#68 | Do We Need to Reintroduce Christianity to the West? Pt. 2 | Mike Goheen

It's watering time, everybody.

It is time for Apollos Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having the second part of one of our deep conversations.

It's the second part to my deep conversation with Mike Goheen. If you haven't listened to the first part yet, I would highly recommend you going back to listen to it. You would be. You will be glad that you did.

And in this second conversation, we go deep. But before I get to that, I do want to ask you this question.

Have you ever been reading through the Book of Acts and just wondered, why doesn't that happen today? I mean, I've been trained in evangelism, and I remember the four spiritual laws very well.

And I remember thinking, this is so different than what I read in scripture. The Bible doesn't have any of this idea of the four spiritual laws. And I know that this is a way to make it quick and succinct.

But when I look at the book of Acts, I go, there is a great movement of God. Why doesn't that happen today? Now, some might say it is happening in different parts of the world, and they would be right.

There are people coming to faith in Jesus Christ all over the world. My question, though, is why isn't that happening here in the west now? Some might say, well, it is. There are people coming to faith in Christ.

The media just doesn't report it. Churches are doing it. I would say, though, statistically that's not true. The church seems to be stagnant and decreasing. My question is why?

Why is it that we have all of the resources, more than any other nation on the planet, more than any other time in history, and yet we seem to be making little or no progress. What's wrong? What is missing from our gospel presentations that we boil it down to these so few points that seem.

That seem so removed from what I read in the biblical story? And why do we neglect so much of the Bible? We make it fly over. We go from Genesis to. I mean, and in the fall, we go creation fall.

And then we just skip through everything else and get to the coming of Jesus and redemption. Why do we make the Bible flyover? There's something about the.

The whole biblical canon that creates and reveals to us God's story and our understanding of salvation and our place within it falls within that story.

And that is something that has been largely missing from modern Western evangelical gospel presentations that has been then exported to other parts of the world. And in this conversation, we talk about that. We talk about the importance of recovering story.

We talk about the modern Western church and how it is a mile wide and an inch deep. As a matter of fact, it's not even a mile wide anymore. Go to any church. They're just trying to get people through.

They're, they're, they're, they've pared down every part of the service.

There's no idea of confession or, or intercession or being, I mean, quiet before God, because we got to get him out, we got to get him in, we got to get him through. And that. I say that to our detriment. Now, I'm not here trying to bemoan or go after every modern pastor.

No, that's not what I'm trying to do, because I know that your burden is great.

My hope is to simply reframe the conversation so that we might have an understanding of the gospel story and recover our place within it and what God's plan of salvation is. And I would encourage you to listen to it because it is an awesome conversation. Happy listening.

And I remember reading in your book how you had a Hindu scholar, I believe, Indian scholar, who said he saw it as story and an invitation into that story.

And many of us who have been followers of Jesus, and we want to follow Jesus, we want to be faithful, we want to honor the word of God, and yet we find that even our evangelistic presentations fall short.

Because I think, you know, Paul Weston and Paul and I were having a discussion, and I remember talking with Paul and he was talking about evidential apologetics. And I said, it doesn't matter. In the culture that I work in, they don't care. People don't care about that.

They don't care about that as though they did 20, 30 years ago.

And today it's talking about a culture obsessed with identity and individuality, so awash and caught up in the currents of it that they don't know, even realize they're being carried along.

And when we mention some of these, even the terms we're using are very difficult for some people to just grasp onto now, not say we jettison terms, we need terms, we need education, we need all those things. But we have to be able to translate, as you talked about earlier and new begin saying, how do we contextualize?

We bring the message of the gospel upon the hearers in such a way that they understand and can take it in. So talk about that for a moment.

How do we do that in our Western, individualistic, idolatrous culture, where we take this concept of story and bring it in? Because I think of, you know, we've really brought it down to, like, the four spiritual laws.

You know, we really try to make it simple, but it's bigger than that, than what we've seen before. But how do we go about creating that?

And I'm not saying that we jettison everything, but help us understand how we can invite people along in this journey with us.

So we're not used car salesmen trying to get people to buy the pitch of Jesus, but are participating in an invitation to participate in Jesus story as he's seeking to redeem the world.

Let me speak at two levels.

Did I give you a fire hose there? You gave me the fire hose. I'm just shooting it back.

You're going to get more than you bargained for.

Bring it, bring it.

Okay.

I was in my mid-50s at the time, and I thought, I'll stay here forever. This is great. And then I was invited by some pastors to come down and bring an. Do an experiment in theological education in Phoenix.

So that's basically what I'm doing here in Phoenix.

And so I wish I could talk more about this, but in a NutShell, in the 60s, 70s and 80s, people like my professor, Harvey Kahn at Westminster, Leslie Newbig, and David Bosch, and many of these thinkers were arguing that if we wanted to do the kind of thing you're asking, change the church, it had to start with theological education. The problem was with the formation of ministers.

And they don't know the story, they don't know their culture, and they don't know how to talk in these terms and disciple their people. And so I was invited by a bunch of pastors who basically said, we don't like the options we have for theological education here.

