#229 | Futureproof Your Church with Stephen McAlpine

At its gut. The Bible is saying the age to come is where your hope is focused when God renews the creation and he will use us to do good things in this age.

But the cataclysmic event that will usher in our hope is the return of Jesus. And if we don't put that on the map for our people, they will lower their eyes and sights to say, how best can I find my hope here?

What conditions do I need to enforce to make life good for me? Now.

It'S watering time, everybody.

It's 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 another one of our deep conversations. Discombobulated.

That's a great word. It's a great word to describe our current time and place. It's a great word for what many of us are feeling right now, really.

It seems like everywhere that I turn and everyone that I talk to feels like the floor has gone out from under them. And what was once firm under their feet and stable and secure has now become more than a little squishy.

And maybe it feels like that ground has just completely gone out from you. We all feel this. You're not alone. But what do we begin to do about it?

It's one thing to say all of the bad that's gone on and where we're at, but what's the way forward? What are we offering to the world right now that is better than what they have been promised and that hasn't been delivered to them?

That's what we're going to be talking about in today's deep conversation. We all know that the church in the west is in trouble. Some would say it's in free fall.

Is there a way for the church in the west to recover its credibility? How do we press forward boldly for Christ against a culture that is becoming increasingly hostile to the faith?

And what can we as leaders in the church, do today to help the church fulfill its mission? Well, today we welcome Steve McAlpine to the show to help guide us as we seek to navigate these chaotic cultural waters in which we find ourselves.

Steve is the author of Future Proof how to Live for Jesus in a Culture that Keeps on Changing. He has been a pastor and church planner for 30 years. Steve now writes and speaks on issues of theology, culture and church.

In particular, the increasing pressures on religious belief in the secular public square. Steve, welcome to Apollo's Watered.

It's great to be with you across the miles. Thank you for having me on.

Are you ready for the Fast 5?

Is anyone ever? But okay, let's do it.

All right, here we go. First question. Favorite show to binge watch with your wife.

Apartment therapy. There you go.

You actually put that in the book now. What is that one?

I did.

I guess it's a streaming one about funky apartments, mainly in New York, that I kind of think now if I was single or we were together without kids, we'd craft our apartment like that. It's very self indulgent.

It's funny, after living in an apartment when I lived in Chicago, I don't have a desire to go back. I'm not in that right now. But the idea of it just kind of freaks me out. But I've seen some beautiful ones and I'm really curious.

The idea could be greater than the reality, I think.

All right, here we go. Second question. You do travel quite a bit. I know you.

You keep up with everything in the United States, what's going on and just really in the Western world. But what is the biggest difference that you've seen between Aussies and Americans?

We don't call anything we play in sport internally, domestically, the World Series anything.

We are so guilty. We are so guilty of that. I wish we change it, but I don't think that's going to happen anytime soon.

I really don't know.

All right. Now you also, you're a writer, but who's been the most influential contemporary author on your life?

That's an interesting question. I would have to say a couple. James Smith. Jamie. James K. Smith was important. Charles Taylor is also important.

And an Australian author that I've read a lot of is Mark Sayers lives in Melbourne, which is a very secular city. So it feels like it's 10 years ahead of Perth, where I live, which is probably 20 years ahead of some places in the U.S.

so I think Mark Sayers is big as a contemporary writer for me and Charles Taylor, you know, just because everything emanates from him and everyone uses the term social imaginary because of him. I think that's probably true.

You know, he's like 90 some years old. He's still kicking.

Yes.

It's so hard to believe.

Yeah, I keep an eye on him because I'm always waiting for an obituary, to be honest.

You know, I actually sent him an email.

Did you?

Because I thought I'd love to get him on the show, but I never got a response, so.

No. He'll handwrite it in ink and send it back, right?

Yeah, probably. Probably. All right. You've also been a pastor, and every pastor has a little bit of a funny pastoral experience. What's yours?

Funny pastoral experience? Yeah, there's a few grievous ones. I know that much.

I think it's probably when someone called out something in a sermon that I said, and I responded in a way that was almost like a funny gotcha. And this is in a very conservative evangelical church. And I said something about looking good. He said, are you saying we all should look good?

And I said, some of us don't have the ability to do that. I was just jesting. That's not a health, wealth and prosperity thing. That was just. Why did I say that? I thought that he's a magistrate.

Oh, really?

He was just, you know, throwing shade on people from the front, so I'm sure he could.

I had an instance once when I was doing announcements at church, and there was a woman in the back. She was eight months pregnant. And I was trying to direct people to her and give her. Them an indication of who she is. I.

