#200 | Does Your Church Allow For People In Process?, Pt. 1 | Mark Baker

So Hebert said, well, there's a totally different way of thinking about who belongs. That's looking at orientation or relationship with a center.

So in a centered church, rather than having a line, it establishes a center and says, this is who we are. This is what's important to us. So for simplicity and for sake of agreement, we say Jesus Christ is our center.

And so if someone is heading toward the center, they belong to the group. So we're looking at the person and not saying, are they mowing their lawn on Sunday or not? We're looking at, are they heading toward Jesus?

Are they heading toward the center?

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of God, Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host.

And today in our show, we're having.

Another one of our deep conversations. Have you ever heard the statement, you're getting what you're getting because you're doing what you're doing?

What if we're getting what we're getting in the church because we have the wrong perspective about belonging, about being a.

Part of the group?

I don't mean that we have everything wrong, not at all, but that we are focused on the wrong thing. What if we're so focused on boundaries that we have forgotten heart, the center of the church, of why we are a part of it in the first place?

Today I begin a new conversation with a pastor, missionary, professor and author, Mark Baker, about how another thinker brought insights from being a missionary and mathematical theory to bear on how we understand ourselves as the church. Now, I know some people think mathematical theory. I'm out.

No, stay tuned because I guarantee it's going to be very insightful for you, math and non math people alike. I'm not a mathlete at all, but I get a lot out of it every time I talk and read about these concepts that we're talking about today.

Now, for some individuals this is a radical reimagining, but for others, it will probably feel like someone gave you language for what you've known all along.

I pray that is the case and I believe that this way of viewing the church is going to be more and more key in reaching people in the days and years to come. But before we get into that, Today is our 200th episode and to commemorate that moment, I'm talking with my guy, our executive editor, Kevin O'Brien.

And I wanted to Celebrate all that has happened over the past few years. So, Kevin, welcome to the studio.

Welcome on the air.

He's always behind the scenes. He listens to every episode, so this isn't new. He's been on the episodes before, but every once in a while, we like to call him back to the.

To be live on the air. So, Kevin, welcome back, brother.

I am glad to be here. It's pretty wild, isn't it?

200 episodes, man, that's a lot of work.

It's. It's a longer time than it you would think. You look back and you go, wait a minute, how do we get to 200? It does.

It feels like yesterday we were sitting out on my back porch talking about the concept podcast and what can we do with this thing?

And it's amazing to see how much it's changed over time. We've had so many discussions.

You have no idea, for those that.

Are listening out there, how many hours we have spent trying to fine tune it, get it down. And there's just so much that's gone on behind the scenes and so much more to come.

Honestly, I look forward to the day where we're at, like, the 500th episode, and we're like, man, can you believe it's been 500 episodes?

It's crazy, but I know, it is wild.

It's a long way in a short amount of time, though, haven't we?

We really have. And.

And, you know, for all that we've changed and we have changed and adjusted and tweaked and all of those things, I look back at some of those early conversations and the seeds of everything that we're now, we're still there.

It's not like it's like a radical shift, but what it is is a refining of who we are and what we're doing and the language we have to help other people to understand. What do we do as the church entering the 21st century in all of the change that's going on?

And it's crazy to think about how many people we've had on this show.

To talk about this stuff.

Like when we were talking about this in your back porch, I didn't envision the deep conversations being the main thing at first, but as time has gone on, we've had so many conversations that looking back just really mystify me. The amount of people who we've been talking to, who we have coming on the show in the future, it just continues to grow.

And I'm just very grateful to God for all the things that he has done. But now we're at 200 episodes. I am curious from you just really quick because we need to get to Marc Baker.

But what are three.

And I know you could cite many three of the episodes that have really stood out to you since we started this thing.

So this is the kind of question I hate. I hate to be limited in this way, but I think about the things that drive us and so broadly conceptually I think about from the.

The scriptural standpoint of one of our guiding principles. I think about Taylee Lau and a guy who's ethnically Chinese from Singapore, who's bringing.

Who's a New Testament scholar and bringing his ethnic heritage and understanding and helping us understand shame and how sometimes it's bad, but sometimes it's what we need. And we'll talk a little bit with, with about that idea with Marc Baker here in a little bit. But.

So that was one that really strikes me as is really being an important idea.

The conversations you had two of them with Trevor Wax about orthodoxy and because the first conversation he was working on the book that you ended up talking to him about for the second conversation and the need for orthodoxy and looking to our past to as. As the church to understand where we need to stay today. And so that.

That both theological grounding that is really, really practical at the same time. And he talked about the rot problem we have in the church and that we need to shore some things up. And that was a really important one.

And then the third one I would say is a combo pack. And that's the.

The conversations we have with Alan Noble and Kelly Capek and those two together, I take them as sort of a package deal because they're all about identity and how the current cultural moment is promising something it can't deliver. But when we see who God intends us to be. And part of that is being finite, having limits, being human being.

I think the questions surrounding identity that are stressing out so many people today, especially younger people. I think those two back to back conversations we had basically almost a year ago last November.