And what we want is we want to train our pastors so they know the biblical story, so they know the Western story, so they can work with the kind of thing that we've just been talking about.

And so we've been working at this because I've been, and I've been following the models of these missiologists who've suggested big changes in pedagogy and curriculum structures and evaluation and assignments. So we have totally reoriented theological education here in Phoenix. And it's actually quite exciting, but I won't go into that.

So the first thing that has to happen if this is to be a reality is leaders themselves have to be, have to be infused with this story. They have to sweat the story, they have to bleed the story. This story has to permeate their lives themselves.

And I know that's happening here in Phoenix because we've been going now about eight or 10 years. And that's what the leaders will tell you, that the thing that has changed them most is the story now has filled them up. Here's the problem.

You can teach story in biblical theology, but then you go into systematic theology or church history or practical theology, and you're working with something different.

So you've got to have a narrative and missional approach to systematic theology, practical theology, church history, and you got to do a lot more cultural studies, because most seminaries are not doing cultural studies. So you have to teach people to read and exegete their culture and they got to know the story of their culture.

That's, that's what we're doing over a four year theological education.

And when our leaders leave, they know the biblical story well and they know the western story well, and they are struggling in dialoguing between those stories in their own ministries. So that's the first level. The second level is this is a whole lot easier than you think. It's just a matter of how what you're doing.

What happened in Phoenix, this started not, I did not come down here first of all to do theological education. It started two years, three years before that.

There was a number of young pastors who basically said what you just said, how do we get the church to know the story of the world? And they specifically had a concern for how do we bring the gospel to bear on vocation so we can impact the public life of Phoenix?

How can we shape a vocation so that they understand the vocation? And so we designed a discipleship program. And this discipleship program was for laity, not for leaders, but for laity.

And so we've had, now it's been going about 12, 14 years and there's been as many as three or 400 people going through it at one time. And they spend nine months going through this. And quarter one is reading the Biblical story.

It's reading our drama of scripture and reading through the biblical story. The second quarter is learning how to appropriate that biblical story through spiritual practices. Be faithful.

The third is learning about the breadth of the mission of the church in its particular culture. And the fourth is about vocation. What does it mean to work out your vocation in the biblical story? And what has happened is we're not.

Again, I want to insist here, we're not talking about people with theological education. This is a discipleship program.

And it's now moved beyond Phoenix to other parts of the United States and even other parts of the world, Brazil, Canada, Hungary and other places.

What this does is it commits people to a very serious discipleship only for nine months, but at the end of nine months, every person will tell you, we had no idea how important the biblical story is, and now we do. And most of them can narrate that story in a simple way, but can do it.

And so what we've got is we've got part of our theological education to bring these two together is that students are allowed to choose half of their own assignments. They're not given assignments. They can do whatever they want. And they just have to put in so many hours and they have to show us what they're doing.

And so a lot of these ministers for their assignments will put together a curriculum on how to teach Western culture.

And I wish I could show you some of the phenomenal ways that some of these pastors who know how to pastor better than I do can, very simple ways explain what it means to be caught up in the Western story and idolatry in such a way that people can understand it in 15 minutes. They become very good at it or teaching the biblical story and how it shapes preaching and discipleship.

But it starts with leaders who are concerned to do that well, and then leaders who are gifted communicators, leaders who are pastors, leaders who are good teachers, leaders who know how to translate what they're learning in seminary into the. The language that is understood by people in their churches. And again, I'm telling you, I'm not talking theoretically here. I've seen it happen.

I've seen gifted communicators.

If I was able to share my screen right now with you, what I would show you is the way one pastor teaches his new members class in such with an illustration that they will never forget when they're done. Maybe I can share that illustration with you without showing it.

It's fine.

What he does, he draws a circle on the whiteboard and he says, what do Americans think the most important thing in life is and what do they pursue? I won't go into all the things, but they answer. And many of the things they answer is wealth, comfort, the consumer worldview.

Then what he'll do is he say, why is it that all Americans pursue that? Isn't that interesting that I've been teaching this course for 10 years and you always answer the same thing.

How is it that everybody pursues the same thing? Did they take a course on worldview, on American worldview somewhere?

And then he'll say, no, they learned this because there's a long story that's led up to this consumer. And he'll briefly just, he'll just tell it in very simple ways. Like very simple ways.

And he'll draw an arrow that comes up to this circle that leads to a consumer worldview. And then he'll say, okay. He'll step back from that. He'll say, what do we believe as Christians?

And they'll immediately, in an enlightenment form, start giving you beliefs. We believe there's triune God. We believe that human beings are sinners. We believe that God created the world. We believe Jesus died on the cross.

We believe he rose again. We believe we're to believe. And he'll start, and what he'll do is, is just summarize what they say, triune God and put a little circle around it.

Human beings are sinners. Put a little circle around and it put all these little circles of all these things we believe. And then he'll say, okay folks, here's the problem.

All of those little beliefs are like ping pong balls. And this western story is like a powerful river that's pushing everybody towards a consumer worldview.

He says, what happens when you take that ping pong ball of all these things you believe and throw them in the river? They will be carried along by the powerful river.