I'm like, is Emily around here? It's for Emily, you know, the large pregnant woman in the back. Oh, yeah, that was a mistake.

That was a huge mistake.

And I went, what? She's falling pregnant. And you can hear the people go, oh, oh. And then you hear from the back, just stop talking.

That's our problem, is that we try to rectify it and make it worse, don't we? From the front.

Always. Always.

All right, number five, if you could personify just anything that's Australian, like some Australian experience or food, what would it be and why? Like, that would be you. If you could just communicate that you're saying, oh, that's something. That's totally Aussie. And it's totally. Me too.

A food or anything?

Anything. Anything.

I think going to the beach three or four times a week in summer, in the mornings, and just walking along it for free parking and coffee, sitting on a cafe, looking over it. Because Australia is just the beach, right? Well, we all live near it, most of us, because it's too hot to live in the middle, right?

We don't have people in the middle of the country. The flyover states in Australia are vast and empty, generally. That's the thing. We all live in the edges.

I always laugh at that, even when I look at Canada. It's like that. It's only on this. The line, right? Close to the United States. There's hardly anybody up there. I'm like, what in the world?

What's going on?

We don't have mountains to give us rain and all that stuff. So it's very dry. You have no mountains and not in the middle.

And it's a very old land that's very flat and without any water in the middle, you know, on a regular basis. Yeah. So that's why it's, it's. To live out there is hard. It's, you know, so the beach is Australia, I think.

Yeah, that actually is a pretty good one. Now let's talk about your book, Future Proof. What made you write this book?

That's interesting because I wrote a previous book which was how do we get here? Really? Like being the bad guys.

And how do we get to the place where Christians are finding it a struggle as Christians to live in the culture in terms of hostility? And this was really a book of how do we go from here.

I didn't want to just dive into how bad things were again, I wanted to say what does it mean to navigate the cultural changes? And the front cover people say you can't judge a book by its cover. But I thought they did great cover work with a very sort of spirally look on it.

It looks like a roller coaster. What we're experiencing in the west, nevermind Christianity, is rapid discontinuous change.

We're finding things shifting in ways that we didn't realize. We're finding things that we thought would be 30, 40, 50 years ahead of us. Now we're seeing technology do things that we didn't anticipate.

We're seeing governments rise and fall very quickly. It's that sense of discombobulation. I love that word. Where are we going and how can we not predict it?

Well, you can't predict Black swan events, but it feels like everything feels like that at the moment. Whether it's a war, whether it's the head of the university being sacked over, you know, all the language issues.

All those things are changing all the time and Christians are caught in the middle of that, I think.

Do you see that going on in Australia? I mean, of course we see that. It seems like it's going on throughout the West. We just had Michael Graham on from the Great Detouring.

And in the United States we saw the drop off of 40 million people from church over the last 25 years. Now some people have disagreed with the stats, but do you see something similar going on in Australia?

We're low in nominalism anyway. We're not like the States. We don't have people who turn up. You know, we've never had the base that you've had.

But you're seeing a drop off of any nominalism and a thinning out of how regular people are anyway. So not only are you seeing a.

A loss of anything of, you know, people going at all, considering themselves even Christianized, but you're seeing people that do go thin out the number of times they do go and thin out their commitment to the place they go and change up the place they go on a regular basis. You've got a lot of churn at a time when it feels that there's already a lot of cultural churn, and that's across the West. The UK is worse.

It's interesting as you mention that, because in the United States, of course, we have the Donald Trump factor. One of the things that people have really talked about, the political engagement, politicization.

Do you see any of the politicization aspects in Australia too, or same things?

Well, when America sneezes, the world catches a cold. And I think when it sneezes culturally, we catch the same cultural cold.

And you're seeing it not as strong, but definitely there's the progressive thing is happening in the universities and the, you see the woke thing, whatever we want to call that, and you see a reaction to that.

And in your churches, you're seeing people saying, well, you know, Australia's a different experience to the, to the US it's always been deeply secular and always pulled its politics apart from its religion and kept them at arm's length. But what you're seeing now, I think, and this is what I would say, is that in a post religious age, something's got to fill the gap.

And I write about that. Politics has become hot religion across the west and that is churning things very quickly.

And it's also now that you, same as in the US it's not just a case of whether your opponent is wrong, but whether they're bad. It's a moral category, politics. And that has changed everything.

With everything that we see going on in the west. You wrote about the fact that we're seeing anxiety rise. There's. You're not the first person, of course, document that.