I guess those were the ones that really jump out at me right now.

So for me there is. Oh, there's just so many people that we could talk to and talk about.

But the episodes that really stuck out to me, I'm going to give you my three here. Cause I never get to give my three. But the first one actually was Oz Guinness just because it was Oz Guinness and I had read Oz for years.

So just kind of meeting him. And that was the first time that I realized, hey, this is a lot bigger than I realized.

And just getting into a conversation with him as time went on, you know, to really. To really pick his brain to delve into it. So he was the first one that really got me just thinking and enjoying it.

I would agree with you on Alan Noble and Kelly Cap being kind of a package deal on that. I really enjoyed interacting with the both of them. They're both funny. I mean, Alan's really funny.

And I just really couldn't stop laughing as we were going on in the show. But one other episode that I enjoyed, although the concept is still deep to me, and that was actually Chris Watkin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I liked him. And probably for a different reason than I would normally on a show.

You just encounter so many people on this show that they love Jesus, they want to see the church go forward, they want to see the kingdom of God expand. And there's certain people that are so humble and God uses in phenomenal ways. And he was one of those guys.

You just sense it as you're with him on the show now. His subject is probably out of all of the subjects we've covered, probably the most in depth mind kind of blowing. Trying to wrap my head around it.

Yeah.

Conversations. So absolutely.

That was an amazing conversation. And I'm looking at the copy of the book that I have right now from him and I want to. I haven't had a chance to read the whole thing.

I want to spend a lot of time.

That's a book that, frankly, if our listeners are interested in doing a book group, I would be interested in doing a book group with you about that book because I think it is that important. I think the ideas that he's talking about could have just sort of earth shattering impact in the years to come. I think it's that big of an idea.

Wow, that's a really big drop there to say that. And he's agreed to come back on again whenever we want to have him. I'm still trying to wrap my brain around the book.

You know, the same with Guy, by the way. I'm going to throw him out there anyway just because he's just such an entertaining dude.

I mean, really, he's like Jerry Garcia dressed as Bilbo Baggins. I mean, I don't know how else to put it. He's a musician and a poet, but his stuff on the imagination really blew my mind.

Yeah. And his poetic sensibility, I'll admit I am. I'm not a poet. But as a storyteller as a wannabe novelist, I get where he's coming from and what he does.

He puts his thumb on the pulse in a way that most of us can never do. And for that reason alone, he's really, really important.

And especially for, I think, those of us who are not inclined towards poetry, understanding his enthusiasm as a guy who doesn't fit, like you're saying, I mean, this is a guy who you look at and you think he's the old dude who belongs on a Harley. Right. I think he's the kind of guy we need to sit with this stuff for a while and just kind of let it soak in.

Yeah, I agree. And speaking of thinking ones, that's what we have on today. We have Mark Baker.

And I want to make sure that we give enough time for our listeners, our audience out there to check out Mark Baker as we talk about the difference between a bounded set and a centered set.

Now, I know these terms might throw you off, but it's the perception of being part of the community that I think is going to be pretty valuable going forward. Because sometimes you have some churches that, you know, you could just be a ghost. You float in and float out, nobody cares.

And there's other churches where you're a part of it and you're either in or you're out. And he wants us to kind of rethink both of those. What does it mean to move toward the center?

So I want us to be able to dive into this conversation with Mark Baber.

And as a side note, we recorded this back in April, so some of the seasonal references are a bit off for August, but just keep that in mind as you listen. And without further ado, let's get to our conversation with Marc Baker. Happy listening.

Mark Baker, welcome to Apollo's Water.

Thank you. Great to be here.

So here we go. Are you ready for the fast five?

I'm ready.

Okay. Being in Honduras, you've been in Central and South America. What is the best Latin food that you love the most?

Oh, you know, Honduras food. Let's see. I guess either pupusas from El Salvador or if you're really an insider, you might know what a baliada is. And Honduras. I'll go.

What are those? You gotta.

It's a. So it's from the north coast of Honduras, and it's a white flour tortilla. Bigger one with crema. It's like a sour cream sort of thing. And. Yeah.

Refried beans folded together. Simple and delicious.

That sounds really, really good. Being that you traveled quite A bit. Being with what you do, the best place to travel is where and why.

Well, yeah, I'm. I love mountains. I grew up. I was the son of a camp director. My father directed a Christian boys camp in upstate New York. So, yeah, I love the.

I mean, I live in California, but. But I would say the Cascades in the northwest would be my favorite mountains. Great place to go.

All right, number three, the strangest food you've ever eaten is what and why?

Oh, strangest food.

And again, strange to your cultural background because I understand everybody's got their culture.

So I'm trying, grasping, you know, like, there must have been something weird in Ethiopia, but I'm not remembering but what. So this was a strange eating experience. Let me go with that. Okay, So I was. For one week. So I taught at a.

And Anabaptist Mennonite seminary in Central America. And it was, you know, the professors traveled rather than the students.