And what will happen is soon you'll believe in a triune God and human beings are sinners, that God is creator. But your life is shaped by this powerful American story that is leading you to the consumer worldview. Now I have just.

He does this diagrammatically and I'm telling you, when he does it like this with his new members class, people get it like that. They get it like that.

Or when I lecture in the Surge School, which is this discipleship group for laity, when I lecture and give a big lecture in there about that, immediately all the stories are about questions about, well, how do we live faithfully in a consumer culture, how do we live faithfully in a consumer that idolizes technology or political ideologies or, you know, or freedom, liberty, and so on? And so what happens is you can get people very quickly talking about these issues. I'm telling you, I've seen it. I'm not speaking hypothetically here.

You can get people who are not theologically educated beginning to understand this and wrestling with it, if they're serious Christians. Part of the problem is just say the two biggest problems we're facing is leaders themselves aren't trained.

And then secondly, and this is something we simply can't do anything about, and that is that a lot of the church simply is not that deeply committed to following Jesus. They're committed to coming on Sunday morning for a nice worship experience. But beyond that, don't ask me to do much more than that.

I'll be a good ethical person individually.

But for the person who is seriously committed to following Jesus, they don't have to have a theological education if they have leaders who understand this. And it can start to lead them in ways to think about how to live into the biblical story.

And quite frankly, our book, True Story of the Whole World, it's a thin book. It's a book that is being widely used in Bible studies precisely for this reason, to help people understand the biblical story.

And it's readable by people who, to have no university education, quite literally readable by a person who does not have to have not only theological education, doesn't even have to have higher education to read that. And so people, if they're willing, and that's not a huge commitment, are able to study together in small groups the biblical story.

And so I've got many, much, much contact with people who've read that, what it's done for them. So it can happen. It doesn't have to be at a highfalutin level that we've been talking about.

I was assuming that you wanted to go deep here, so I went deep.

No, I want to do both.

You can also come up to the level of people who, at a very simple level, can understand you're living in a story that's shaping you idolatrously. You need the biblical story to reshaping you so that the cultural story doesn't become your default story.

How do we change that narrative when you mention our pastors aren't trained? It's true.

I worked with Vanderblumen, which does a lot of the profile of placing pastors and nonprofits, and they said that 50% of their placements now in pastoral ministry have no theological education, no Bible degree, no seminary degree. And these are some of the megachurches that we have in the United States.

They're looking for, in many ways, a person who is that CEO who understands the business aspect of things, or that charismatic personality that communicates from the front, knowing this, how do we go about changing that? And how do we invite people to be a part of that story? Is it buying your book? Is that the solution?

No.

He says, if it succeeds, there's going to be a lot of copycats because that's the way America works. And he's right. There have been a lot of copycats since then. A lot of other people say, boy, Gawain and Bartholomew, they can't tell the story better.

I can tell it even better. Well, great. Go for it. And so they don't have to buy our book. There's lots of other books out there. But the point is not just a book.

I mean, there's other things you've mentioned in your small narrative or your small scenario that I think when you ask me, how do you change it? My first answer is, I have no idea.

I love that.

When you start talking. When you start talking about a celebrity culture.

Yeah.

When you start talking about the business model of the church. And let's just take it further.

When you talk about the way consumerism is shaping worship and preaching and church growth and thinking, what's happened here is that the problem is so deep that I'm not sure what the solution is. The problem is very deep. And, you know, quite frankly, you're not going to get pastors who are even.

Pastors who are even willing to think about these issues, let alone put the time into reading a book.

And so the problem is, and this is what I say, because I've never seen so many discouraged pastors as I have over the last year because of COVID I think what has happened is, number one, Covid has raised to the surface all kinds of what I call idolatrous crap that's in the church.

It is. Totally agree.

Secondly, we've been in the midst of some of the worst idolatry in the church on the left and on the right we've ever seen before, and we've seen the Church capitulated to so many isms on the left and on the right. And they're very discouraged because they've learned to start to discern these isms.

And they're discouraged because they see their people just capitulating to these isms, falling into idolatry, and they're so discouraged. And I don't know how many times I've had to give a speech that I'm going to give you in about 30 seconds that I give to them over many hours.

Basically, I say, here's where you have to be thankful that this is not your mission. This is God's mission. Your responsibility is not to change the church because you can't do it. You don't have the power.

It's got to be the work of the Spirit. You've got one job. That job is to throw yourself into following Christ and using all your gifts you can to help your church be faithful.

And if there is such idolatry and an unwillingness to follow Christ at a deep, committed level and you are doing everything you can, there's just unwillingness.

I said you should not take that burden on yourself, or if you take that burden on learn how to lament, but then to leave it at the foot of the cross and to continue to work, or you're going to be discouraged and disheartened and you're going to give up and you're going to burn out because you can't change anybody.

As he looks at the church in America, he's going to see a church that is deeply compromised by the idols of our culture and that he or she just can totally give up or can take a humanist American attitude. I'm going to change these things. But if they give up or they take on that humanist attitude, they're going to be destroyed.

They got to take the attitude of the long haul, spirituality of the long haul. They have to just say, what can I do? Where's my sphere of influence? Who wants to listen to me? Who's willing to follow Jesus seriously?