And we also Know that theologically the church is going to be victorious, which is one of the reasons I think you put that out there. It's less future proof.

We can all talk about this guy is, you know, is falling and as you mentioned, Mark Sayers, where he talks about the non anxious presence and having that non anxious presence. We do know that the church is going to be victorious.

But do you feel that the church is unnecessarily hurting itself in its cultural testimony before a watching world? Because in some respect, while we know that it's on the decline, we have secularization, we have technology, all these things are causing the fray.

But what I find is a church that's a little bit just unaware of what's going on and they continue on their merry way. But I think that we can future proof it. We can, we can help stop the bleeding, if you will. Do you think that's the case or no?

Yeah, I do. And I'm not saying that we should, you know, devolve or descend into sort of quietism and not have anything to say to our cultural moment.

But what I've deliberately done in both the books I've written is say, let's do some exposition of scripture, let's see where other situations have arisen. And what I would say too. And this is what I, I've been writing about.

How do you sort of, you know, taking off your glasses, put on the cultural lenses to say, and there's a great quote. It was in. Okay, I think it, I can't remember where it was in.

It was a great article that said, you know, all things considered, the Bible was a book written by losers for the benefit of other losers. That's not a value judgment, that's just an observation.

I thought, what would it be like to preach to the people of God week in, week out from the context that we are a community who does not fully belong here and that our hope is in the age to come, that we are put here at a time to showcase the beauty and justice and mercy of God to a culture that one day will be recreated in the image of what Christ is calling it into, but at the same time not expect that we're going to win everything.

And so if I'm going to preach the Bible and preach it well, I want to preach it to people who are exiles, are wandering in a strange land at the same time that they had to live here.

And I think we've forgotten that because we've been preaching the Bible as a home game and we've been moralizing that, or we've been therapeutizing that, or we've been materializing that. And of course the Bible has things to say about those issues.

But at its gut, the Bible is saying the age to come is where your hope is focused when God renews the creation and he will use us to do good things in this age. But the cataclysmic event that will usher in our hope is the return of Jesus.

And if we don't put that on the map for our people, they will lower their eyes and sights to say, how best can I find my hope here? What conditions do I need to enforce to make life good for me now? How do I do that? And I think that's our key issue.

Well, that's one of the shifts that I don't know if you've read the great Detourching and I've heard other people say this as of recently, between the two chapter gospel and the four chapter gospel, where one was fall redemption. And then you have the consummation. And I've heard others say, well, there's six chapters and you get into this debate on that.

But I think the overall arching field, that recreation of things is something that we've lost. I would say that it was the whole world's going to the hell in a handbasket. So we need to do evangelism and not care about this.

But then you see a shift, of course, in America with the Moral Majority, Jerry Falwell, and then everybody became very much, you know, politically driven. And the gospel in some respect has been distorted. We've got a culturally distorted gospel.

And you actually mentioned one part of that where you talk about the gospel of the autonomous self. I thought that was very fascinating. What is the gospel of the autonomous self?

If I encapsulated.

Well, a friend of mine, Rory Shiner, is a great writer and thinker and pastor here in Perth, said if you look at every Disney movie, every Pixar, every Netflix series, every graduation speech, it says that the point of your life is to find the true inner you and express that to the world. And then he puts these words, God is framed out.

He says that's what secularism is and that's the autonomous self, that the Point is not who I am physiologically, but who I psychologically feel myself to be. And no one can challenge that. And so your role is to do that. Now, another writer I've really enjoyed is Alan Noble. Alan O. Noble.

He's been on this show.

O Noble alum. He sounds like a knight from sort of the 15th century.

Do you know what the O stands for, by the way?

I'd love to know.

Orville.

Orville.

Because I asked him that. I'm like, what's the O?

I had to think about that. Orville. Named after the Wright brothers, surely.

Or the popcorn guy. Anyway, keep going. I'm sorry.

That's okay. And what Alan Noble says, and Tim Keller says this as well, is that the, the autonomous self, when you pull that lever and it works, it's great.

But when you pull that lever and it breaks off in your hands, you've only got yourself to blame. And Taylor Swift, who's been in Sydney and Melbourne this last few days, disrupting.

My flight with her biggest crowd ever. Right, but not the biggest crowd in Melbourne history. Right. That was Billy Graham. Yeah, I, I read the article, I read some articles on it.

So keep going.

Yeah, that's right. But that tells you something, doesn't it? That.

Is it, is it good to be autonomous or is it scary to be autonomous? It's a mix of both. And it's saying there is so much opportunity in our world for you to express who you want to be.

