big conversation
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  point that a lot of young adults are framed as much by their work as anything
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  else. Um, so we need to take seriously what people do in their
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  work and learn how to talk about it. Um,
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  and that's a little bit about my faith journey and kind of led us up to this book, but
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  I'm happy to get a little deeper in that. I know that was a little
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  bit of a long road, um, but that's what you get when you
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  interview a guy who's old.
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  >> Loren: Well, let's just jump right in, then, because you've kind
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  of introduced the background of the book that, if
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  I'm understanding correctly, having a background
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  in the Lilly grant, the long study. So
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  what else do you want to say? Just about the book, broadly speaking, to
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  introduce it?
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  >> Jeff: Yeah, just to give you a little more
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  background about the project. Um, in 2016,
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  the Lilly Endowment, um, uh, which is a
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  massive, massive, um, endowment, uh, formed by
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  the Lilly Lilly family years ago. It's not Eli
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  Lilly, but it's family members who have started a
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  foundation after that, um,
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  they, uh, brought together twelve
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  researchers, and I was one of the twelve. And we had a meeting
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  in 2016, and they said, look, we're looking at the
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  us census data. Um, and we found
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  that outside of baby
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  boomers, which is the largest demographic, age wise, in the
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  country, the next largest group
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  that's moving through are 22 to 29 year olds.
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  Okay, so this is back in 2016. So that's changed a little bit because
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  of time, but this is the largest
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  demographic in the United States, and they are the
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  least likely demographic to be in a mosque, to be in a
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  temple, to be in a synagogue, or to be in a church. So,
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  you know, just from a data point, that regression line
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  is incredibly startling when you have the
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  largest population, who is least likely
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  to be inside a building to
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  participate in faith practices. And this is
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  across religious traditions. This isn't, uh, merely just within
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  Christianity and the big tent of Christianity, but this is, you
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  know, all religious traditions. And
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  there's. And so their. So their question to us was,
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  why is that? You know, what. What's going on? And there's
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  some. You have some instincts, usually, that you think about with
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  that, but they said, let's. We want to get some granular
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  data on that. So it didn't become a million
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  dollar question. It became a $55 million question
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  for Lilly. Um, because they. We only had five years
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  at first, but then we came back after five years. All the research
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  centers across the country said, look, we need more time.
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  Uh, this is a massive, massive study, and
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  we're just beginning to scratch it. So we're in the
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  second tiers, phase two of this project
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  right now. Um, so I hired a number
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  of researchers, uh, PhD students in IO
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  psychology, to start modeling surveys. And you'll see some of
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  the survey data in the book, um, as well as
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  theologians, um, and myself, to kind of manage
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  the project work. And we just got on the road. Now my.
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  Now my part of the project, which you'll see in the book, is focused
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  primarily on the Pacific Northwest. So the I five
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  corridor. So this is north to Canada, down through
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  Washington state and Oregon, and then east over into
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  Idaho. So our churches and our
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  conversation partners primarily are in that three state region
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  over the Pacific Northwest. But you'll see in the
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  book that we compare our findings both
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  quantitative and qualitatively, with national
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  data from our other partners. So we found that
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  the trends that we're seeing are largely similar to
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  what you're seeing across the country or what our findings are.
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  So, um, that's a little bit about the project.
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  >> Loren: Yeah. So I think what's interesting there, obviously
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  being in the Pacific Northwest,
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  if the rumors or the stereotype,
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  excuse me, hold true, right.
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  >> Jeff: You could rumor stereotypes can be the same thing,
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  right?
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  >> Loren: Pacific Northwest is in many ways, like, you could think
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  like five, uh, ten years advance, right, of
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  where the general culture
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  is going. Is that fair?
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  >> Jeff: Yeah. There's a couple things that are, you know, every region of
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  the United States has its own unique character, right? That's what makes it
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  such an interesting, diverse experiment as a country.
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  Um, and the Pacific Northwest is interesting for a number of
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  things, both theologically as well as economic and socially.
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  Theologically, the, uh, Pacific Northwest has
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  no major church denomination
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  headquarters based here. Uh, we are,
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  we are kind of a frontier area, right? So if you
• 14:00
  are presbyterian, if you're Lutheran, if you're Catholic, if you're
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  Baptist, um, people have come from another
• 14:06
  place and set up churches here, right?
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  Um, but the other thing about this region theologically is there's no
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  one dominant, like majorly
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  dominant christian tradition, right? So if you're
• 14:17
  in Minnesota, you're either Lutheran or not Lutheran, right.
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  If you are in parts of Texas, you're either Southern Baptist or
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  not southern Baptist, right? You have this dominant sense
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  of christian identity in certain parts of the country, and m you
• 14:29
  come out and you start slicing up the pie of kind of like,
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  how many Presbyterians are there? How many non denominational
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  evangelicals are there, how many Baptists there are out here?
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  Each pie slice is so thin compared
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  to everything else that nobody has a dominant voice.
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  I mean, like Washington state, for example, probably
• 14:48
  has the biggest dominant voice, with about 21% of the
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  population of Washington who say they're Christian would be Roman
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  Catholic, right? So protestant traditions
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  are just small slices, for example,
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  along the way. So what that means is there's not like
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  one big dominant voice telling you what christians are or
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  aren't. When you walk into Google,
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  when you walk into Amazon, when you walk into Boeing, walk into
• 15:11
  comcast, when you walk into Costco, know
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  these, these big, huge, you know, employers,
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  Microsoft, that are all out here, big tech places,
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  big money. Um, there's not a picture, really, of
• 15:23
  what a Christian is that's bubbling up from the sidewalk,
• 15:25
  right? You're not having a bunch of people saying, this is what the Bible
• 15:28
  is, this is what the Bible isn't. There is that, but it's coming through
• 15:31
  other means. Um, so it's coming through, it's coming through
• 15:34
  generalized podcasts like this one. It's coming through
• 15:37
  literature, it's not coming through congregational life and
• 15:40
  formation economically. The other thing about the civic
• 15:43
  northwest is that also helps push on
• 15:45
  this, um, theological question is we're an economic
• 15:48
  bubble. We have been all the way for the past
• 15:51
  30 years with the tech boom that came up through in
• 15:54
  the nineties, with the way that in the early
• 15:57
  aughts, we had this explosion of growth in various tech
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  industries. The Pacific rim has brought in a lot of
• 16:03
  money, as well as a port city, um,
• 16:06
  where a lot of the country after 2008 went through these
• 16:08
  biggest dips and drives. As far as the housing
• 16:11
  crisis. Um, all of that
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  stuff didn't affect as nearly as harsh
• 16:17
  as it did into parts, other parts of the
• 16:20
  country. The Pacific Northwest has had this expansion
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  in growth for the past, particularly 20 years, where it's been
• 16:25
  fairly safe economically to be here. And that's created a
• 16:28
  very weird kind of economic picture to the
• 16:31
  place as well. Um, so that in itself has
• 16:34
  also been a challenge.
• 16:35
  >> Loren: Yeah.
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  >> Jeff: And lastly, I'll just say the region that also
• 16:39
  shifts. This is a lot of the country talks
• 16:42
  about the Pacific Northwest as this unchurched area, like the great
• 16:45
  unchurched Pacific Northwest. We have the least amount of churches per
• 16:48
  capita in Seattle, for example, um, in anywhere in the
• 16:51
  country. Now that is true,
• 16:54
  um, in the sense of actual buildings, um,
• 16:57
  and spaces for worship. But if you start pulling data
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  as far as, do you believe in goddess? Um, are you a follower of
• 17:03
  Jesus Christ? Do you pray?
• 17:05
  Um, we actually have a very, very high
• 17:08
  engagement with religion, and
• 17:11
  particularly evangelicalism. Non denominationalism
• 17:14
  is a really big story out here. Um, you'll
• 17:17
  see a chapter in the book where we talk about the growth
• 17:20
  and the after effects of Mars Hill church, which many people in
• 17:23
  evangelical circles have heard of. Um,
• 17:26
  so we have kind of a frontier way that people come out
• 17:28
  here, they, they build a website, there
• 17:31
  are church planners, um, and, um, they're
• 17:34
  not attached to any real theological traditions.
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  So there's a lot of those stories that are out here too, that kind of
• 17:40
  make that a very active and very vibrant
• 17:43
  place for christians to talk and believe,
• 17:46
  but not really grounded in particular religious practices
• 17:49
  like spiritual disciplines that would come through being a Lutheran being
• 17:51
  catechized, or Roman Catholic being catechized.
• 17:54
  Um, it's a lot more the wild west out here as far as how people
• 17:57
  form their christianity.
• 17:59
  >> Loren: Yeah. And I think that was one of the interesting things that you
• 18:02
  present in the book here that I wanted to talk about.
• 18:06
  The common thinking is that
• 18:10
  these young adults aren't interested in
• 18:12
  religion and you're wanting to change that
• 18:15
  narrative.
• 18:16
  >> Jeff: Mhm. Yeah. One of the things that we found in
• 18:19
  our studies that I think just shocked pastors. When we talk to
• 18:22
  pastors and priests and we bring our research out and we say, hey, we'd
• 18:25
  like to tell you something that you may not understand
• 18:27
  is that young adults do not want to shut down
• 18:30
  churches. Um, so by and large,
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  in our data, you know, there's this picture, I think, from inside of
• 18:36
  churches, particularly in more evangelical
• 18:39
  churches, that, well, it's a culture war out there, you know,
• 18:42
  2026 year olds, they don't want to go to church. They want churches
• 18:45
  shut down. They want to turn our church into a
• 18:47
  skating rink, or they want to turn it into
• 18:50
  just a big rave club or something. All these kind of weird
• 18:53
  thoughts that they have about they don't want us to even
• 18:56
  be around. And that's just not true.