Who can I train as leaders and to think strategically and then basically say, God, here's my small, here's my loaves and fishes. What are you willing to do with them? I don't know. If you know Zach Eswine, he's one of our.

Yeah, yeah. The imperfect pastor. Love that book.

Yeah. Zach is one of our Professors here in Phoenix.

And Zach has said in that book Imperfect Pastor, and I love it, he says that basically Americans want the kingdom to come big, fast, and famous. We want our churches to be big. We want sanctification to happen fast, and we want to be famous in the process.

Even when we say, make God's name famous, even when we use nice holy language for our famous idea, he says, but the trouble is in the Bible, he says, the kingdom of God comes slow, not fast. The kingdom of God comes small, not big. And the kingdom of God comes through obscurity, through obscure acts.

People that are not recognizable and through acts are not recognizable rather than famous. And so I want to encourage leaders, go out and do your small, slow, obscure pastoring and see what the Lord will do with that.

And don't try to change the whole evangelical church in North America. And don't be discouraged.

And so he wants to compare between the crowds and the disciples. Now, I think there's some legitimacy there. And what he's saying is, I want those crowds to come to Christ.

And so I'm going to continue to call them to Christ, but I'm going to put my effort into discipling those disciples so hopefully maybe they can disciple others. And so I want to say that if you ask me, how do we fix the American church, I said, I don't want to fix the American church, because I can't.

And I'm not even going to try.

What I'm going to do is I'm going to take the 70 leaders God's given me here in Phoenix, and I'm going to throw myself into discipling them so they understand this. And I'm going to pray that those 70 leaders will have an impact maybe on 70 more people.

And just maybe, maybe, just maybe in small, slow, obscure ways, it will begin to shape the church in Phoenix to be a good News people, it's not going to fix the church in Phoenix, and it's not going to fix the evangelical church. It's not even going to fix the church these pastors are leaders of.

But maybe, just maybe, the Lord can use these small acts of obedience to help the church be a little more faithful. So that's what I'd want to say. Where's your sphere of influence? What can you do?

And so I want to say I want to throw myself into being as faithful as I can in small ways, and I want to invite you to do that, too.

And I want to go back to something you just said. You said you need to learn how to lament so that you don't get angry. Describe that for us. What is that lament that you're talking about?

Well, I wish I, you know, I'm an old man, so I didn't. I didn't know all this stuff when I should have.

There's a lot of people writing about it now, and I wish I'd understood this in my early Christian life. But I think what I'm talking about is Lament. What I have is I have a number of songs that I play in that.

And I think it's Lament is acknowledging the state of affairs, acknowledging, number one, that the United States is a deeply idolatrous nation, two, acknowledging that the church has followed in that idolatry. It's simply acknowledging that this is the reality of the world in which we live. And as you do that, you're acknowledging your own idolatry.

Your own heart is idolatrous. So it starts with simply an acknowledgement, and it's an acknowledgment that is willing to cry out to God and say, why? Why?

Why is not the church not like the way you described it in the Book of Acts? Why is the church not like the way Paul described it as the new humanity? Why is the church like it is, and why aren't you doing anything about it?

I mean, it leads to questions of frustration and saying, why? Not thinking you have to suppress these things, but just saying, why? What is going on, God? Why are you allowing this? God's big.

And more than half of the psalms are lament psalms in the Bible. I shouldn't say more than half. More than half. The two major groups of psalms are praise and thanksgiving and lament.

And so lament is one of the major groups of psalms. And so these lament psalms are because God said, look, I'm big enough for you to come to me.

You know, you don't have to, you know, say whatever you want to say, yell at me, tell me what you are thinking.

And so there's kind of sometimes when you get to that point of being willing to say that and cry out to God, but when you do that, you're coming to God.

And every psalm of lament I know, except for one, ends with the person finally coming back to say God, okay, I believe you're doing something about this and that your will ultimately will be done. Your kingdom will come, and the injustice of the world, the unjust, will not get away with what they're doing.

And you will judge your people, and you will judge the nations, and your kingdom will come and justice will come. And I will celebrate that day be when your justice will come.

And so all the psalms end with finally coming to that point where they've just been able to express their frustration to God rather than in cynicism or in complaining or anger or hatred towards church members.

What it does is you express it to God towards that anger, and then as you do, then he enables you to finally come to see, I'm doing something about it, doing something about it. And until that day, get on board with what I'm doing about it.

Bring small acts of obedience and faithfulness into that world, small gleams of light into that world of darkness, and let me take care of history, thank you very much. I'm God. And then you finally can leave it with God. I.

I can't describe it as well as a lot of younger pastors who I'm working with because they've read more on it because they're younger and are struggling with this more and are working through it. But there's a lot of good writing out there right now on Lament.

And I suggest Lament is a good way for the Christian who's serious about being faithful and following Christ and looks out and sees America not as a Christian nation, but as a deeply idolatrous nation, and looks out at the church and doesn't see a faithful church, sees. Sees a church that is deeply shaped by the idolatry of its culture, that laments a good way to go.

You know, you bring up something I find very interesting. Several years ago, I interviewed for a Bible teaching position at a ministry that was just in radio.