And that works well when it works well, but when it doesn't work well, what you're finding is this stripped back.

Robert Bella said it and you know, he coined expressive individualism, that just as we're finding the self as the sacred self, we're losing the institutional frameworks that would hold selves together. And I think that's our problem. The autonomous self is great, but if you fall through the gaps, it will crush you.

And it's a very fine tightrope that people are walking on that one. That's why you've got anxiety, because we've been told, express yourself to the world and it'll work.

And my wife is a clinician, clinical psychologist.

The number of 23 year old young women who went to the best schools, went to the best universities and were told they could be what they want and live how they want. And at 23, they're coming to see her going, this isn't working.

What's going on, you know, that's off the charts among the 18 to 34 year olds, the very cohort that does not have a Christian framework at all.

Do you see them curious in giving Christianity a turn? I know Justin Brierly wrote about that, a surprising turn of belief in God.

I've talked to other people that they said they've seen intellectuals at Cambridge that are coming to faith in Jesus. So you're seeing some of these intellectuals, which I find very fascinating, are coming to a belief in God and even in the great to churching.

One of the things that of course that they mentioned was the more education you had, the more likely you were to be a Christian. Which goes flies in the face of a lot of the anecdotal evidence that's out there or some of the mythology that continues to present itself.

Exactly.

I mean, do you see this kind of surprising group of young people that are anchorless and they're looking for hope, but are they receiving it or are they rejecting it?

Well, a couple of things you see in Australia that Christian unions at university campuses, colleges are saying they've never seen so many people become Christian.

And as in the last five to 10 years among people who've had no background and the people most hostile to Christianity as my cohort, 50 somethings, because we remember sitting in church with itchy pants and a tight shirt and listening to someone boring us to death. And then it's not to say there aren't issues. The whole sexuality thing is at a political, cultural level is seen as a very hot issue.

And many 18 to 34 year olds are going, what's the issue with sexuality? Why are you so hung up on it?

Well, I'd say the culture's hung up on it, but I think the thing that we need to do and is happening is that people are starting to put an anthropology together that's saying if the sexual revolution from the 60s was going to fly 60 years later, it would be showing some great fruit.

But there are holes in it at the same time that the cultural commentators, for example, are saying, I was a Muslim, I became an atheist and now I'm going to church.

And even the great Richard Dawkins is saying, I'll have a conversation about Christianity with my good friend Hersi Ali to try and convince her otherwise. There might be something here. The new atheism has not answered anyone's questions.

Because the questions people are asking today are not about science, they're about meaning and purpose. And you can't answer those questions. No one wants to know you.

Tara Isabella Burton, you may have heard of the sort of the pagan, sort of white Wiccan witch of everything, suddenly becomes a conservative Catholic. And she says people are hungering for meaning and purpose and community and identity, and they're not necessarily going to Christianity.

Technology is allowing them to put together their pastiche of spirituality. But she says whether that can hold, whether that can carry the weight that Christianity has carried, let's wait and see.

That's a very good point. Something that I. I know we have talked about on the show about the need that people have to belong, even sometimes before they believe.

They need to know that people care, that they need to love. But I love the fact of how you put that, and now she's put it that can it hold the weight?

And that's what I'm seeing, even a revival of Christian thought as it within the social sphere as people are starting to pick that up.

Which leads me to my next question is we've been talking about this, we've talked about the individuals, but I wanted to talk about really a liberal democracy. You do delve into that a bit. Can we have a liberal democracy without Christianity?

And secondly, does Christianity, and I think I'm pretty sure how you're going to answer this question, give us a framework of unity in our modern world and how so. So there's two questions, actually three in there, but feel free to take the first. Can we have a liberal democracy without Christianity?

We think we can because we're post Christian and we think we can carry the fruit of that without the roots. But I don't think we can for long.

And you're already seeing it that many American and you and Australians and New Zealanders and Canadian young people are going democracy, shromocracy. There are some ideas that shouldn't be promulgated.

I've got it right here. Remaking the World.

Remaking the World, yeah.

Good book.

Yeah, great book.

So much of the assumption is that the Christian framework has shaped things to an extent where Tom Holland says it's the revolutions that won the day that you can't see.

It's the impermanent, it's the ones that didn't survive that you notice we're so baked into Christianity, we're non Christian in a Christian kind of way so far. But I know you notice the politics on hard left and hard right are saying again, this is about power.

This is not going to be about a community that can live with deep difference. This is going to be a power struggle. And we're coming back to that post Christian.

The Christian public square was a place that was radical and still anywhere that wasn't, Christianity hasn't had it.