• 19:00
  We asked a broad swath,
• 19:03
  thousands of young adults, both in the region and outside
• 19:06
  the region, we asked questions about, what do you think about
• 19:09
  churches? Do you want them to exist? You want them shut down and
• 19:11
  repurpose that money to help the poor? What are your
• 19:14
  thoughts on this? And they were like, oh, no, no, churches need to be
• 19:17
  there. Churches are agents of social change. Um,
• 19:20
  churches are places that people can go for food
• 19:23
  banks, um, and these are people who
• 19:25
  are conservative as well as progressive,
• 19:28
  um, who want churches to exist. They've
• 19:31
  seen the change that it's had in their parents. They may not
• 19:34
  agree with where their parents are. They may have very different
• 19:37
  theological views of their parents, but they saw that this is something their
• 19:40
  parents love, their grandparents love.
• 19:43
  Um, so young adults are not broadly.
• 19:46
  I mean, you're going to get things on the either end of a bell curve in any
• 19:48
  research. Um, so you certainly have ones on one end of the bell curve.
• 19:51
  It's like, oh, yeah, churches are these repressive places, and
• 19:54
  I don't want to go there. Well, these are just more reactionary
• 19:57
  statements, but the broad
• 20:00
  number of young adults, 22 to 29 year old,
• 20:03
  think churches need to exist. Um, they're vitally
• 20:06
  important to the social fabric of our country.
• 20:09
  They're part of what. And this was like such a
• 20:11
  shock to some pastors when we were starting to roll our research out that they
• 20:14
  didn't even know what to do with that because they'd been preaching a
• 20:17
  narrative from the pulpit that
• 20:20
  the people outside this door are against us.
• 20:23
  And they. And it's like, no, no, no, no, they're not against you
• 20:26
  at all. They actually would love to come and be part of
• 20:29
  what's happening here. But the on ramp question which
• 20:32
  is in the book we talk about on ramps and off ramps. Yeah, let's, uh,
• 20:35
  maybe different than you think it is. Yeah.
• 20:37
  >> Loren: Right. Well, I think that's so interesting because
• 20:40
  I think whether, like you said, in evangelical circles, there's this
• 20:43
  idea that like, young adults
• 20:46
  are antagonistic churches. Like for me
• 20:49
  in a mainline context, I feel like I see it the other way where it's
• 20:52
  like, oh, young adults think church is irrelevant,
• 20:55
  doesn't matter. So why are we doing this?
• 20:57
  >> Jeff: Right.
• 20:57
  >> Loren: Um, one thing I wanted to talk about, though,
• 21:00
  to jump from that, is you talk about this
• 21:03
  belong, believe, behave
• 21:07
  trifecta. And I see that most often
• 21:10
  in at least the belong, believe kind of
• 21:12
  emphasis in evangelical spaces. And I'm curious
• 21:15
  if you can talk more about what that is, what that means and
• 21:18
  what that looks like in churches.
• 21:20
  >> Jeff: Yeah, yeah. There's, there's kind of a
• 21:23
  message that I think some young adults get, um, about
• 21:26
  what church life is. What does it mean to belong to a faith community?
• 21:28
  What does it mean to settle into a community where you're
• 21:31
  participating? And like, so one of the questions that
• 21:34
  we asked a, um, lot of young adults is what does it mean to be
• 21:37
  part of a church? Like, so we were interviewing church leaders,
• 21:40
  you know, and also young adults, you know, what does it mean? How do you know that you're
• 21:43
  part of the church? And one of the things
• 21:46
  that came up a lot was, well, they keep asking us to
• 21:49
  join membership classes, right? So there's this
• 21:51
  membership thing that happens, right? So it's like in order for
• 21:54
  us to be part of the church, we should go to a membership class.
• 21:57
  And, um, different churches have different ways of doing this.
• 22:00
  There's catechesis models in different churches, more
• 22:03
  liturgical churches have different kind of on ramps
• 22:06
  to get part of the church. Um,
• 22:09
  but even in evangelical churches, they've shortened the
• 22:12
  timeframe, say, hey, come to this weekend thing and then you can become a
• 22:14
  member. Right?
• 22:15
  >> Loren: Mhm.
• 22:16
  >> Jeff: But when we talk to young adults about what is membership already?
• 22:19
  Yeah. Yes. We talk to young adults about membership,
• 22:22
  we say, well, what does that mean to you? And they say, well, I don't really
• 22:25
  understand it because I'm a member of Costco. So I have
• 22:27
  a, I'm a Costco member and
• 22:31
  yeah, I belong, my crossfit gym, I belong to
• 22:34
  my, you know, I belong to Sam's club or something like that.
• 22:37
  And I know what I get from it. I know what it costs me. And uh, that makes
• 22:40
  sense. I don't understand what church membership means. I mean, so,
• 22:42
  yeah, yeah, so what is what is that? Right? So they don't have this
• 22:45
  picture of what it's supposed to be. So then we asked
• 22:48
  the, we changed the question. So do you feel like you
• 22:51
  belong to the church?
• 22:52
  >> Loren: Mhm.
• 22:53
  >> Jeff: Do you feel like you're part of it? I said, oh,
• 22:55
  well, that's different. Right? So we had one,
• 22:58
  one church, and you'll see this in the book. This
• 23:01
  one, this one young adult said, yeah, you know, so how did you know?
• 23:04
  What did you know you belonged? He goes, well, I was, I was
• 23:07
  going through my slack channel and I saw I got
• 23:10
  added to the Slack channel, uh, for the young adults group to
• 23:13
  help with, um, help with coffee. My name popped
• 23:16
  up, so I got added. And it was that moment I realized, wow, I'm
• 23:19
  part of this thing because I got added to the Slack channel.
• 23:22
  Now, all the things I just said there,
• 23:25
  like I would talk to a 45 year old pastor and they go, what
• 23:28
  is slack?
• 23:29
  >> Loren: Right?
• 23:30
  >> Jeff: What is that? Right. What are you talking about? Right. And
• 23:33
  so these markers, um,
• 23:36
  of kind of what, some of the ways that young adults in their places
• 23:39
  of work, their places of community, how they
• 23:42
  know they belong when they see their name pop up on a certain app, that
• 23:44
  they know that now part m of a list of things, they're on a text
• 23:47
  stream, they've now been grouped to the texture of people. That's a
• 23:50
  trigger. That's like, wow, I'm now part of this. Right?
• 23:53
  So belonging is a very different
• 23:56
  question for young adults and membership, right? So I'm trying to shift
• 23:59
  the narrative around that. And even as I bring that up,
• 24:02
  I get churches really nervous about this, because the other thing about
• 24:05
  membership that young adults hear is, why do I have to be exclusively
• 24:08
  part of that as opposed to this? So
• 24:11
  when I join a church, when I'm part of a church community, why do I
• 24:14
  have to be exclusively part of XYZ Methodist
• 24:16
  church? Why can't I just be part of a lot of churches?
• 24:19
  I mean, I'm participating in this church, but sometimes I like to go to
• 24:22
  their once a week tase service they
• 24:25
  host. Right? Can I go to that too? And there's this
• 24:28
  weird exclusivity that local congregations
• 24:31
  continue to perpetuate that they need to be the one stop shopping
• 24:34
  for everything, right? And, um,
• 24:37
  so there's a sense of, like, almost a sense of
• 24:39
  adultery that you like, if I'm part
• 24:42
  of other things and I'm cheating on my church or something like that,
• 24:45
  right? There's like this guilt if I take like, my kid
• 24:48
  to this youth group as opposed to this youth group,
• 24:51
  right? And so I've even asked churches this question. I said,
• 24:54
  well, why do you need to even have a youth group? There's a perfectly
• 24:56
  good youth group that's theologically aligned with you, that's one
• 24:59
  block away. And they've got it, they've got their funding it, they've
• 25:02
  got a youth pastor who's crushing it right now.
• 25:05
  He's loving on these kids. Send your kids down
• 25:08
  there. Stop trying to scrape together something there, because you only have
• 25:11
  three families anyway. Um, why don't you start putting focus
• 25:14
  in areas that you really. I think God is shaping you as a
• 25:16
  church, and there's a sense of failure and shame in
• 25:19
  churches if they don't become the one stop shopping for everything.
• 25:22
  And, uh, the metaphor I use in the book is, I said, you know, the death of
• 25:25
  shopping malls in America, right? We are a
• 25:28
  very different country now or a very different
• 25:30
  time in the 21st century, as opposed to
• 25:33
  everybody gathers in one place to do all their shopping in one
• 25:36
  location. I can show you shopping mall after shopping mall
• 25:39
  after shopping mall. That is failing in
• 25:42
  America because it's not how people think and
• 25:44
  live anymore, and nor do they kind of view churches the same
• 25:47
  way. A church does not have to be everything for
• 25:50
  you. It can be a grounding place for you. And for
• 25:53
  22 to 29 year olds, there's a lot that a local church
• 25:56
  should provide and they want to be part of it, but there's
• 25:59
  nothing wrong with them listening to a good podcast like this
• 26:02
  one, reading a book that's being somebody else, going
• 26:05
  to other churches to meet other needs that are funding their
• 26:08
  spiritual life. And this is something that's just
• 26:11
  really hard, I think for a lot of pastors who have been
• 26:13
  trained to be attractional churches, meaning we need
• 26:16
  to build our numbers in this one location as
• 26:19
  opposed to spreading the gospel and participating in larger
• 26:22
  network.
• 26:24
  >> Loren: Yeah, I got that. This reminds me
• 26:27
  of a conversation I had with Scott Thoma. Uh, I don't know if you're familiar with his
• 26:30
  work. You know, talked about this, this model going
• 26:33
  forward of young adults using, utilizing
• 26:35
  different various methods or, you know,
• 26:38
  avenues, I guess, to. Yeah, to connect
• 26:41
  spiritually. I'm also thinking like,
• 26:45
  again, if I'm understanding this model
• 26:48
  you're highlighting, it's really like backwards
• 26:50
  of the traditional church model, which has
• 26:53
  been behave, I think,
• 26:56
  believe belong. When you join in
• 26:58
  membership, then once you join, you
• 27:01
  demonstrate that you believe the right things, and then when you've done
• 27:04
  those two things, then you'll belong, right?
• 27:06
  >> Jeff: Yep. Yep. And certainly I mean, and this is,
• 27:10
  if you go. If you go back to the patristics, right. You go back to
• 27:13
  first century, second century churches.