They brought me out to their headquarters, and I got to go into the studio because they were experimenting with online stuff. This was several years ago.

And as I went in there, I saw they had Bibles that they gave to everyone in the audience, and they were all Red, white and blue. And my reaction was, just as yours is right now. It was, you have united God and country in such a way that it's become, in my mind, idolatrous.

Needless to say, I didn't get the job, but I think many Americans have done that. However, within the last election and over the last several years, we've seen a shift where you're seeing the.

I don't want to say the wheat from the tares, but there is this nationalism, as you mentioned, on one side. And then we've got other forms of idolatry expressing itself both on the left and on the right.

And in many ways it's a great opportunity for the Confessing Church. And I'm going to use that term because I think Bonhoeffer, that was a term that he used that I find is becoming very relevant to this day.

I mean, we say evangelicals, but I feel like every time I turn around and I know Oz Guinness, who is just on the show talked about, he's not willing to lose that terminology, classically as it's understood.

But I'm wondering, do we try to use this term Confessing Church because the church has become so compromised in ways that I don't think many people do, as you mentioned, we've become so consumeristic, which is a form of idolatry. But people don't see it that way. And it's not just in the United States. I know you've been in Brazil and interacting with many Brazilians.

I've seen the same thing in Western cultures. It's not just in the United States. Let's take it out of America for a moment.

We're seeing this idolatry permeate every culture in many ways because we have exported the church and our understanding with enlightenment and all this background.

What do we need to relearn from our brothers and sisters around the world in different cultures that can help challenge our understanding of our consumerism so that we can become more faithful disciples of Jesus Christ?

These are great questions. Let me just say two things. One, it's very interesting that Bonhoeffer speaks of the Confessing Church. There's this Latin word, status confessionis.

And that language is pointing to times where the church must take a life and death stance against idolatry. And there are two times where status confessionis has been called upon. Number one, with the National Socialism of the German Nazis.

And that's where Bonhoeffer, Barth and those people come in. The other time has been apartheid in South Africa.

And Neubingen raises the question, as do others, is global capitalism, global consumerism, global economism which is spreading around the world. Is this a time for a third invitation to think in terms of status?

Confessionis, in other words, is the idolatry that's flowing from the United States and Western culture to the rest of the world now reach that point of bringing such injustice globally and to the world that we've got to invoke this terminology to say the church must take a stand against this if it is to be faithful. I won't answer that question. I'll just leave it there.

But I think that just the fact that anybody's raised that question and more than one have, has ought to lead us to be a little bit to really start to see what we're talking about here. But the second point I want to make is you talk about the importance of listening to brothers and sisters from other parts of the world.

I just couldn't agree more. Now it's a double edged sword here I'm finding because I spend time in three countries and I purposely narrowed it to three countries.

But every year I spend about two or three months in Brazil, Chile and Hungary. And now I'm going to think of Brazil and Chile for a moment.

In Brazil and Chile, the globalization and the American form of globalization has invaded every one of the urban centers. And so what you've got is you got the same consumerism, you got the same kind of Western idolatry there is everywhere.

So it's impacting the church in many ways. The church themselves are having trouble now seeing through this idolatry because it's become so dominant.

On the other hand, there's still, there's still a critique that's comes from the west that we simply need to hear. And I like to think in terms of five areas.

These are the five areas where I have heard the non Western church critique the west over the last 30 years in writing and in person. And number one, the Western Church is rationalistic. It's reduced the Christian faith simply to what you believe up here.

And your life is not as important as your doctrine. It's rationalistic. Secondly, it's individualistic.

That is, you've reduced the Christian faith to individual salvation, individual sin, individual salvation. No understand of structural sin, no understanding of communal salvation, cosmic salvation. Thirdly, dualism, I.e.

you've separated religion from most of the rest of life. And religion is not the dynamic power that shapes all of life the way all the world has always understood religion.

What we've done is put religion over in this Private realm that shapes only parts of our lives, doesn't shape business, doesn't shape politics. Preach the gospel. Don't talk about politics. Preach the gospel. Don't talk about racism.

That will show you how we've just put the gospel over in this private realm and that dualism that separates so much of life from the gospel. The fourth thing is what I call spiritualism that basically says going to heaven when we die is the goal of the Christian life.

And then I've had literally had Christians from other parts of the world say, where do you get that in the Bible? In the Bible, it's a new heavens and a new earth and it's the resurrection of the body and we don't go up to heaven.

In the last chapters of the Bible, the new Jerusalem comes to earth and they say, where do you get this idea of living in heaven? This is strange. This is not to Christian faith. And I say, yeah, it's the Platonic Christian faith that many Americans have absorbed.

And so a spiritualism they critique. And then the fifth thing is a consumerism and especially the popular culture kind of consumerism that's shaping our worship and our churches.

And so I think rationalism, individualism, dualism, spiritualism, consumerism, and we might even say a popular culture form of consumerism, not just in economic consumerism, I think is where we better start listening to our brothers and sisters.

But I found that quite frankly, and I've been told this many by many Third world Christians as they've come to the United States or had Americans come to them, that Americans don't listen very well.