So they would send us off to different countries and the students would come together for a week. So I was in Panama right at. I mean, the literal end of the Pan American Highway.

So this is like, you get to there, it's Yavisa, and after that it's jungle, the Darien, like we're reading about now, you know, the immigrants coming through. So I was there. And so these were indigenous students coming from Wanan and Embera people.

And they pulled up in their dugout canoes for the week of this course, and they. And they brought the food for the week. And so they were unloading, you know, these. These big things of plantains, platanos and fish and stuff. And.

And we just ate the same thing, you know, every meal. And so sometimes the platanos were. Were ripe and what I would consider delicious. Sometimes they're pretty green and they boil them and hard.

But to think fish just like every meal. And that's not. Yeah, like I'm an oatmeal in the morning guy, you know, so just. It just. Yeah, fish at every meal weared on me.

How many. How many days are we talking here?

I was a week.

That's a long time to have the same thing every single.

And they were. It was so cute. There was this. There was this one guy who he.

He kind of looked out for me and he kind of sit next to me at every meal and, you know, sell me. And yeah, he. He protected me from having to eat the fish head of what, you know, that. So that's where I didn't. Didn't get into weird strange.

But it was just Yeah, a lot of fish.

Okay, how about this one? Number four, if you were an airline, what airline would you be and why?

Wow. What airline? Yeah, well, you know, Southwest is.

Image is damaged a bit at the moment, but I was just on Southwest a couple weeks ago, and I, yeah, I'm, I'm an efficiency lover, frugal, so, but. But hopefully, you know, with some quality get you there. So I'll go with Southwest.

Southwest has normally been. For me, it's an adventure. I never know what I'm gonna get. I mean, it can be crazy. There's sometimes the flight attendants are just so funny.

And yes, it's, it's just relaxing. And you want to be relaxed on a flight. You just want to be able to relax. But hey.

Okay, number five, if you could pick a sport that most represents you, it would be what and why.

Yeah, it's hard for me to not think, well, what sports? Yeah. So really I was. I'm not very big. Maybe you can tell that from the video or not, but so, yeah, I aspired to be a football player.

That wasn't the card. So I ended up getting into rock climbing, so that immediately came to mind. But again, going with my frugality.

I'm a cross country skier and I go downhill every once in a while, but getting out into the wilderness, I have that appreciation for wilderness and a bit of an adventure, getting off the trail. So I'll go cross country skiing.

I like that. That's a great description. That's a really good description. Just kind of like, get off the trail, be in nature, explore life.

It sounds like you've done that a lot. And so let's hear a little bit about your bio, where you grew up, your faith journey, and what you're doing now.

Okay, so I already mentioned that my father was a camp director, and that was, that was really influential. And the, the, the approach of this camp.

My father's philosophy was in an organization called Christian Service Brigade, which sort of like a Christian Boy Scouts. And the philosophy of the camp was, I mean, to do well by the campers, but it was really a training place for, you know, the high school counselors.

And so discipleship by doing. And that really shaped me. And then I, I went to Wheaton College, a double majored in social science and also Christian education.

And both of those reinforced that sense of learning by experience, learning by doing. And I headed off after Wheaton, taught in a bilingual school in Honduras.

And I was the chaplain of the high school, sort of youth ministry within that school. And that was a really. Yeah. Shaping transformative experience for me in a whole number of ways.

Did that for four years, came back to the United States and worked with InterVarsity Christian Fellowship in upstate New York at Syracuse University in Cornell. Got married in that time. And during the summers, my wife and I took students back to Honduras. IV intervarsity students for a couple months.

Then we went to seminary after that and went back to Honduras, worked with the Honduran equipment of intervarsity for a few years, and then went and did my doctorate in theology at Duke University. So we were in North Carolina for four years and then again back to Honduras. And in that time is when we became Mennonites.

So we returned to Honduras with Eastern Mennonite Mission and did a variety of things, including teaching the Panama thing I just mentioned. And we have two daughters. One was four months old when we went to Honduras, the other one was born in Honduras.

And I like to mention, I mean, I stay in touch with Latin America, go most summers for a week or two, haven't been since COVID but we're going back in June for a couple weeks. And also I lead a Bible study in the. So this afternoon. Yeah, this is Friday.

I don't know when this will actually show or people listen to it, but for me, it's a Friday. And in a few hours, instead of talking to you, I will be in the Fresno county jail leading a Bible study. So I do that every Friday.

That's a pretty incredible story. There are a lot of Mennonites in Fresno, California.

Yes, there are actually. So, you know, there are different sort of Mennonites. What would you say? Hubs or Meccas, Jerusalems.

And so, you know, sort of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, is one. And then in the Indiana and Ohio, you're like Elkhart, Goshen, Winnipeg, but yes. So Kansas.

So a lot of Mennonites settled in Kansas as refugees and then they, you know, look for land and a bunch landed in the Central Valley of California. So there are a fair number here.

No, my. My hometown was a small farming community. We had 14 churches, nine were Mennonite. So I get.

I get it.