• 27:15
  Um, and people love to have this romance with, oh, the first century
• 27:18
  church did this, this and this. Right. That's romantic picture of what it
• 27:21
  was like. It was as crazy and
• 27:24
  as diverse as it is today, it's not
• 27:27
  terribly different. M there are a lot of different house churches. Oikos
• 27:30
  in the Greek.
• 27:30
  >> Loren: Right.
• 27:30
  >> Jeff: These church. These church collectives. And they all had very different on
• 27:33
  ramps and off ramps than we think they do. Right. They wasn't as
• 27:36
  unified as we may think. But one, the two things are
• 27:39
  really particular about the early church, if you want to model it. Number
• 27:42
  one, membership took a long time.
• 27:45
  Right. Three to four years. Right. To become a member. And
• 27:48
  part of it was, they weren't proselytizing in the way that we
• 27:51
  did today. They would tell the story of the resurrected
• 27:54
  Jesus, the power to heal, the power
• 27:56
  to be part of your life. I mean, this kind of outpouring the Holy Spirit that we
• 27:59
  experience in acts. But what they also knew is that to be
• 28:02
  part of this community was probably a death sentence for you.
• 28:06
  The closer you aligned yourself to a church, the more likely
• 28:09
  the vampire was going to kill you. So
• 28:11
  you're not trying to get people a death sentence. You want to
• 28:14
  say, okay, you really serious about this? Is this really something
• 28:17
  you want? So it wasn't like, hey, stay away, we
• 28:20
  don't want to be here. But it's like, do you seriously, deeply
• 28:23
  understand what it means to be part of this community,
• 28:26
  to have this part of your life, to be part of your family?
• 28:29
  Um, so it took a while for people to
• 28:32
  experience kind of this understand, of full inclusion. Right. It
• 28:35
  was a long spectrum. Much, um, more
• 28:37
  Emmaus road than Damascus road. Right.
• 28:40
  I think a lot of churches want you to have a Damascus road. Hey, I've got
• 28:43
  it now. It's the flash of lightning. I'm in,
• 28:46
  right. And it's much more Emmaus road,
• 28:49
  and it is for young adults today. There are Mayos road people, not
• 28:52
  Damascus road people. They want long, winding roads of
• 28:55
  conversations, and they're going to be shocked as
• 28:57
  anybody that they showed up in the congregation. I mean, it'll just
• 29:00
  happen over time. Uh, so, yeah,
• 29:03
  so early churches, you know, it took a long time to do that because of
• 29:06
  the cultural impact that's there. But secondly, and I think
• 29:09
  this is even more important, the goal was
• 29:12
  not to be part of the church. The goal was to
• 29:15
  proclaim the gospel of Jesus Christ.
• 29:18
  That was the goal. Churches were training
• 29:20
  areas to get you out into the world, to proclaim
• 29:23
  the gospel, right? And so membership
• 29:26
  was not so much about how do we get you in? It's how do we
• 29:29
  send you out, right? How do we prepare you to go
• 29:32
  to work? How do we prepare you to be a father or mother to your
• 29:35
  children? How do we prepare you to
• 29:38
  be a soldier after the third
• 29:40
  century, when Christianity became involved with the
• 29:43
  state, after Constantine. So it was more about
• 29:46
  the tools to go out into the world. It was never
• 29:49
  about how do we brand you as
• 29:51
  XYZ church member. It was more about how do we
• 29:54
  send you out into this thing? And so as sending stations, which
• 29:57
  we have an entire chapter on that. Young adults
• 30:00
  get that idea that churches are resource
• 30:03
  centers to send you out into the world. And when
• 30:06
  churches prepare you for, what does it mean to go work at Google? What does
• 30:08
  it mean for you to have five different gig jobs, which are
• 30:11
  exhausting you, but that's how you're making your world work.
• 30:14
  Um, how do we talk to you about what it means to be
• 30:17
  single in this time of life? How do we help you find
• 30:20
  funding? Right? I mean, I tell churches all the
• 30:23
  time, if you want to attract. If you want just an instant influx of young
• 30:25
  adults, change your greeter board outside and say, we
• 30:28
  will help you get jobs.
• 30:31
  You have a lot of.
• 30:32
  >> Loren: I'm going to that church. I'm going to the church now.
• 30:35
  >> Jeff: I mean, churches. Churches are. I mean, here's the thing that young
• 30:38
  adults tell us all the time, that churches are one of the few places in their
• 30:41
  life where they have multi generational relationships, right?
• 30:44
  Because the nature of the world outside of it
• 30:46
  is so segmented by age that when they go to a
• 30:49
  church, they can actually have a relationship with an 80 year old and a five year old.
• 30:52
  Right? It's an amazing
• 30:56
  microcosm of the fullness of humanity. People loving each other
• 30:59
  across denominations, hopefully a very diverse
• 31:01
  group. Um, but they also are people who
• 31:04
  hold unbelievable wisdom.
• 31:07
  So young adults really want mentorship on a lot of things
• 31:10
  in their life. And so if they opened up
• 31:13
  their phone and started kind of getting their contact list to help
• 31:16
  people make connections, you know, I want to start my career. I
• 31:19
  want to kind of do these things. And they were more open about that
• 31:21
  stuff, and they stewarded those resources. Boy, young
• 31:24
  adults would thrive in a place like that. And now I'm getting way ahead
• 31:27
  of myself. But, I mean, these are a lot of things you'll see in churches.
• 31:30
  Yeah, yeah.
• 31:31
  >> Loren: So much good stuff here. Coming to mind. Like, I'm thinking of.
• 31:34
  Obviously, Ryan Burge has done a lot of work talking
• 31:36
  about churches, so, you know, church and social capital.
• 31:39
  >> Jeff: Right.
• 31:40
  >> Loren: Um, I'm thinking also of,
• 31:43
  you know, I'm thinking of your long on ramps, and. Yeah,
• 31:46
  let's get to on ramps here shortly. But I'm thinking, like,
• 31:48
  uh, Priya Parker's talk or her book on
• 31:51
  gathering.
• 31:52
  >> Jeff: Right.
• 31:52
  >> Loren: The art of gathering.
• 31:52
  >> Jeff: Right, right. Yeah, yeah. Great book.
• 31:54
  >> Loren: I think that's one of the things that churches
• 31:57
  don't get, is they want to make those barriers
• 32:00
  lower. And correct me if I'm wrong here,
• 32:03
  like, my sense is, like, when we make the barriers a little higher,
• 32:06
  it's like, oh, this actually matters. This is important.
• 32:09
  >> Jeff: Absolutely.
• 32:10
  >> Loren: Uh, so let's talk about this in the context of on
• 32:13
  ramps and off ramps.
• 32:14
  >> Jeff: Yeah. So, like, one of the things that we found is that we
• 32:17
  asked, you know, what attracts you to a church? You know,
• 32:20
  and what kind of pushes you away from a church? Right. That's what we mean by
• 32:23
  on ramps and off ramps. Right. What are the ways in which you are
• 32:26
  attracted to a community? What is it you desire? So, like,
• 32:29
  the top off ramp that we found in our study was
• 32:31
  that the Christians in a church community really cared
• 32:34
  about each other. So, imagine you walk
• 32:37
  into a Sunday morning, and you're in the
• 32:40
  narthex, or wherever the church is kind of gathering to meet and
• 32:42
  greet people. And what you observe
• 32:46
  are, uh, a bunch of people who are sitting there looking at their phones,
• 32:49
  kind of their backs to each other. They're kind of
• 32:51
  scratching their head, wondering, when's this all going to start? They're kind
• 32:54
  of looking at their watch. Um, as soon as they walk out,
• 32:57
  you overhear the conversations they're having with their kids. Like, the first
• 33:00
  thing that happens once they leave the church is, hey, we got to get you to the select
• 33:03
  basketball game. Have you already started your AP test stuff?
• 33:06
  Have you got that going? Um, hey, I got to get over to Jim's because
• 33:09
  I get my tire changed. All very important stuff. But
• 33:12
  you're totally distracted, and you're not part of what
• 33:15
  this thing is happening right here. What if there was a
• 33:18
  different narrative that you saw when you walked into a church? What if I walked
• 33:20
  into a church and I saw people coming up and
• 33:23
  asking, hey, Cindy, how did that, um, biopsy
• 33:26
  go? What's going on with that? Or, hey,
• 33:29
  Bill, I know you had your second round of interviews for that job. Is
• 33:32
  there anything more going on with that? And m if I'm hearing these whispers and
• 33:35
  conversations that's a very different type of
• 33:38
  caring for one another that they're
• 33:40
  experiencing. Young adults sense,
• 33:43
  like a spidey sense, like a Peter Parker spidey sense,
• 33:46
  you know, if a church actually cares about each other or they don't,
• 33:49
  right. If people are there just to kind of hang out,
• 33:52
  um, be blasted by the music that's in there and
• 33:55
  leave, um, just to check a box that
• 33:58
  I showed up on Sunday and hoping something stuck,
• 34:01
  um, as opposed to, I go there because the people I love are
• 34:04
  here. The, ah, people I care about are here.
• 34:07
  Um, and I want to know more about who they are and what
• 34:10
  they're doing. Um, so that's one of
• 34:13
  the biggest off ramps that we saw. And now that's a
• 34:15
  hard one to kind of like instrumentalize, right.
• 34:18
  It's like, how do you teach people to care about each other?
• 34:21
  Right. Um, so we
• 34:24
  really challenge, and we've done a number of different projects, and we do
• 34:27
  consultancy with churches. Right. We're available to churches to do this kind of
• 34:30
  work. We do design thinking seminars. We do transition
• 34:33
  leadership seminars for them, and we try to get them to think
• 34:36
  through. Okay, what are you actually here for when you're 55 years
• 34:39
  old, what are you here in this church to actually do? What's your purpose for being
• 34:42
  here? And we try to get them to think. It's not just
• 34:44
  merely about information dumping. Like, I need to hear the gospel. I want to
• 34:47
  get Bible teaching. Good stuff. Right. But you also have
• 34:50
  to. Do you care about these people? Right? Are
• 34:53
  these people that, if they're not there tomorrow, would you
• 34:56
  be heartbroken about it? Would you go to their funerals? Would
• 34:59
  you actually be at their kids weddings? Would you be invited to? So
• 35:02
  there's different ways of caring that young adults really see.