They still think that they have the truth if they're Christians, or they have the truth economically if they're not, or technologically or whatever, because they're wealthy and they're not willing to listen to Christians from other parts of the world. I've heard this from Christians who felt a lot of pain, who have come into the American church. And they basically are.

The insights that they have are not welcomed.

I make a habit, and I've done this for about 25 years of when I see a Christian from a non Western country come, I go to them and you would not believe the insight I've gained through this and what's come of it. I've gone to them and I say, what is the first thing you noticed about the Western church?

I ask them that question and usually they'll be very nice and say, oh, it's the most wonderful thing I've ever. And I say, baloney. I'll often nicely Depending on how well I know them, nicely or sharply rebuke them and say, that's baloney.

Really, what really did you see? And often they'll smile because they'll know and they'll know. And then if you finally get them to start opening up, I'll tell you.

Their insights into what they see are startling in terms of the way they can expose the idolatry of the American church. But quite frankly, most Americans never even thought to ask that question.

And if they see some poor black African or some poor Latin American come in, these are maybe illegal immigrants or these are not people we want to listen to. What we have is a celebrity culture. We have a vision of what the kind of person that can tell us how to live.

Our celebrity pastor who can speak to 10,000 people.

It's not these people that come from other parts of the world that probably have so much more insight that could tell us so much more, is I would invite people, next time you see a Christian from another part of the world just arrived, go and say, what is the first thing you noticed about the Christian church?

And I'll tell you, if you do that, like I have for a quarter of a century, you're going to be startled at the kinds of things they're going to tell you.

You know, it's interesting. I remember at a conference nearby where I'm at, it was a men's conference. And of course, it has a lot of the hype in the men's conferences.

They often do. Well, Brother Yoon, the Heavenly man was, you know, the book the Heavenly man is about him. And he was actually present at the conference.

Well, they found that out almost immediately in the middle of the middle of the conference that he was attending. And they asked him to come on the platform to speak. And I got to make sure I get my facts straight. But they said, would you give a word to us?

And he said, please pray for us so that we may not become like you, is basically what he said, because. And they quickly got him off the platform.

But he was basically saying is that you've become in love with yourself, you've become consumeristic, you've become addicted to comforts and power.

And in many ways, a lot of the culture stuff that we see going on right now, I think a lot of Christians have that they've made power and comfort at their. I mean, they're idle and they don't realize that. But I'm like, jesus never called us to be safe. He called and said that the world has rejected me.

It's going to reject you and you're going to have tribulation and you're going to have to endure suffering as a good soldier of Jesus. And he wasn't talking in the political realm. He was just talking about living your life and sharing Jesus and living that way. Yeah.

And I think it's so difficult. And I'm finding that Covid has accelerated the process because you're seeing such a shift right now in the culture.

We recognize that the future of the church is not big, but small, and we need to get smaller and more mobile because we're just seeing the writing on the wall. And I said. I said, you're the first church I've ever heard doing this. Every other church is big, big, big, big. And they're saying, no.

Yeah, because that gets bigger. That's right. It gets butts in the seats is what it does. And we become addicted to that. And it's like.

But that can't survive, especially in the culture and the way the winds are blowing now. Some people are hoping, like I was talking with Guinness the other day, for a Christian renaissance.

And I'm looking at him, I'm like, you know, God bless you, and I. I hope for revival like you do. As a matter of fact, I need to hunger for it more.

But what I see in the winds of change right now is our culture is totally shifted, and for us to live, we're going to have to live just as a different group of people. What are these things that you're learning? I mean, as you're shown this, you're talking about story and we're talking about the global church.

And what else can we, though, learn from the global church?

But at the same time, and I want to make sure that we be equally offensive in that there are certain things that the global church has idolatries in their own culture, but some of that actually comes from ours. I mean, even in the exploitation of the word of faith movement and the prosperity gospel that I see going so everywhere today.

And I remember hearing it, I think it was Guinness that talked to me, and he said, you know, I have some Chinese Christians in the churches that are. He goes, I was talking to a pastor, and he said that my people are two unanswered prayer requests away right now from leaving the faith.

And I thought, what do we need to do to strengthen and see ourselves as a global village, not just A church in America. I'm trying to get out of that a bit, but see ourselves as a global body of Christ. In many ways, we are a global village.

But how do we really unite theologically and get pastors to see this? So they don't see missions is over there, because really, missions is across the street. And God has brought these nations to us.

And I was talking to Daniel Yang of the Sin Institute. I used to say they brought the nations for us to reach them. He goes, but it's. The nations are reaching us. And that's been the shift.

I mean, what else can we learn in the middle of this culture and where it's headed right now? I mean, what do you think the state of things are?

And how do we try to really participate in what God is doing as well as challenging the idolatries in our culture?

I don't know where to begin, Travis. I really.

But it's all. I mean, it's. This is where we're at, and this is what I find that people are not talking about.

Okay, let me just list some things without going into detail. I think, first of all, we got to start thinking about how powerfully our worship is forming us. We have walked away from tradition and worship.

Most of us don't have major parts of worship anymore that were central to the worship of the church and the worship of Jews. We've just neglected that. Our worship is shaping us, but for the most part, it's shaping us in terms of popular culture, not the gospel.