I get. Exactly. Because we were in heart of Illinois, Amish country, so had a lot of Mennonites that were around us. A lot of my friends were Mennonite.

So growing up, I'm very familiar. That's why I was, I was curious I just didn't know about California.

Yeah.

And you wouldn't, you wouldn't run into, I mean, there's a, there are a few of the more sort of conservative, old order kind of things here in California, but it would not. Yeah. It would not be like that Illinois, Indiana, central Pennsylvania or Ontario.

Experience of buggies in that, that, that sort of Mennonite you wouldn't encounter here in central California.

Yeah, old school.

Old school.

We had a spectrum. There was even a spectrum of the. I mean, for crying out, we had nine churches that were Mennonites. So there was a spectrum.

I can imagine. Yes.

From Black Bumper Beachyites all the way. All the way around.

So it's just interesting, you know, to be able to encounter different groups and different backgrounds and all that, which actually leads to your book. And I wanted to talk about this book, Centered Set, Church Discipleship and Community Without Judgmentalism.

And I was really drawn to this book because we're going to get that to a minute. Exactly. Because of Paul Hebert. We're going to talk about him. But what made you write this book?

Great question. And so, and even, you know, implicit in what you just said is you knew about centered set, bounded set, before reading this book. So.

Yeah, there are a lot of people like you that already know about it. And actually, I mean, if you Google it, you, you could find. Yeah. Blogs, podcasts, sermons, like it's, it's a, yeah. Fairly common thing.

But the reason that propelled me, I mean, one is. Yeah, so I'm passionate about the concept itself from Paul Hebert, and I've taught it in my ethics class for, yeah, for 24 years now.

And I found it very, very helpful for students. But commonly in class, after I'd present the ideas, the concepts, a student would say something like, okay, Mark, this is really good.

So I'm really attracted to this centered approach, but what do you do when. And they would ask me some situation or, well, how about membership in a centered church or those what if kind of questions.

And, and I didn't have the answers.

And, you know, I could draw back to a few things from my ministry experience at their varsity or something, but I had, I didn't, I wasn't working with the paradigm at that time, so I just say, yeah, I don't know. And after a while I thought, you know, oh, and there was no resource I could point people to, which is, you know, usually the case.

Like that's what professors were sort of walking bibliographies.

Right.

And so you say, oh, well, Go read this or go do that. And so then I just came to a point where saying I, I'm going to write this resource that's not there. So it is.

So I work hard in the beginning of the book at explaining the concepts. But you know, really about two thirds of the book is putting it into practice. How do you live this out? And that's what motivated me to write it.

Well, let's go back for our audience. So they know what we're talking about.

Exactly.

We're talking about centered set. So let's define those. We've got three. We have the bounded set and the fuzzy set and then the centered set.

So describe those three for us because some of my people right now are going, what are you talking about? I have zero idea what you're referring to. But you will. Just a moment, just stay with us. And Mark's going to explain to us.

Okay, so let me start briefly with a story.

And this is the same way I start the book to say, here's Mark Baker, 6 years old, riding home from church, northern New Jersey, looking out his window, sees somebody you know is out there mowing their lawn. And I think, oh, they're not a Christian. Or at least they're not a good Christian. Why?

Well, they weren't in church this morning and they're working on Sunday. They shouldn't be working. Okay, so what was I doing in that moment?

I was drawing a line between myself and my family, good Christians, and this other person not. And what I was doing is what Paul Heber would call a bounded group or a bounded set.

So Paul Hebert, missiologist, missionary in India, came up with these things, borrowed them from mathematics and. Yeah, and it's kind of a tame thing there, you know what a six year old. That's cute.

But I continued and I got into high school and it's this list of rules, you know, don't drink, dance, smoke. And I look judgmentally at other people who, who were doing these things and I wasn't. And again, think of myself, I'm a good Christian.

They're not Christians. So this is a, this is a very visual concept and I would in invite listeners to go to centeredsetchurch.com and that's my website I have for this.

And if you scroll down to the second screen there, there's a thing that says, I think it says free PDF diagrams or something like that. And so if you just hit pause, go get that sheet, and then we'll come back and I'll unpack them for you.

So what Hebert says is, and again, barring this from math, applying it to groups, and I'll just go right to churches. So a bounded church is a church that. Oh, sorry. And this, the central question in this is, how does a group define who belongs?

And Hebert says, there's different ways of doing this. So a bounded group comes up with a criteria, and it can be beliefs, behaviors, other things.

And they say this is what is required to be part of this group. And then that becomes a line. And anyone who's inside, on the right side of that line is in. Belongs to the group, and someone outside doesn't.

And as in my example, so that's what I was doing. Yeah, I was drawing this line. And so for my bounded set church, you know, it was, yeah, you need to not work on Sunday.

And then later it was, you know, don't drink smack, don't drink, dance, smoke, et cetera, steal on the job things that other people were doing. And so I had this line. But as I mentioned, bounded sets, the bounded churches, have a tendency towards judgmentalism.