• 35:05
  So that's one thing that was a big on ramp for us.
• 35:08
  Another big on ramp was that they actually spoke and cared
• 35:11
  about things that mattered. Meaning that there were questions of
• 35:14
  justice, questions of inequity, um,
• 35:16
  economic issues, these kind of hot button issues
• 35:19
  that populate the other six days of their
• 35:22
  work. Right? I mean, when the country gets
• 35:25
  on fire after the death of joy, truly, George
• 35:27
  Floyd, when there's an absolute death
• 35:30
  spiral in the stock market, that affects whether my gig economy job
• 35:33
  is going to be there tomorrow or not. Um, the fact that
• 35:36
  in major metropolitan cities, this could be in Denver, Seattle,
• 35:39
  Los Angeles, New York, where I can't afford to live anywhere.
• 35:43
  Housing has gotten so out of control that they
• 35:46
  can't live together. They can't find a place to live
• 35:49
  these are very real questions. And who's talking about it?
• 35:53
  This is literally what keeps me up at
• 35:55
  night. Um, and, yeah, I think salvation is
• 35:58
  vitally important. Yeah, I think we need to fight evil
• 36:01
  spiritually, but at the same time, I need to know
• 36:04
  exactly what's going on politically and economically, and
• 36:07
  how is this church involved in those questions.
• 36:09
  And, um, so that's another on ramp. If I hear
• 36:12
  people talking about these, not because. Not in a politically
• 36:15
  polarized way, not in a kind of like, let's go get the
• 36:18
  other side. Right. We're right, they're wrong. But it's
• 36:21
  like, where are places where we're troubled by this stuff?
• 36:24
  Um, and we're naming it, right. We're not afraid to name
• 36:27
  it, um, and acknowledge it in ourselves, acknowledge it in our
• 36:30
  own hearts, um, and acknowledge it with others.
• 36:33
  Uh, so those are some of the on ramps. I mean, but I can go through the book
• 36:36
  and kind of list some other ones for you.
• 36:37
  >> Loren: Yeah. Any other. Any other real big off
• 36:40
  ramps?
• 36:41
  >> Jeff: Yeah, I mean, some of the off ramps that we kind of see. And if you look in the
• 36:44
  middle part of the book, you'll see some of these as well. Um,
• 36:47
  is looking at kind of the ways in which, um,
• 36:49
  number one, uh, and probably the biggest one that
• 36:52
  we get from young adults is that young adults don't feel like they
• 36:55
  get to be part of leadership or they don't get
• 36:58
  included in decision making. That's a big offering. So when they
• 37:01
  look around the room, uh, we talk about the difference between
• 37:03
  leadership, um, development and leadership identification.
• 37:06
  And this comes from Leroy Barber's work, um,
• 37:09
  uh, with particularly urban young adults and BIPOC
• 37:12
  communities, is that when churches tell you, okay,
• 37:15
  look, we want to develop you as a leader. We
• 37:18
  think you have a lot of potential here. What the signal for that
• 37:21
  usually means is you're too young. You need to wait
• 37:24
  your turn. Get in line. Um,
• 37:27
  I'm 68 years old. This is what I do. Now that I'm finally
• 37:30
  retired, this is my thing. I get to do this until
• 37:33
  I'm gone. When I'm gone, you get to have
• 37:35
  this. I want you
• 37:38
  to. If you're 26 years old, my picture for
• 37:41
  you usually is, wait for it. Go help with the youth
• 37:43
  group. Right. Um, so that's what you get to
• 37:46
  do. You get to help with the youth group. Now, that's great. And youth group
• 37:49
  needs more leaders, more mentorship. That's really cool.
• 37:52
  But a lot of our young adults, particularly in urban
• 37:54
  centers, they're, like, dealing with multimillion dollar
• 37:58
  budgets at Amazon. They're managing
• 38:00
  teams of 58 people internationally on
• 38:03
  major projects. These are smart,
• 38:06
  intelligent, highly educated,
• 38:09
  gritty individuals who if you turn them loose
• 38:12
  in church leadership are going to be amazing.
• 38:15
  Right. And we're squandering
• 38:18
  those people by pushing them away from
• 38:21
  key leadership decisions. So another off ramp is that
• 38:24
  the church is not transparent about their financials,
• 38:27
  right. That the church will not talk about money.
• 38:30
  Um, I always joke about the fact that if you want to really kill a Sunday
• 38:33
  morning, you say um, hey we're going to do a meet and greet. I want
• 38:36
  everybody to stand up by their pews, turn to your neighbors, say your name
• 38:39
  and how much do you make annually per year?
• 38:42
  Um, and it's crazy because churches will talk
• 38:45
  about their sexual sins. They'll talk about maybe
• 38:48
  they'll talk about other things. They will not talk about money
• 38:51
  at all. It's like an off topic
• 38:53
  conversation and it is
• 38:56
  behind the eyeballs in the brains of young
• 38:58
  adults every second of the day. The question of
• 39:01
  how do I make it through today? How do we make it through the
• 39:04
  month? How's um, this going to work?
• 39:07
  Um, all the pressures they're hearing out there. So why aren't
• 39:10
  we talking about it? Jesus talked a lot about
• 39:13
  money, way more about money than he talked about sexual
• 39:15
  preferences. So why are we not being
• 39:18
  biblical christians and talking about money more? And young adults get
• 39:21
  it. They say, look, I want to hear more about the fact
• 39:24
  that you are making this level of cash,
• 39:27
  you're investing in these things morally and ethically. How do you put that
• 39:30
  together?
• 39:32
  >> Loren: You know?
• 39:32
  >> Jeff: And they just, they just want to know right. I mean it's great that you're
• 39:35
  building a 5000 square foot deck on your house.
• 39:38
  Um, and I'm trying to figure out an apartment to live in but I just want to,
• 39:41
  I just want to know how we put this together. Right. I just want to know.
• 39:44
  Right. I want you to help me understand that.
• 39:46
  Right and young adults will make decisions on
• 39:49
  that. I mean they are very open about
• 39:52
  money. They will tell you exactly what's going on with
• 39:55
  themselves financially. Um, theyre very close to it
• 39:58
  so theyre not scared of that topic. So thats another big off ramp as well.
• 40:02
  >> Loren: Yeah. So much good stuff here I want to respond to
• 40:04
  but lets do this because you mentioned
• 40:07
  the idea of leadership.
• 40:09
  >> Jeff: Yeah.
• 40:09
  >> Loren: And one thing that really intrigued me from the book, uh,
• 40:12
  Im going to read from 113 here. One
• 40:15
  aspect of diversity that seemed to make a difference in leadership was
• 40:18
  gender. From our observations we noted a trend toward
• 40:21
  health and vitality when women were involved in young adult
• 40:23
  leadership. So talk more
• 40:26
  about leadership, uh, diversity,
• 40:29
  and how that can build trust.
• 40:31
  >> Jeff: Yeah. Um, one of the things that's
• 40:34
  vitally important, I think, for young adults, because you look at all
• 40:37
  the data, you look at pew data, you look at us census data, you look
• 40:40
  at Gallup polling, um, you can go down the list. Diverse
• 40:43
  polling is that young adults, particularly in their
• 40:45
  late twenties right now, have a
• 40:48
  very different view of what
• 40:50
  inclusion and diversity looks like.
• 40:53
  And here's the thing, is that different
• 40:56
  ages will be triggered by the word
• 40:58
  diversity in different ways. Right?
• 41:01
  So if you're at a certain age demographic, you hear the word diversity, and
• 41:04
  you all said all the battle shield things go up,
• 41:07
  right? It's like, this is like some crazy thing that's going to happen.
• 41:10
  They're talking about tearing down systems. They don't like
• 41:13
  Xyz types of people, and they want to do this and that, and that's
• 41:16
  not what's going on when you're talking about young adults. It's not
• 41:19
  a, how do we tear down old systems and build new
• 41:22
  systems? What they're looking for is a picture of
• 41:24
  humanity that they themselves have grown up in, right?
• 41:27
  20 year olds have been raised in probably the most
• 41:30
  ethically, economically, and culturally
• 41:33
  diverse time that humanity has ever
• 41:36
  seen. They're the most traveled generation that's ever
• 41:39
  been on the planet. Um, they've been around the
• 41:41
  world. They've had instant access to ideas across
• 41:44
  the globe. Um, they've been reading and thinking about
• 41:47
  ideas from very diverse parts of our world.
• 41:51
  Diversity is not a scary thing
• 41:54
  for them. Diversity is a way that we show the fullness of the
• 41:56
  kingdom of God. And so when it comes to
• 41:59
  gender in particular, um, a lot of church
• 42:02
  traditions still have an imbalance when it comes to
• 42:05
  how leadership is understood. Um, they
• 42:08
  will make certain theological, biblical arguments for that.
• 42:10
  And I stand by traditions who
• 42:13
  want to make those arguments. I'm nothing here to kind of change
• 42:16
  that. Um, but I will say that you're getting young adults
• 42:19
  who are coming in. They're asking the question in my body as
• 42:22
  I come into this room as a woman or as a
• 42:25
  man, um, why am I afforded certain things and
• 42:28
  not certain things based upon the body that I'm coming
• 42:30
  into? And I just want to know why. Because the
• 42:33
  rest of the world is not viewing me that way. They're viewing me at
• 42:36
  my competencies. They're viewing me in my education.
• 42:40
  Um, now, there are glass ceilings and concrete
• 42:43
  floors all around in everything, right?
• 42:47
  We have biases that come bubbling up through different things.