Draw that out.

I think we got to reshape our worship.

What do you mean by that?

Oh, man.

Are you talking about Amir? You're not talking about going back to piano?

No, the organ. I think we've got to realize that are that most songs are being written and shaped by the consumer worldview.

And we've got a narrow group of songs we're singing, and many of them are very shallow in the approach they have to the Christian faith. And so, number one, we've got an approach to worship in many churches that are just kind of sing some songs and listen to a long sermon.

So we've cut out all kinds of stuff with that. We've cut out a call to worship. We cut out prayers of invocation. We've cut out a lot of prayer in our worship. We've cut out God greeting us.

The biggest thing we've cut out is confession of sin and taking time with confession of sin. We've cut out all kinds of ways of responding to the word of God. We've Cut out benedictions. We've cut out the way God sends us.

We need a richer worship that is forming us. And we could talk about this for a long, long time. We just need a richer culture that is forming us.

Okay, so we got worship. What else?

Second, we need to spend far more time on formation. I'm finding that many of our leaders are throwing their energies, time and money into Sunday morning.

Yeah.

They're not throwing their time into nurturing people, helping, you know, reading the Bible as one story, reading drama of scripture, or reading true story of the whole world, or just reading the Bible and studying it, or praying together or forming people in terms of. Forming people in terms of their vocation or helping them understand their culture. We need to return to the importance of formation.

I think that is just a critical thing and start throwing much more behind formation. I think thirdly, and this is a part of formation, but I think it's a really important part of formation, and I've done this.

We got to start training our parents to train families, because I don't care how good a formation you're doing, if your kids are spending hours and hours and hours and hours and hours and hours on TV and video games and there are 45 minutes in Sunday school, you're not going to undo all of that.

They don't even have Sunday school anymore. There's no. There's not a lot of Sunday school.

I know. And if there is, it's during the church service. So they don't worship with the rest of God's people. And so I think that, like when I was.

I asked what's the best thing I can do right now in our church?

And I decided the most important thing my wife and I could do was to invite young families with young kids to come and talk about what it meant to parent in this, this world. We got so many people that wanted to come to our place on Saturday morning. We had to have two long sessions, and we dealt with all kinds of issues.

And so we've got to somehow think about forming parents to take up their task of forming the next generation. So I'll just stop there. But may I say one more thing? And this is part of formation.

We got to think about helping our people understand how to read our Culture, and they don't have to be trained to do it.

But there's all kinds of ways of teaching people how to read culture without having them say, look, we need you to take a seminary course on how to exegete culture and how to tell the story of the West. There's all kinds of ways of doing that in other ways.

So these are some of the ways, and I think helping them understand the biblical story in worship, the biblical story in formation, the biblical story in the home, all of that is going to be really important. Maybe I can close what I'm saying here with a story of. Of someone that called me once.

And this person had been doing a lot of writing, and they called me after Drama Scripture published and said, thank you for publishing Drama Scripture. And I was kind of taken aback. Why did you say that?

Well, I found out this person was dying of cancer, and this person had written a lot of books on evangelicalism. And basically, he says he missed the biggest problem that evangelicals were facing. And the way he put it is, who gets to narrate the world.

And he said that evangelicals are being more narrated by the modern Western humanist story than they are by the biblical story. And so he wrote an ancient evangelical call, which many people then sign, many leaders signed.

And in that ancient evangelical call, he says, the first and most important thing is, what story are you living out of? Then he went on to say, that story needs to shape our worship. It needs to shape our formation. It needs to shape our mission. It needs to shape.

And he goes through five areas. But he says knowing that story is the starting point for reshaping the church to be. To become what it's called to be.

That's really good stuff. I mean, hearing all of that and about the formation and the family, it's something that is so desperately needed that I'm astounded at it.

I pastored in Chicago for six years, and I remember one night I was working primarily with youth, and we had. After the youth ministry night was over, we would have kids over to our home.

And one night I remember having 17 young men on my back porch, and only two of them had dads in the home. And so seeing that they're desperate for. I mean, we can get knowledge anywhere, but we don't have wisdom. And we need that other generation.

We need to recover the family. We need to recover those things. And I'm wondering if Covid is helping that or harming it. I'm sure probably a bit of both.

But I'm also reading texts and talking to people that are reading books such as the Benedict Option. And he's calling for a withdrawal from culture. But I can't go there that far in the way that he's going because I don't see Jesus doing that.

However, his understanding and his proclamation or saying that the family is so essential going forward because it's being attacked in ways that. I mean, the devil's coming against the family. Just need to look around and we see it everywhere we go, and we need to restrengthen it.

I mean, there's so many things that seem to be pressing in all around us that it can become overwhelming at times. And we're busy. We have so many things going on, but yet we still can participate in that story. And God's not calling for perfection.

And part of our busyness, part of the problem. And basically, if we say on that final day of judgment, God, I was just so busy, he's going to say, that's not a good enough excuse.

I gave you 24 hours. And I. And there's a lot of ways you could have made yourself unbusy. There's a lot of ways you could have reestablished new rhythms in your life.