And there's this sense of in and out and superiority. And also it can tend to breed shame of both.

I mean, those people that are outside can feel the shame, but also people on the inside, if we trip, mess up, then we feel shame. So in reaction to this, this judgmentalism, some people go the way of what Hebert called a fuzzy church.

And so this is to look at, hey, this judgmentalism is no good. We've got to get rid of it. And so you recognize, well, this line is the problem. We're drawing lines, big judgment, let's get rid of it.

So you erase the line, and then what happens is the group becomes fuzzy. There's not a clear sense of who belongs, who doesn't belong, or even sort of what the group is about.

So it takes care of one problem, the judgmentalism, but it creates others. The group lacks identity. And in a fuzzy church, there's.

There's really not much of a way to call people to conversion because, you know, what are you calling them to? And.

And there's certainly, you know, tolerance is a high virtue in a fuzzy group, but not much, you know, loving confrontation or, yeah, journeying with people, because that would be against the wave of fuzzy church. But Hebert said, he offered a totally different approach. So bounded and fuzzy are sort of on the same on a continuum.

And one has this strict line, the other is fuzzy. So Hebert said, well, there's a totally different way of thinking about who belongs? That's looking at orientation or relationship with a center.

So in a centered church, rather than having a line, it establishes a center and says, this is who we are. This is what's important to us. So for simplicity and for, you know, sake of agreement, we say Jesus Christ is our center.

And so if someone is heading toward the center, they belong to the group. So we're looking at the person and not saying, are they mowing their lawn on Sunday or not? We're looking at, are they heading toward Jesus?

Are they heading toward the center? And if they are, then they belong to the group. If they're heading away, they don't. So it's about orientation to relationship.

And still there's space there to talk about behavior and beliefs. If we think someone's out of line, we'll come along beside them and say, you know, hey, that doesn't line up with who we are.

But there's not this pressure of, you're out, I'm in shaming, because we're all in process towards the center. And just, yeah, briefly, I'll stop with this. Where's the security line?

So at a bounded church, the security is in the line, and abounded church can say, we centered on church, we center on Christ. You know, many most churches do, but the reality is their attention is pulled toward that line because that's where their security is.

Whereas a centered church, our security is in the center. I mean, that's what makes me part of this group. That's where my security's in the center. So it draws my attention toward the center.

So bounded, fuzzy and center.

So you give a story in the book to illustrate this, because I think it's still a little bit fuzzy for some of our people to understand that, because you're talking in terms, but when you talk in story, as you've already alluded to and shown us, it helps us to put meat on it, to really see it in our experience. You mentioned, I think you were in Honduras and you were talking to this woman who was married to her husband, and where was he at? Is it.

Am I getting the story right? Tell that story for us.

Yeah, let me. Let me just back up just a paragraph in the book to say, okay, why did I tell this story? Because.

Okay, so I just said a fuzzy church is fuzzy and is not as, you know, strict on ethics and beliefs, things like that.

And people in a bounded church can feel like, yeah, we don't want to go to this centered thing because our beliefs matter, these behaviors matter important. And what I Advocate is that a centered church actually can have, can lead to more profound transformation in discipleship than a bounded one.

So a bounded feels strict, but it tends to be superficial. So what I, what I talked about is in Honduras, yeah, there's common law.

Marriage is very, very common in Honduras in part because of finances and people can't afford to have a party and reception, but other reasons as well. And churches, both Catholic and Protestant, emphasize strongly people getting legally married. And that's a good thing. And I'm in favor of that.

But what happens is, okay, so it's a bounded church. So, and this church where I've been working with, they had people that were not legally married.

And so those people, they're, they're, they're on the wrong side of the line. So they couldn't be members. They couldn't participate in the Lord's Supper. They couldn't be leaders in the church. They're outside.

And the church I was working with, they didn't go this far.

But, but I've been in some other churches where they would, you know, and it's, and it's generally women that they would call them, you know, fornicators. And, and so just think this person, they're not legally married. So, yeah. So officially they're fornicators.

So this church I was working with, we read Galatians together and we, we, we say, okay, we want to step away from this bounded group way of doing things. And so they take this on. And so what they decided to do.

So now they're centered, and they're looking at these, these three women in their church that weren't legally married have been attending all the time. And so they're saying, okay, well, what does it mean to be centered?

And what the, the, the elders, leaders of that church says, well, we need to go and talk with these women. We see that they're talking in terms of the diagram.

We see their arrow is headed towards the center, but they are in this situation that we think is inappropriate, they, they should be legally married. So, so I tell the story. The leaders go and visit this woman to discern. And I was right there. I mean, just to feel the difference.

If they're in a bounded church, they don't have to do that. She's not legally married, she's out. That's all we need to do. But a centered church is going to walk with the person, discern what's going on.

So I talk in the book of, you know, qualities of a centered church, of compassion, curiosity. So they're Going in.