• 42:50
  And people experience that, workplaces and other things like
• 42:52
  that. But why is the church
• 42:55
  continuing in some of these areas? And so
• 42:58
  when you see, um, young women
• 43:01
  who have got their MBA from Wharton being told
• 43:04
  that they're not afforded leadership
• 43:06
  capacity within a church, you have to scratch your
• 43:09
  head and say, okay, what. What's the reason for
• 43:12
  this?
• 43:16
  When you're talking about a younger
• 43:18
  generation, they're very used to being in diverse conversations
• 43:21
  in diverse communities, whether it's gender, racially,
• 43:23
  economically, politically. They want
• 43:26
  diverse conversations politically, and they're not afraid of it. They have no
• 43:29
  problems having friends who are in various different parts
• 43:33
  of the political spectrum. They can actually have
• 43:35
  better. We found. This is crazy. We found that 20
• 43:38
  year olds have more civil dialogue about politics
• 43:41
  than 70 year olds.
• 43:45
  We found it over and over and over again. They're like, yeah, here's my friend.
• 43:48
  They're voting for this candidate. They're my friend. We work together. Yeah,
• 43:51
  we kind of talk about these ideas, but, yeah, we still go play pickleball
• 43:54
  together. It's not like we don't play pickleball.
• 43:57
  Right. And they don't understand why churches
• 44:00
  have become so polarized in many of these factors and why they
• 44:03
  have chose a way away from diversity.
• 44:06
  So, like, one thing we say in the book that we found young
• 44:08
  adults is diverse communities show them a
• 44:11
  bigger God. The more diverse voices, the more diverse
• 44:14
  inputs. God is that much bigger.
• 44:17
  Homogeneous communities show them a small God, an
• 44:20
  easily manageable God. Um, and the
• 44:22
  question for churches is, do you want to be following a big God or a
• 44:25
  small God? You know,
• 44:28
  homogeny is a small God, and diversity is a big God. It's just
• 44:31
  that basic. Um, and so whether you're looking at
• 44:34
  acts two, whether you're looking at the kind of movement of the
• 44:36
  epistles, I mean, and young adults
• 44:39
  know this in spades, right? They have diverse
• 44:42
  friendships. They have diverse communities.
• 44:45
  Um, and if churches continue to be the most segregated
• 44:47
  place on a Sunday morning, it's, um, going to be really
• 44:50
  hard for them to understand the way that
• 44:53
  this is a global gospel.
• 44:57
  This is a unifying force.
• 45:00
  This is the cosmic christ that we encounter in the epistles. Right.
• 45:03
  They, um, have a hard time seeing it if it becomes that. That
• 45:05
  small.
• 45:07
  >> Loren: Yeah, yeah, that's a good point. I. Thank
• 45:09
  you. Thanks for bringing that up. So, I want
• 45:12
  to stay on the theme of gender, but switch gears a little bit,
• 45:15
  because I was just watching this video before we start
• 45:18
  recording from the Wall Street Journal on, like,
• 45:21
  the difference between young men and young women and
• 45:24
  their political beliefs, obviously, as we're
• 45:26
  recording this, the DNC, I think, was their
• 45:29
  last night, just last night. Can't remember when
• 45:32
  this will air, but this will probably air before the election. So very much we're
• 45:35
  going to be going through these themes. Like,
• 45:38
  there seems to be, like, I'm kind of shocked at this
• 45:41
  difference between young men and young women,
• 45:44
  and, like, I'm kind of lamenting, like, how so many
• 45:47
  young men are going hard. Right. Like, uh, I don't know
• 45:50
  if you have any insights, like what. What that's about,
• 45:53
  um, and then how that's showing up in churches like
• 45:56
  this. Big difference.
• 45:57
  >> Jeff: Yeah. Um, and again, we can do
• 46:00
  two to 15 more podcasts on the question of
• 46:03
  masculinity in America right now. Um,
• 46:06
  from a sociological as well as a theological
• 46:09
  background. Sociologically, a number
• 46:12
  of people have been really wrestling with the question of
• 46:15
  what is masculinity right now? What does it mean? What is
• 46:17
  maleness? How does it understood?
• 46:20
  Um, and you'll see in certain church communities, they'll think it
• 46:23
  has to do more with what they would say would be the
• 46:26
  feminization of masculinity.
• 46:28
  There's a deep concern that men aren't men
• 46:31
  anymore, and so there's all these kind of tropes and stereotypes of what
• 46:34
  that means and then what we call the markers
• 46:37
  of gender. Right. How do you know somebody is this or that? What are
• 46:40
  the. How do you. How do you, you know, people would say
• 46:43
  present or what? Usually it's what we call markers in
• 46:45
  sociology. Right. So how do you present maleness? How do you
• 46:48
  present, feel maleness? You know, how do you present gender
• 46:51
  identity? And kind of what's happening
• 46:54
  right now with men in particular, is a
• 46:57
  confusion of what really constitutes, what
• 47:00
  actually makes somebody a man. You know, what is. What is
• 47:03
  masculinity supposed to look like? So there are
• 47:05
  regressive markers, uh, that people will go back to.
• 47:08
  They think, well, men are biologically,
• 47:11
  you know, have more, you know, they have more muscle mass, so therefore,
• 47:14
  they must be stronger. So there must be. And so they'll have all these kind of
• 47:17
  rational ways that we're created a certain way by virtue or
• 47:20
  biological makeup. So, therefore, that necessitate certain
• 47:23
  actions that we present in certain ways. Um,
• 47:26
  and that's part of what's going on right now, is
• 47:29
  trying to ground a sense of gender. Um, and this
• 47:32
  is across the board, right? As women, post World War one, World
• 47:35
  War two, entered the workplace as more and more women
• 47:38
  have taken and become college graduates.
• 47:41
  I mean, higher education, right now, 55%
• 47:44
  of women getting undergraduate.
• 47:46
  55% of all people getting undergraduate degrees in the United
• 47:49
  States are women.
• 47:50
  >> Loren: Right.
• 47:50
  >> Jeff: So there's a majority of women who are getting educated, as opposed to
• 47:53
  men in higher education.
• 47:55
  >> Loren: Um, and so now comes are
• 47:58
  similarly. Right.
• 47:59
  >> Jeff: Yeah. And now we're seeing in the workplace itself,
• 48:02
  um, this is the first time that we've seen this in
• 48:05
  kind of particularly white collar jobs, is every
• 48:08
  tier, from the C suite, CEO's, CFO,
• 48:10
  Coos, all the way down to middle
• 48:13
  managers, district managers, account managers, whether it's a business, whether
• 48:16
  it's in medicine, whether it's in engineering. Almost
• 48:18
  every tier of leadership in most
• 48:21
  corporations have. Majority of women versus men right
• 48:24
  now.
• 48:25
  >> Loren: Wow.
• 48:25
  >> Jeff: Right. Um, so what's happened is that there's
• 48:28
  been this massive shift that's been building ever
• 48:31
  since World War two when women were going to work, because men were at
• 48:34
  work, where women are in places of
• 48:37
  power, they're in places of leadership, um, they're
• 48:40
  more highly educated. Um, and this is creating
• 48:43
  a threat to kind of gender identities around
• 48:45
  masculinity. And, um, one of
• 48:48
  the biggest areas in particular is shifted is that
• 48:51
  men traditionally view themselves as what we call the breadwinner.
• 48:53
  Like they're supposed to earn more money than a woman is. And
• 48:56
  so a balance in a relationship is a man
• 48:59
  takes care of that and a woman doesn't. Well, now women actually are
• 49:02
  earning more money than men, um, across the board.
• 49:05
  And that's becoming. It's also really strange confusion of what
• 49:08
  men's identity is supposed to be. How do I. How am I in a relationship with a woman who makes
• 49:11
  more money than me? Um, who has a. Who?
• 49:13
  They're. They happen to have a culturally important job.
• 49:16
  Right. Maybe they're a physician and I'm a graphic
• 49:19
  designer. Right. And so, yeah, so how do I walk
• 49:22
  into a dinner party? How do I have a cocktail conversation?
• 49:25
  Um, yeah, and so these, these are, these, these are all identity
• 49:28
  markers that are being challenged. So what's
• 49:31
  happening politically then, is this,
• 49:34
  um, and I think it is,
• 49:36
  frankly very damaging that we're going to see
• 49:39
  probably in ten to 20 years of how this plays out is
• 49:42
  men in particular are being told to be angry as opposed
• 49:45
  to be productive. Um,
• 49:48
  so if I can't be productive, if I
• 49:51
  can't use other things, at least I can be angry.
• 49:56
  That's a totally acceptable
• 49:58
  experience of masculinity in certain sectors, because that
• 50:01
  means that I have strengthen. Right. I can yell,
• 50:04
  I can stop my feet. I, um, can be
• 50:07
  fierce. Right.
• 50:08
  >> Loren: And so anger, guns.
• 50:10
  >> Jeff: Yeah. Yeah. So anger and force are
• 50:13
  kind of the last bastion of this is something I get to
• 50:16
  do. So if a woman is angry that she
• 50:19
  gets, you know, she's not valued, she's considered
• 50:22
  to be out of her mind. She's not rational. Um, but
• 50:25
  men get to be angry and rational at the same time. Right? So,
• 50:28
  so there's all these different markers that are playing out. And I
• 50:31
  think politically you're seeing that more and more. And part of
• 50:34
  what's deep down inside of it, and I see this with young men
• 50:36
  all the time, um, is that
• 50:39
  young men are looking for mentors. They just want.
• 50:43
  They want someone to kind of show them what it is to be 40,
• 50:46
  50, 70. They, uh, want to walk alongside these
• 50:49
  people and get a picture of what does it mean to work, what does it mean
• 50:52
  to care for a family? What does it mean to, um,
• 50:55
  be loved and love in return. Um,
• 50:57
  young adults are not scared of emotions. They're not scared of
• 51:00
  sensitivity. Um, and there's a lot of young men who are
• 51:03
  deeply, deeply ashamed of
• 51:06
  caring, you know, of being loving people. They feel like they're
• 51:09
  not allowed to do that. They're supposed to be mad all the time. They're supposed
• 51:12
  to be violent all the time, and they don't want to be violent. You
• 51:15
  know, I mean, the vast majority, again, we're talking the middle to bell
• 51:18
  curve, not these extreme edges, right?