And in establishing those new rhythms, you could have begun to be shaped and formed and shaped your children, form them in different ways. You were busy because you got caught up in a certain kind of a culture and in many ways. And it's idolatry.

Sorry, that excuse doesn't wash here in the final judgment.

Okay, so we've talked about a lot of stuff, and this stuff is awesome. And we're going to have to probably pick this up at another time because I think we're just scratching the surface of things.

But I want to really bring this in for people, just for them to take home. And we like to say, here's your water bottle for the week, and we want someone to take this so they can water their faith this week.

What's something that a person can take away from? Our conversation we've talked about a lot, but your heartbeat.

I mean, you are hitting people with a fire hose today and you are spraying them with some pretty intense and amazing stuff that I think is essential for people going forward as the culture continues to shift and people need to find themselves in this story. But what is the water bottle that people can take away this week?

You know, I'd hand a different water bottle to different people. It depends on who they are. As simple as this sounds, I would just say part of our problem is people don't know their Bibles.

They're not reading their Bibles anymore. They simply are not reading them. And they're spending more time on FaceTime and Netflix than they are in their Bibles.

And not only that, prayer has, you know, has become so thin in our church circles. And so we're finding the leaders we're dealing with here in Phoenix. Will tell me regular people don't know their Bibles.

They're not praying, they're not doing any. There's no devotional practice together in the families, as simple as this sounds. I mean, so this may not be your audience, maybe your audience.

This is not their water bottle. But I'm saying start reading your Bibles and start spending time praying.

Make that essential to your life, essential to the rhythms and the patterns of your life. Now you might say, abby, I believe the word of God is powerful and can transform and change us.

I believe that prayer is the only way that we can begin to experience the SAP of the vine of the life of Christ. And so, you know, these things are essential, but I don't know how to, you know, they sound so simple.

And so they're going to have to be accompanied by a million other things. But that's my starting point.

And I remember reading one social commentator that said, you know, we've traded prayer for posting.

And I think that's unfortunately too true, because I look back to when I first started in pastoral ministry as a young man, and I remember there were prayer meetings going on, and some of those churches still have them, but those old saints understood the power of it. And it used to bother me that there weren't a lot of young people there, but the older people knew where the power was.

And I think the younger generation took it for granted.

I remember one woman passing away in her late 90s and a man said to me, I feel that she's gone because she rose up every day to pray for me at 4:30 in the morning since I was a young man. And I thought, we have to recover prayer and ministry of the word, especially our leaders, our pastors.

I mean, they're really versed in techniques and leadership, and we've talked about exegeting culture, but oftentimes we just get caught up with what we see and it's plug and play and what the people want, because that's what they're caught up in, that we're reacting rather than helping them formulate these things. And I think what you talked about today, spiritual formation, recovering of family, devotional practices, the rhythms of life, exegeting Our culture.

I mean, these are all water bottles for different people. But I think it gets back to those simple things. Knowing the Word and knowing the Lord through prayer.

And then he changes us, and then we end up helping reach the world around us. But I want to thank you so much for being generous with your time. How can people learn more about you and what God is doing through you at Phoenix?

Just give us some ways that people can check stuff out.

I have a website that is mainly to plop a lot of free material on for people to use for teaching. And a lot of my writing I put on there for free.

And that's at missionworldview.com missionworldview1word.com and if you wanted to understand what we're doing in terms of theological education, because there's a lot of wonderful things happening, they would go to missional training. One word.

Missionaltraining.org missionaltraining.org and just get your books on Amazon. How many books have you written now out there, published?

I think there's about 12.

Okay, that's awesome. So get one of the books. And again, thank you so much for your time and coming on. Apollos watered.

Good to be here, Travis. Thank you so much for inviting me.

I told you that was really deep stuff.

But I, I hope that you go to his website, check out what they're doing, because it's really, really phenomenal to see how God is using that, see how people are growing in their knowledge of Scripture to see how they are, are changing and watering their worlds for the truth of who Jesus Christ is.

And I want to let you know that today's episode has been brought to you in part by our friends at Tyndale House in the nlt, the New Living Translation. And they have partnered with us. And if you want to get a hold of anything on Tyndale.com go to Tyndale.com and put in promo code NLT Bibles.

And you get 15% off of anything@tyndale.com but I would recommend going online and getting yourself an NLT Bible. You will be glad that you did.

And if this episode has helped you so that you can water your world, would you subscribe to this podcast, go online to our social media pages and follow us so that it might get out to other people. The more people subscribe, the more comments that are made, the more people hear and know what God is doing through this ministry.

And if you are interested in partnering with us and sharing the blessing of what God is doing in us.

And once to do through us, then I would encourage you to go online to ApolloSwatered.org and click that Support Us icon in the upper right hand corner and then pick the amount.

Because we are looking for watering partners to be a part of our Apollo's Watered family so that this content can be created and it can get out to people around the world that they might be able to water their world for the name of Jesus Christ. I want to thank our Apollos Watered team, Kevin, Eliana, Rebecca, Melissa Donovan. It's a great team and I love serving along with you.

And with that in mind, this is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollos Watered. Stay watered everybody.