So they talk to this woman and, and as they, they, yeah, they, they interact with her, they find she and her common law mare husband have been together for, I think it was 17 years. And they, at least she had been faithful to him. I don't. He wasn't a believer. I'm not sure about him. But, you know, they'd been in a.

In a faithful relationship together for. Raise children together. And she said to the church leaders, you know, I want to get married.

I agree it's the right thing to do, but my common law husband refuses. He won't get married. And so. And the leaders asked more questions, explored their relationship. Okay, so now fast forward a little bit.

The leaders leave her house. They're standing on the street in front of her house talking about the situation.

And one of the men says, you know, she may not be legally married, but her relationship with her common law marriage with her common law husband, you know, it's actually better than my relationship with my wife. Legally married wife. And what happened from that, that encounter with that woman is two things.

One, they decided, we think this woman is headed towards Jesus. She's part of us. And they invited her to start taking communion today, or at least last time I was in Honduras, she was on the church council.

Like, she's in now. They discerned, yes, she's in. But here, I think was the beautiful thing is the leaders, how did they respond to that?

They said, we think we need to work on our marriage relationships. So what came out of that was they. They did a series. They looked around in the church. Who's the couple in here who has the best relationship?

And they asked them to lead a series of studies for other couples in the church on improving their marriage relationship. So the centered approach, it's messier, it takes more work, but it opens up possibilities that are complex for, like, this woman.

And I'd argue the potential of deeper transformation because you get past just the superficial rules.

Illustrating that there was almost an exact situation at the church. We were at the last church we were at before, where we're at now. And the. The husband had become a believer in Jesus, but his wife wouldn't marry him.

And they were pretty much common law. There were four children. And I know pastors would say, you know, you can't be in that situation. Actually know some people said, we won't baptize you.

You're not going to be baptized. But here is a man that said, if I leave, I'm leaving my wife. Really?

The woman who's Been my life for 14 years and my children, which would be more detrimental. And our elders said the same thing. They came back and they said, he's in process. He's moving that way. It would be bad for you to leave.

We think that would be worse. We want you to stay and continue to grow in your relationship with God. And that's what happened. And then she became a believer in Jesus through that.

And then they got married and they had this amazing marriage.

But in a world today, especially as we're encountering more and more of this in our churches, that bounded and fuzzy part, I think, and the centered part becomes much more important to see. We've seen the fuzzy, we've seen the bounded. But very few people have seen this centered. Now, some would say, and I.

And I know just in conversations with several people, they'd say, well, our church doesn't do it that way. It's bounded.

You give another story of a woman who was in a bounded church, and she was, for all purposes, I mean, she was legally married, but her marriage wasn't very good. If I remember correctly, they weren't even living in the same place.

Yeah.

Can you tell a little bit of that story?

Yeah. And it's actually from the same neighborhood as this other church. So this was when I was doing research for my dissertation.

So I was interviewing people in different churches, and I was trying to get a sense of. Yeah, I did, actually, at the time, I didn't unfortunately, have the language of bounded and centered, but that's what I was working at. So.

And one of the things, one of the questions I asked people was, what does. What's it mean to be a member in good standing? So that's in the Spanish. They'd say, no, like a member in good standing in your church.

So I'm talking to this woman and who. Who I didn't know. Like, I just got connected to her from someone else in the neighborhood.

I'm interviewing her, and she proudly tells me, yes, I'm, you know, I'm a member of my church, and I teach Sunday school. And I said, okay, so what? You know, like, what are the requirements? And she said, well, so membership. You have to be baptized.

And, you know, if you are. If you're not single, you need to be legally married. And then there was something else, which I'm not remembering.

And she again, affirms, you know, she's a member in good standing. She teaches Sunday school. So then I go through the rest of the interview, and we're sitting, like, in front of her house, do the interview.

And then, yeah, back to what I said about airlines and stuff. So, yeah, I'm efficient and I'm thinking, okay, Mark, time is short. Why don't you ask to talk to her husband as well?

You can get two interviews out of this same visit. So I innocently ask, oh, could I talk to your husband as well? And she turns to me and says, no, actually, yeah, he doesn't live here. He.

He lives over with his mother. And, and so, like, yeah, I am not there to, you know, do marital counseling. So I'm backing up, like, fine, you know, I'm ready to go.

But she keeps talking and she says, yeah, she said, you know, it just doesn't work when we're together. Like, it's just like cats. We fight all the time. And she said, and I, I like his mother. I can't stand her. Like, I can't live there.

And, you know, just. And so what I observed was the contrast between these two examples. She's a member in good standing. Her marriage is a mess.

But in a bounded group, there's a tendency, because we need the security of being in. So we make rules, characteristics, criteria. There's the word that we can meet. And so here's this rule. You have to be legally married.

And she meets the rule. So she's. She's in. She's okay. But that church was not working with her to, to save. To improve her marriage because she met the requirements.

So that, that gets at that sense that I think, you know, bounded can be. Has an air of strictness, but it can be superficial. And then I think, to what you alluded to, I think it's important to bring in fuzzy as well.