• 51:21
  The majority of young men, they just. They want to care and
• 51:24
  love and be with friends and, um, and they want
• 51:27
  to. They want to have joy. They want to be productive. They want to
• 51:30
  have their work valued. They want to be valued in society.
• 51:33
  Um, they don't want to be mad and angry and blow things
• 51:36
  up. And also, they also don't want to be indifferent and
• 51:38
  cold, right? I mean, they're human beings. I mean, they were created
• 51:41
  to love and be loved by God. So I do think that's a
• 51:44
  really interesting time. Um, and I
• 51:47
  worry. And this is where the formative communities
• 51:50
  matter. Um, and later in the book, I talk
• 51:53
  about, um, churches being communities of loving defiance.
• 51:56
  It's a phrase that I borrowed from Ron Seder. And I
• 51:59
  think there's a way that churches can be in loving
• 52:01
  defiance to these models, right? They can show a different
• 52:04
  form of gender, right? They can show a different
• 52:07
  way of not having to be so polarized.
• 52:10
  Um, I find it fascinating. And here I'm gonna take one
• 52:12
  short detour here biblically. But in Genesis one,
• 52:15
  Genesis two, the ish and the man and the
• 52:18
  woman in the garden, they're cognates
• 52:21
  in Hebrew that are very close to one another, right? They're
• 52:24
  created together, they're serving in the garden together. And all that. When
• 52:27
  we get to Genesis three with the fall, when we have
• 52:30
  the adamah, the man becomes. He
• 52:32
  becomes different, distinctly from the woman, right? And so
• 52:35
  the fall creates a sense of antagonism. You
• 52:38
  know, you now, you know, a man is a man is a man because he's not a
• 52:41
  woman, as opposed to just being a man before God,
• 52:44
  right. And that shift is
• 52:47
  now the trajectory that God's trying to create for us,
• 52:49
  you know, as opposed to being adversarial, that I know that I'm a man
• 52:52
  because I'm nothing feminine, or I know that I'm a woman
• 52:55
  because I'm not masculine. I mean, that is not
• 52:58
  a biblical model. That is a fall model,
• 53:01
  that's a sin model. Um, and so I don't
• 53:04
  understand, actually, why churches continue to perpetuate
• 53:07
  identity as an adversarial, um,
• 53:10
  construct, right. That I only know who I am by what I am
• 53:12
  not, as opposed to what I am. So I'm hoping that churches
• 53:15
  can find communities of loving defiance to say, this is who we are in
• 53:18
  God. Right. This is what God wants us to be.
• 53:21
  Not adversarial. Um, but they want us to be
• 53:24
  moving our faces forward and forward to the loving and
• 53:26
  redemptive power of christ. Right. That's, um,
• 53:29
  a very different way. And young adults, when they see
• 53:32
  that in a church, they'll come thronging,
• 53:35
  they'll want to be part of that.
• 53:38
  >> Loren: Yeah. I'm glad you brought up that point about loving defiance because I was going to
• 53:41
  ask about that. Um,
• 53:45
  end with the. Before we take a break, let's end with this part about
• 53:47
  mentorship because I appreciate, like, uh, I'm thinking about, like,
• 53:50
  myself as a 40 something year old man. Like, I'm still looking
• 53:53
  out for mentors older than me to,
• 53:56
  like you said, help me grow and become a better
• 53:59
  man. How can churches better
• 54:02
  foster relationships with young
• 54:05
  adults?
• 54:06
  >> Jeff: Yeah. One of the models that's been really big within
• 54:09
  corporate structures that we've tried to bring back into churches is
• 54:12
  the idea of reverse mentorship. Uh, a lot
• 54:15
  of corporations, when you on ramp into a job in a company,
• 54:18
  uh, you will be assigned a mentor. Um,
• 54:21
  and usually, um, it will come in the form
• 54:23
  of kind, um, of apprenticing somebody into a particular
• 54:26
  job or area of responsibility. You walk alongside people
• 54:29
  who are your skip level manager or something like that. They'll help
• 54:32
  you kind of be formed into the career that you're going to be moving
• 54:35
  into. But reverse mentorship is that one
• 54:38
  of the responsibilities of a skip level manager is to
• 54:41
  learn from the person coming in. Tell me more about where
• 54:44
  you went to school. Tell me more about your background. Um, how
• 54:47
  can I incorporate your gifts and talents
• 54:49
  into what we do here, right? I mean, good
• 54:53
  long term employee and talent acquisition
• 54:55
  means that you're kind of bringing, you're constantly bringing and change the organization
• 54:59
  from the bottom up, right? New people are coming in,
• 55:01
  they're bringing new ideas and you want new ideas, right?
• 55:04
  I mean, if I'm in a tech industry, for example, I want to know what's the
• 55:07
  latest thing happening, right? I don't want to kind of keep making
• 55:10
  slate and chalk. I want to know what's
• 55:13
  new. Um, reverse mentorship in
• 55:15
  churches means that we train older
• 55:18
  adults to say, hey, you know what? You're curious, aren't you?
• 55:21
  I mean, you want to know about new things. Here are some
• 55:24
  very basic ways to engage young adults to learn
• 55:27
  more about who they are, what they bring.
• 55:29
  Um, start telling me more about your background.
• 55:32
  Tell me more about where you came from. Um,
• 55:35
  be very curious, be open hearted. Um,
• 55:38
  be generous with your time. Um, and you
• 55:41
  do not have to speak all the time because one of the things, particularly
• 55:44
  with men who are older, they feel like, well, I've got this whole
• 55:47
  reservoir of knowledge. I just want to talk at you for a while.
• 55:50
  You know, it's kind of like Ken in the Barbie movie. I'm now going to play
• 55:52
  guitar at you. You know,
• 55:55
  it's a strange kind of thing about just kind of like
• 55:58
  pushing ideas at somebody that I've learned in my
• 56:01
  wisdom and that's what I'm supposed to be doing. That's not
• 56:03
  mentorship. Mentorship is walking a journey together,
• 56:07
  um, and then listening, being curious, allowing, um,
• 56:10
  somebody to flourish and understand that mentorship doesn't have to be
• 56:13
  alignment, meaning that you don't have to have two people who agree
• 56:16
  on everything to be mentors. Um, some of the best mentors that
• 56:19
  young adults will find are people who are different than them because
• 56:22
  they're showing the diversity of ideas in the world. They're showing different
• 56:25
  inputs. So those are some things about mentorship that's really
• 56:28
  important. But a lot of it is this is that just
• 56:31
  like any age group, people are insecure
• 56:33
  about what they can have to give. I mean, I've talked to
• 56:36
  so many older adults who are sixties and seventies who have so
• 56:39
  much to offer and they're scared. It's like I don't
• 56:42
  understand what they talk about. I don't know what brat means? I
• 56:45
  don't know. I don't know what this stuff is being
• 56:48
  thrown around. Yeah. Ah, I don't know what that is.
• 56:51
  I don't want to. You get so used to being in
• 56:54
  control, um, of understanding things,
• 56:57
  um, and having, you know, what we call a beginner's mind, you know,
• 56:59
  understanding what it means to be open to what somebody else can teach you and
• 57:02
  be okay about asking and saying, I don't know that you just said
• 57:05
  something. I don't know what that phrase is about. Um. Can you tell me more about
• 57:08
  it? Um, so we've actually done some training
• 57:11
  with. With older adults to get them more comfortable with that, and I think that's
• 57:14
  a. That's a good start.
• 57:16
  >> Loren: Okay. I've got to ask you one more question, though, so forgive
• 57:19
  me for I'm keeping you long here.
• 57:20
  >> Jeff: No, it's okay.
• 57:21
  >> Loren: Uh. Uh, the old man get off my lawn.
• 57:24
  In me is saying,
• 57:26
  where there are times in church where
• 57:29
  the older person clearly has more wisdom, experience,
• 57:32
  insights, appreciation of tradition,
• 57:35
  where is that balance? Like, uh, at, ah,
• 57:38
  what point does the
• 57:41
  older or more wisdom experienced
• 57:44
  person have to say, hey, I really appreciate your. Your
• 57:46
  insights, but here.
• 57:48
  >> Jeff: Yeah.
• 57:49
  >> Loren: Like, this is why we do it this way.
• 57:51
  >> Jeff: Yeah, yeah. And as somebody who takes lawn care seriously, I
• 57:53
  totally love that metaphor, by the way. So, um.
• 57:56
  But, yeah, no, I totally get what you're saying. You know, there are. You know,
• 57:59
  churches have been around for 2000 plus years.
• 58:02
  You know, they, ah, many of these traditions, you know, have been around
• 58:05
  for a while. We have three to four generations of
• 58:08
  death that you can have. Even a local congregation in America.
• 58:11
  Right. You know, they have a story to tell. And
• 58:13
  Christianity has always been, uh, what we call a democracy
• 58:16
  of the dead. That's a GK Chesterton phrase,
• 58:19
  which is that we give our votes to the past as much as to
• 58:22
  the future. Right? So this is the communion of saints in
• 58:25
  Hebrews eleven and twelve.
• 58:26
  >> Loren: This is.
• 58:27
  >> Jeff: This is the gathering of the cloud of witnesses. Um, so
• 58:30
  we sit in congregations part of a much larger
• 58:33
  story than we're seeing here in the room, and that includes the
• 58:36
  past. So when the. When the seven
• 58:38
  ecumenical councils of the church are putting down kind
• 58:41
  of, this is how we live, these are the things we believe. This is how we
• 58:44
  read scripture. Um, there's a
• 58:47
  reason that we go back to that and say, okay, look, we want to move the
• 58:50
  dial on this question. Um, culture
• 58:53
  is changing. Culture is moving. Um, how
• 58:56
  do we sit with that, with what's gone in the past? And that means that
• 58:58
  sometimes things take a while to wrestle with. Right? And that
• 59:01
  means sometimes I don't always get my way. And that
• 59:04
  also means that I sit with the past,
• 59:07
  and I'm sticking with it. Um, like, for example,
• 59:10
  if you look at protestant, you know, moving into
• 59:13
  using English, you know, in our. In our liturgy, right,
• 59:16
  we're not doing the latin mass. We're actually using English or
• 59:19
  German or French. And we think about the reformation. People have
• 59:22
  this imagination about Luther, just like, you know, going to the
• 59:25
  diet of worms, having this big argument, strutting out like a
• 59:28
  boss and saying, I'm gonna go change everything, and that's gonna be
• 59:30
  awesome. Um, and it did, it took.
• 59:33
  It took time. It took a lot of wrestling and pain
• 59:36
  and suffering for people to make change. Um,
• 59:39
  and so just simple things like what
• 59:42
  bible you read as opposed to this translation versus that
• 59:45
  translation that takes wrestling. Uh, it takes
• 59:48
  time. And so I think the old man
• 59:51
  on the lawn who's saying, look, I want. This is the
• 59:54
  way it's always been. This way we're going to do it
• 59:57
  as opposed to being like a wall, be
• 1:00:00
  a window and say, okay, let's both look out a window
• 1:00:02
  together. You know, what do we see out there? What is God
• 1:00:05
  calling us to? And you're going to have some, some battles,
• 1:00:08
  right? You're going to have battles with young adults who say, well, I think, you know,
• 1:00:11
  this. This is how we should present, you know, this way, and this is how we should talk
• 1:00:14
  this way. And these are the issues that we need to be centered forward.
• 1:00:17
  And the person sitting next to you looking out the window with that person.
• 1:00:20
  Okay, let's look at that. But let me show you another part of the vantage
• 1:00:23
  out the window that I see. So let's look together at
• 1:00:26
  what's going on outside. Right. Let's kind of bring some,
• 1:00:29
  some harmony to that. And that means that we all give up
• 1:00:32
  something. And that's the other question, is that, is the church willing
• 1:00:35
  to give up something to move forward? If you look at acts
• 1:00:37
  15, the council of Jerusalem, as
• 1:00:40
  gentiles and jews are coming together, and they're trying to wrestle with the question of
• 1:00:43
  circumcision and whether gentiles need to be circumcised, I
• 1:00:46
  mean, that's a great microcosm of that, of
• 1:00:49
  how that conversation went down. Peter took people out, they
• 1:00:52
  went around, looked, uh, at other house churches and others wrestled with
• 1:00:55
  this question, and the church changed. You
• 1:00:58
  know, they did something different. But in acts 15, it's
• 1:01:01
  very clear that being led by the holy spirit meant
• 1:01:04
  that you have different groups coming together, and they
• 1:01:07
  both had to give up something to move the trip forward,
• 1:01:10
  right? So that means that young adults don't get it always
• 1:01:13
  their way. They don't get everything right. They have to give up something
• 1:01:16
  too. Right? And that's what love is. Ultimately,
• 1:01:18
  in order for me to love somebody, I have to make space for them. I have to give
• 1:01:21
  something up for us to be close. And
• 1:01:24
  churches that model a capacity that we all give up
• 1:01:27
  something means, uh, that they'll move forward.
• 1:01:30
  That's hard. It's hard work. I mean, if you think it's easy work, you're
• 1:01:33
  not, you're not in a church very long. It takes a hard
• 1:01:36
  work. And the other part of it, too, is staying long
• 1:01:39
  enough to see the change happen. So, like, for example, in
• 1:01:42
  the book, we talk about when young adults take over
• 1:01:45
  leadership. We've seen that older adults start leaving the
• 1:01:48
  church. Uh, you know, they're just like, yeah,
• 1:01:51
  you know, they're not talking about Dietrich Bonhoeffer. I really like it when they
• 1:01:54
  preach on Bonhoeffer. So I'm going to go to a church where they talk about Bonhoeffer.
• 1:01:57
  Right. And Bonhoeffer is great, don't get me wrong. Karl Bark, great.
• 1:02:00
  I mean, I get all that, right. But a lot of people formed in a post
• 1:02:03
  world war two evangelical setting, they have their drop down list
• 1:02:06
  of things they need to hear as far as deal theologically.
• 1:02:08
  If they don't hear that or they hear something different, they don't know what to
• 1:02:11
  do. Um, and so
• 1:02:14
  we challenge older adults. Hey, stay
• 1:02:17
  longer, don't jump ship to
• 1:02:19
  another option. Stay longer. Stay
• 1:02:22
  long enough to see where this is going to take
• 1:02:25
  you, um, before you jump ship.
• 1:02:29
  It's a commitment to leadership transition. And this is
• 1:02:32
  a whole other conversation that we could have on leadership transitions we're having right
• 1:02:35
  now, is young adults need older adults
• 1:02:38
  to stay to give them both the courage and the
• 1:02:40
  wisdom. And this is back to our conversation. Wisdom of what it means to be
• 1:02:43
  a church for the long, long story.
• 1:02:46
  >> Loren: Yeah.
• 1:02:49
  And similarly, imagine young adults got to stick around, be
• 1:02:52
  patient to stay with
• 1:02:55
  that.
• 1:02:56
  >> Jeff: Yeah, go ahead. Sorry, go ahead.
• 1:02:59
  >> Loren: Oh, finish your thought.
• 1:03:00
  >> Jeff: Well, no, I was just saying exactly what it means. And this is where,
• 1:03:03
  um, one of my friends who does work in New Zealand
• 1:03:06
  talks about the difference between, uh, fences and watering
• 1:03:09
  holes. Um, is that, you know, because of the way they do sheep
• 1:03:12
  in New Zealand, right. There's more sheep than humans. About three to one
• 1:03:14
  ratio, right, to humans. And,
• 1:03:17
  um, and when you're herding sheep. And you're kind of putting sheep
• 1:03:20
  and, you know, and grazing them. You. There's just.
• 1:03:23
  There's too many to kind of have to try to contain them. Right.
• 1:03:26
  So you don't, um. And fencing it off just doesn't work. Right. So you just let them
• 1:03:29
  graze. So what you do is you create watering halls and salt
• 1:03:32
  lakes, and they'll always gather in those places. Right. So as opposed
• 1:03:35
  to kind of trying to fence people in with boundary
• 1:03:37
  lines, just create a very hospitable
• 1:03:40
  watering hole that you're going to keep coming back to. Right. And
• 1:03:43
  don't worry, because they will come to the watering
• 1:03:46
  hole. They're going to be thirsty, and if it's water that's pure and
• 1:03:49
  good and they're going to get what they need. So don't get too stressed
• 1:03:52
  about locking the door. You know, don't worry about kind of trying
• 1:03:55
  to contain people. Um, just build a
• 1:03:58
  really hospitable space. And who God
• 1:04:00
  brings, God brings. Right. Uh,
• 1:04:03
  and let that be your witness to the world, because
• 1:04:06
  the world needs good water. It doesn't need more.
• 1:04:10
  >> Loren: Yeah, that's a good metaphor. The book is defiant hope,
• 1:04:13
  act of love, what young adults are seeking in places of
• 1:04:16
  work, faith, and community. Jeff is
• 1:04:19
  the editor of this, so really encourage folks to check it
• 1:04:22
  out. I really appreciate reading it, Jeff. Really appreciate
• 1:04:25
  the conversation. Uh, we've, we've been long, so
• 1:04:27
  thanks for your time. Let's take a quick break and come back with some
• 1:04:30
  closing questions.
• 1:04:31
  >> Jeff: Great, thanks.
• 1:04:35
  >> Loren: All right, we're back with doctor Jeff Keuss So thank you so much
• 1:04:38
  for your time. Really appreciate the conversation. Like you said,
• 1:04:41
  like, I've got a page, like, full of notes here. We could
• 1:04:44
  have, like you said, had multiple podcast
• 1:04:46
  conversations on these topics here. So I hope this is
• 1:04:49
  helpful for listeners. And again, if you're looking to dive in
• 1:04:52
  deeper, go check out the book. Want to recommend it?
• 1:04:55
  Uh, so some closing questions. Always encourage folks. You can take
• 1:04:57
  these as seriously or not as you'd like to. If
• 1:05:00
  you're pope for a day, what's the day
• 1:05:03
  look like for you?
• 1:05:05
  >> Jeff: I was pope for a day. Um, yeah. The bishop of
• 1:05:08
  Rome. What a job description. Um, yeah, yeah,
• 1:05:11
  yeah. I think if I, you know, if I was pope for a day, you know, I think
• 1:05:14
  there'd be kind of three basic things, and part of it is there's
• 1:05:16
  a novel written in the 1970s called the Shoes
• 1:05:19
  of the Fishermen, which was about a new pop
• 1:05:22
  enclave was getting together. Call new pope. New pope was given to.
• 1:05:25
  And it was like. And it's this kind of fable. But
• 1:05:28
  the beginning of World War three is about ready to break out because
• 1:05:31
  people are starving in Central America, right. It's a very interesting
• 1:05:33
  story, and they're trying to figure out how to stop world war three.
• 1:05:36
  And world powers turn to the pope,
• 1:05:39
  and, um, he goes and reflects and he's thinking and
• 1:05:42
  praying at the very end of the book. Spoiler alert. But it's been out since the seventies,
• 1:05:45
  so I don't feel bad about spoiling this for you. But in the end
• 1:05:48
  of the book, the pope says, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to devest
• 1:05:51
  all the holdings of the church to feed the world.
• 1:05:54
  I'm going to sell all the art. I'm going to sell the property.
• 1:05:56
  Um, I'm just going to give it all away. Because the church has always
• 1:05:59
  been about faith, and these holdings
• 1:06:02
  are needed, and I'm giving it all away. And if the church is
• 1:06:05
  here after it's done, then God is blessing it.