Like a fuzzy just wouldn't even, you know, like, oh, we're not going to talk about it. We don't, you know, we don't make this person feel bad or that's their thing, not our thing. So.

But the centered offers the potential of, well, the sort of thing that you described that happened in your church.

Well, that allows for process. And that's something that I don't think we do very well with. We want the, we want the light on and light off. It was dark and it was light.

And I tell some people that is their salvation story. They were in darkness and they were in light. But other people, it's like a dimmer switch, and it's in process.

And we're going to encounter more and more of this, I think, as our culture continues to, I want to say devolve, but moves away from the Judeo Christian framework. And we're going to see more and more of this. So process becomes more and more important.

But it also means there's, as you said, it's very, very messy. And some people don't like messy. We want things to be clean. Even if it's just on the surface, we want it to be clean.

Like my wife and I get into this discussion about our house all the time. She's like, I asked you to clean. I'm like, it is clean. Look around and everything's put away, everything's folded. She means like scrub dust.

She wants that part of it. So we have these two definitions of clean. I think it's very similar with churches.

On the outside it looks great, but when you probe down deep, that's where you find massive problems. And I've seen this, we've all seen this. Anybody that's been in any type of ministry, we've seen this.

But it does bring a lot of it questions a lot of our paradigms. Getting back to the bounded part, and you mentioned interacting with your students.

And when I was reading your book, you go through a lot of things that frankly made me uncomfortable at first. I went, okay, what's this situation? What's he going to do here? And you, you start off in part one of defining the paradigms and nothing there.

Foundation of a cris centered church discipleship in communities where it gets really messy. But it was in chapter eight, I felt like there was a really hit your stride.

And I started seeing a lot of the different elements that you were talking about with people bringing it out. This idea of because you allow for vulnerability. I mean, if you go to a church today and you ask, is your church vulnerable now?

There is a larger group of people being vulnerable. My question is, is how do we juxtapose vulnerability with.

Again, you might be vulnerable on the surface, but you use that as a ploy to just to say that I'm making a change and I'm not. You know what I'm saying? There's always that danger. There's the part where you go, I met the external, but I don't have the internal.

I can be vulnerable, but I'm using that as a smokescreen because I really don't want to change. And this is the issue. You're dealing with guilt, you're dealing with shame, you're dealing with these issues.

And you mentioned moving away from shame. And you've written about this, but you also mentioned that there's two kinds of shame. And it was Interesting.

When you first said you want to kind of get rid of this idea of shame, and myself, I reacted like, you don't want to get rid of all shame. There's a healthy shame. And you called it integrative. I think shame is the term. And then disintegrative.

Disintegrative, yes.

Yeah. Can you explain those two different types of shame that are being employed when we're talking about this centered set idea?

Yes. And so I'm. Yeah, obviously those are, yeah. More technical big words. I borrowed those from social scientists. I didn't make that up. But.

And yeah, just to affirm you.

And so like, yeah, the book I co authored with Jason, you know, administering out of shame content, I mean, that was a key thing for us, is that there are things that are shameful. So it's, you know, shame is appropriate at times, but then how do you respond to it?

So disintegrative shame is when there's a spirit of stigmatizing the person. So you're shaming them and. And it's. Yeah.

With non redemptive.

Yeah. You're not concerned with their restoration. You're. And this is just. I'm talking. Yeah. So I pause. It's just like bounded. Just leaps at me.

In a bounded church, the line is more important than the person. Okay. And I'm careful, you know, that's a general statement. That's not true in every situation. But.

But the tendency in a bounded church is to prioritize the line over the person.

And so disintegrative shaming is when you shame a person and you're not seeking the person's restoration, you stigmatize them and it prioritizes something else. And so to me, when you ask the question, I just immediately thought Pharisees and Jesus.

So the Pharisees practice disintegrative shaming and their, their, you know, crusade. Their method for achieving holiness. Holiness was to shame people. And they are. They are more focused on the rules. Okay. Now, integrative shaming is it.

It still may cause the person shame, but the, but the goal is to restore the person.

So Galatians 6:1, you know, Paul says, if someone amongst you is singing sinning, then, you know, those among you, spiritual brothers and sisters, you know, restore them, talk to them with gentleness and be.

Careful lest you yourself feel tempted. That's in that part of it too. Because they're but for the grace of God go I.

Right.

You know, so anyway, keep going. I just want to make sure I.

Added that part of that, yeah, where I really like talk about this is, and as a just an example is Luke 7 of the woman, the house of Simon the Pharisee. And so she has, she has been shamed by her community in a disinterestive way.

Like she's trash, she's looked down upon and Jesus is honoring her, lifting her up.

But in the, in the context story, you know, Jesus says to Simon, but look, but look, since I came in here, you know, you didn't wash my feet, you didn't greet me with a kiss, you didn't anoint my head with oil. That's a shaming move. I mean he's, he's calling Simon out. So it, it's, he's putting a spotlight on me. But what's Jesus's intention?