• 1:06:08
  And I think there would be a level of radical deinvestment
• 1:06:11
  of power that I'd see. I think particularly
• 1:06:14
  as you look at the way in which the american Catholic church
• 1:06:17
  has created struggle points between bishops in Africa,
• 1:06:20
  um, and other things like that, there needs to be a radical
• 1:06:23
  realignment in Rome, uh, from my perspective,
• 1:06:26
  and I'm saying this as a Protestant, so, I mean, I don't have, you
• 1:06:29
  know, so I'm outside of it. But if I was pope for a day,
• 1:06:32
  I would definitely look at how do we realign ourselves to a more
• 1:06:34
  simple, um, and more economically
• 1:06:37
  realistic picture of what the church is supposed to be.
• 1:06:40
  Um, so I wouldn't very. I probably wouldn't be very popular
• 1:06:43
  that day. Um, but I do think it would be an interesting
• 1:06:46
  conversation.
• 1:06:48
  >> Loren: Yeah, absolutely. Um, a theologian or
• 1:06:51
  historical christian figure you'd want to meet or bring
• 1:06:54
  back to life?
• 1:06:56
  >> Jeff: Um, well, I definitely. One of my go to in the patristics is St.
• 1:06:59
  Augustine of Hippo. Um, I've learned a lot from
• 1:07:02
  Augustine, um, when he was
• 1:07:05
  bishop, as a rhetorician, as a
• 1:07:07
  writer, um, he has been so
• 1:07:10
  impactful in my life. I would love to talk to
• 1:07:13
  him about the first ten books of confessions.
• 1:07:16
  The first ten books are his. His autobiography
• 1:07:19
  is being this wild kid, you know, running around doing
• 1:07:22
  kind of crazy stuff, fathering an illegitimate child,
• 1:07:25
  getting mixed up with the wrong people, has this radical
• 1:07:28
  conversion to faith, um, and he moves into
• 1:07:30
  becoming this one of the greatest theologians, uh,
• 1:07:33
  we've ever experienced. And I would love to sit down at a table
• 1:07:36
  with him and say, tell me more about this
• 1:07:39
  conversion, about this call of God to take up and read
• 1:07:42
  scripture and, and the way that you
• 1:07:45
  conceptualize the Trinity. And as an
• 1:07:47
  african, what could you say to us today
• 1:07:50
  as far as how we listen to voices on the
• 1:07:53
  african continent to help us be better understanding
• 1:07:56
  the global impact of Christ? I think Augustine is
• 1:07:59
  so contemporary right now. Um, and that would be
• 1:08:02
  an amazing, amazing conversation. And I think he'd be
• 1:08:05
  pretty mad at me for bringing him back to life because I
• 1:08:08
  think he's having a great time in glory. So I think I'd have to spend the first
• 1:08:11
  15 minutes, um, apologize.
• 1:08:13
  >> Loren: Yeah, yeah. Um, what do you
• 1:08:16
  think history will remember from our current time and place?
• 1:08:20
  >> Jeff: Uh, yeah, I think, you know, if I.
• 1:08:23
  If I was to, you know, get my DeLorean and go into the
• 1:08:26
  future, you know, to name a certain movie from the
• 1:08:28
  eighties, um, I think you would. I think
• 1:08:31
  we look back on this period of time, and two things would be very apparent.
• 1:08:34
  One is that this is one of the most exciting
• 1:08:37
  technological eras that humanity has ever experienced. I think
• 1:08:40
  they're going to see the
• 1:08:43
  acceleration of technological and medical advances in
• 1:08:46
  this period of time. What it kind of did. I mean,
• 1:08:48
  it's going to be this age of almost
• 1:08:51
  singularity, of change that's occurred.
• 1:08:54
  The second thing is going to be looking
• 1:08:56
  back with a sense of such sorrow,
• 1:08:59
  of we could have done so much
• 1:09:02
  more ecologically. Why didn't they
• 1:09:05
  understand the data? Why didn't they do something
• 1:09:07
  differently about what's going on environmentally?
• 1:09:10
  I think politically, um, there's going to be a
• 1:09:13
  sense of looking back on this in the history books and
• 1:09:15
  thinking they had so many things in
• 1:09:18
  common. Why didn't they work together?
• 1:09:22
  They had everything at their fingertips.
• 1:09:25
  Um. Ah, I do think there'll be some
• 1:09:28
  of that dissonance. There'll be this kind of age of wonders,
• 1:09:31
  of seeing where we're going to go technologically. Began
• 1:09:34
  with so many things that happened in the 21st century. But
• 1:09:37
  I also think there's going to be such a sense of sorrow of, like,
• 1:09:39
  you know, you had so many things together and look, and
• 1:09:42
  I. So I don't want to get apocalyptic, but I do think there's a
• 1:09:45
  reckoning that's going to happen with our division that'll be just really
• 1:09:48
  traumatizing.
• 1:09:50
  >> Loren: Sure. What do you hope for the future of
• 1:09:52
  Christianity?
• 1:09:54
  >> Jeff: One of the things I love about
• 1:09:57
  following Jesus, one of the things I love about doing the
• 1:10:00
  work I get to do and talking about God and kind
• 1:10:03
  of being in communities that talk about faith is
• 1:10:06
  it's a topic that will never get exhausted.
• 1:10:08
  Everybody keeps announcing the death of God. It's
• 1:10:11
  like, oh, it's over. The church is folding. You know that you get all this.
• 1:10:14
  Wait, ah. Oh, it's. You get all this stuff,
• 1:10:17
  and it's been going on and on and
• 1:10:20
  on. You know, one thing about the history of the faith is you get
• 1:10:23
  to see that conversation over and over again. You realize everybody keeps
• 1:10:26
  announcing the death of the church, right?
• 1:10:28
  And God's not done yet.
• 1:10:31
  Right? God's done when God's done. Right.
• 1:10:33
  So, um, I get thrilled.
• 1:10:36
  The two things I'm excited about. One is, I think we're finally getting
• 1:10:39
  beyond the eurocentric view of
• 1:10:42
  Christianity, that there's a prioritization
• 1:10:45
  of the european voice around the faith, is
• 1:10:48
  that there's a moving forward of
• 1:10:51
  so many theologians globally, from the global south,
• 1:10:54
  from the african continent, um, that
• 1:10:57
  are bringing voices and evangelizing.
• 1:10:59
  And, I mean, we're getting evangelists who are coming to the Pacific
• 1:11:02
  Northwest, from Ghana, from Malawi,
• 1:11:05
  uh, who are knocking on doors and saying, we want to tell you about
• 1:11:08
  Jesus Christ. We're excited to tell you what God is doing,
• 1:11:11
  and the spirit is moving, and you're getting these pentecostal
• 1:11:14
  revivals, and you get this growth of the church happening in the
• 1:11:17
  global south. And I'm thrilled with what
• 1:11:19
  God was doing with that.
• 1:11:23
  I am just, I'm not optimistic. I'm hopeful, right.
• 1:11:26
  Because I think hope is a different thing than optimism. Right. I
• 1:11:29
  mean, hope is an actual theological virtue, you
• 1:11:32
  know, that we need to talk about more. And so I'm very hopeful about the future of the
• 1:11:35
  faith. I want to see what God is doing and showing up. And this
• 1:11:38
  work that I've been doing with young adults has also shown me
• 1:11:40
  that God is in, God's in good hands with the next
• 1:11:43
  generation. I am not in any way, shape, or
• 1:11:46
  form feeling like, oh, no, they're going to drop the ball and I'm going to
• 1:11:49
  walk away from God. That's just not going to happen. You
• 1:11:52
  know, God is waking hearts of, you know, 20 year
• 1:11:54
  olds, and they're getting fired up, and they're going to do church
• 1:11:57
  way differently than I did, and I couldn't be happier about
• 1:12:00
  that.
• 1:12:01
  >> Loren: Yeah, well, great stuff here. Really appreciate the
• 1:12:04
  conversation. Uh, sure. If you would just. How can, how can people
• 1:12:06
  connect with you to get the book or
• 1:12:09
  whatever?
• 1:12:10
  >> Jeff: Yeah. So you, um, can find me on social media.
• 1:12:13
  Um, so, Jeff cuse, I'm on LinkedIn, I'm on
• 1:12:16
  Instagram, I'm on Facebook, you know, just go and
• 1:12:19
  connect with me. Um, you type in my last name. There's very
• 1:12:22
  few people who have it, so you'll find me pretty quick.
• 1:12:24
  Um, also, uh, you can
• 1:12:27
  contact me at the university at Seattle Pacific University. You'll find
• 1:12:30
  me there in the faculty of theology. Um, and also the book is
• 1:12:33
  available on Amazon, Barnes and Noble. You know all the sites
• 1:12:36
  you're looking for, and also just dm me or email
• 1:12:39
  me if you have questions. If you pick up the book, I'm more than happy to
• 1:12:42
  dialogue with your church leaders. Um, I'm very good at
• 1:12:44
  Zoom. And be happy to zoom in with you to talk more about the
• 1:12:47
  book. Um, our team of researchers would love to talk
• 1:12:50
  to you, too. Um, because we're funded by the Lilly
• 1:12:52
  endowment, um, it won't cost you much at all
• 1:12:55
  to have a consultation with us about maybe challenges you're
• 1:12:58
  having. We do this all the time. We'd, uh, love to help
• 1:13:01
  your church kind of think through these big ideas to kind of serve God
• 1:13:04
  better.
• 1:13:05
  >> Loren: Yeah. Well, thank you so much. Really appreciate the time.
• 1:13:08
  Always, uh, leave folks with the word of peace. So may God's peace be with
• 1:13:11
  you.
• 1:13:12
  >> Jeff: Great. Thank you.
• 1:13:20
  >> Loren: Thanks for joining us on the future christian podcast.
• 1:13:23
  The future christian podcast is produced by Resonate
• 1:13:26
  Media. We love to hear from our listeners with
• 1:13:28
  questions, comments, and ideas for future
• 1:13:31
  episodes. Visit our website at future dash
• 1:13:34
  christian.com and find the connect with us
• 1:13:37
  form at the bottom of the page to get in touch with Martha
• 1:13:40
  or Loren. But before you go, do us a
• 1:13:43
  favor. Subscribe to the pod to leave a review.
• 1:13:46
  It really helps us get this out to more people.
• 1:13:48
  Thanks. And go in peace.