You know, he, he doesn't, he doesn't get, get up and storm out. He is seeking for Simon the Pharisee to turn away from his ways because it'd be better for him and the, the, the community. So integrative shaming.

Yeah. So a fuzzy set would not practice any kind of shaming.

Well, not, not intentionally, because.

Correct. Right there is a shame.

If you don't follow our tolerance virtue.

Exactly.

Then there is a form of shame. It's just a different kind anyway.

Yeah, no, and actually in, when I, the first draft of the book, I had eight or nine practitioners read over it and give me input. And a couple of them who had more experience in fuzzy churches, they argued that churches don't actually stay fuzzy very long because.

But the thing that, yeah, the one thing you can't do in a fuzzy church is to be judgmental. But that in itself is judgmental. So yes, that's a, that, yeah, got off track there a bit. But yes, I agree with you on that, that kind of shame.

But, but, so yeah, the fuzzy wouldn't. Whereas in a centered, again it would be call up.

And if we go to where you started with, you know, this person with kind of this false vulnerability, I think that's why in a centered we walk with people. Yeah, maybe. And I don't. Yeah. And you can come back and ask it differently or say something.

But what I thought of when you said that was when I started the book. So I, I don't have the answers to my students questions.

So I went out and interviewed numerous pastors, church leaders, ministry leaders to ask them, how are you seeking to live out this centered approach? And what I imagined the book would be, would be this collection of case studies.

So you know, here's this person, this situation, what's the centered approach? And then this next situation is not so. But very quickly, I mean, within the first three or four interviews I did, I realized, oh, no, that's.

That's totally wrong thinking, Mark. Like, there is not a centered approach to deal with this particular situation. And part of that is because of, like you mentioned.

So we have two people that are in the same kind of situation, and one person is giving this sort of vulnerability about it, but you perceive it's false vulnerability and another person is, you know, torn up, repentant. You're gonna. In a centered church, you would have the necessity and the possibility of responding to those people in different ways.

That was a fascinating conversation, Kevin. Fascinating.

Absolutely. Absolutely. I think he's. I think he's an interesting character with a very interesting take that is going to be revolutionary for a lot of people.

But I think it's really true.

It is true.

I mean, we saw that at our church. That's one of the things that we started doing is looking at the centered set rather than the bounded set. And at the church, my last church.

That I've been at, there was a.

You'Re in or you're out type of mentality. And it was very clear on who was an insider and who was on the outside of that line. The problem that we all know is that people abuse that inside.

You know, they get in there and they think, oh, I'm a part of it. And then it's anything goes. And they don't look any more Christ like. And yet these people who seem far away are progressing toward Jesus.

And I mean, it's such a huge difference. So it kind of removes that, that line of in and out and shows people just moving too. So. Because why? Grace is messy, right?

Absolutely. We are a mess as people, whether we want to admit it or not. I like to say that we're all broken. Some of us are just better at hiding it than others.

Oh, no, that's very true. But grace is messy, and we've talked about this so many times on the show.

Whenever you're doing ministry, like real ministry, you're going to have the broken come in. You're going to have the people that don't fit the model.

You're going to have people that don't look the part, that don't know the theology, that don't value the things that you do, but they're continually moving toward Jesus. And there's not any ifs, ands, or buts about it. We should be.

But here's my thought, we should be grateful that God is patient with us to allow us to grow because we're, as you said, we're all messy. And so this centered set approach, let's be honest, it's not easy because it's easy to know when there's a line, you know, who's in and who's out.

So, I mean, let me ask you this question. I already know the answer. But which is easier being part of the bounded set or the centered set?

Oh, it's absolutely being part of the bounded set because you are. You have easy ways to know what's going on. And I think a lot of us who go to church, we tend towards that bounded set mentality.

Tim Keller called us older brother types from the Parable of the Prodigal Son. We tend toward that. People who go to church tend towards that. Thinking. Well, I like to.

I love that illustration and I love the fact that he wrote about that, because I think when you come to Jesus, I mean, for me, I was the prodigal, but the longer that I've been in ministry, the more that I've become the older brother. But yet we're not saying that beliefs don't matter here. They do. And because beliefs do show us who God is, so they matter hugely.

Just as you mentioned or alluded to at the beginning of the show when we were talking about Trevin Wax and he writes about the thrill of orthodoxy. And so orthodoxy matters and beliefs matter, but at the end of the day, it's really a question of why those things matter.

Because they're markers, right?

Pointers to where we're headed.

And that is.

That is towards Jesus.

It's not about being right when everyone else is wrong or some kind of cosmic fire insurance or finding the people who are just like us and agree with us. The whole point is being with God. And then because we're with God, we're bound together as one body in Him.

I love that. And we need to keep that in mind.

But that's just the first part of the conversation.

We have another part to come in our next episode where we delve into some of the practical aspects of how to be and do church with this centered set mentality. So I want to thank Kevin for being here today.

I want to thank all of our.

Apollo's water team for helping water the world. This is Travis Michael Fleming and Kevin.

O'Brien signing off from Apollo's Watered.

Stay watered, everybody.