So whether or not you think it gave rise to it, it's a deep dark coincidence that the Christian countries have been the place that brought liberal democracy and allowed it the public square, to be places where people disagreed at vociferous levels. That has not occurred now. That took time, but it's it, it did happen.

And I think you're seeing in the post Christian framework a return to the, the dark ideologies of on the left and right. And I think that'll increase.

I am in full agreement, I think, because nature abhors a vacuum.

That's right.

And you've got to find something in there that's. You have to go to something, you have to fill that with something. That's what scares me.

And I said, think of a game of Tetris where the bottom layer disappears and everything drops down. Flip it and you take God out. Something will push up to fill that top spot. It's a reverse game of Tetris. Politics is doing it.

That's why it's so hot at the moment. I look at American politics, I look at increasingly Australian politics and it's a zero sum game now.

You don't have opposition members of Parliament or Congress walking down the halls with each other as often as you used to discussing how we can make a better country. Because they have two different competing visions of that.

Well, that is in the United States. I had a conversation with Pete Wehner, who was a speechwriter. He served in three presidential administrations.

He writes for the Atlantic, New York Times, but he's a deeply Christian man, close friends. I've been friends with Tim Keller and I also had Albert Mohler on. And they had two very different views on that same idea.

And Al let it be known that he didn't agree with Pete in a conversation offline. And it is. What I've noticed is there are two varying different degrees of how that plays out in the testimony in the public Square.

I mean, these are both people that are followers of Jesus with radically different visions on how that plays out. Meanwhile, secularization continues to increase.

I see the Christian community continued to fragment and yet we haven't even talked about the global rise of Islam or any other different framework which offers a framework of life. And it's in some respect. I remember reading Craig Bartholomew where he was saying basically that is the competing and greatest he felt threat.

Now we know that the church is going to be victorious.

Nevertheless, you read individuals like Philip Jenkins who have basically said that there are places where Christianity was once really high and now are complete wastelands. Do you think that we're in danger of seeing that here in the United States, in the West?

I mean, it is in some respect that way, but you're also seeing the stirrings of revival. Do you think it will go completely vacant from the Christian faith?

Both? And isn't it.

There you go.

Anyone who says, you know, persecution is great for the church, well, hello turkey. Right? You know, yeah, yeah, you can't say that anymore. And I think what you're going to see is a very different church.

You're going to see a chastened church. And I kind of used it in the past. It's a bit like Detroit, Detroit bloated.

And then the world situation changed and then the car industry collapsed and Detroit collapsed.

But the way Detroit reinvented itself was it looked at the suburbs that were far flung and they couldn't sustain the infrastructure and their houses and they let nature take it over again and they reinvented Detroit as a much more sober minded, smaller but maneuverable city. I think that's how the church is going to have to operate in the West.

It's going to become a cohort on the margin, perhaps the creative minority line that we talk about. The creative minority rather than holding the center of power. And as things change, you're getting reactions to that.

You're getting angry at reactions or despairing reactions.

You're getting crowing reactions from secularists who think the church should never have had a place at the seat, at the table at the same time that they live off the land that Christianity gave them in that respect. So I think you're going to find the church a chastened church.

I think unless you get matters of what it means to be human, who what a human is for, who a human is for, some of those things that Alan Noble talks about in his book, you're not your own.

Unless you can get those sorted out in the church, you'll See a tail off among young people who will not buy into the anthropology of the biblical anthropology because the other gospel of self is pulling them away at the same time. Like ships passing in the night. You're going to see young people who've pulled the lever of I can do me for as long as I want and it's not working.

And so Tim Keller's last article in the Atlantic before he died was the seeds of the American Church. You know, the revival is there. It could revival become.

And he said there was no, you know, monasteries in, you know, that were keeping the culture alive in the Benedictine time until there was. There was no reformation, until there was. There was no Great Awakening until there was.

And his last line in that article, very poignant given that he died, was, you know, Christianity does not go from strength to strength, death to resurrection. Something has to die in order for something to rise.

Part of that dying might be our hopes and dreams and expectations that we will hold the center of power. Part of what might mean to die is that we will be wealthier and better off than our previous generations or more influential.

And what might have to die is that sense of this is about me because we've bought into that culture ourselves. Never mind the culture doing it, we do it. What does it mean? So death to resurrection is always the way that Christianity is going to grow.

That's a very good point and one that I hadn't really considered. I mean that article that Keller had written and he had written so many near the end.

Yeah.

It seemed like God was just using him to feed so many people.

There's a flurry, wasn't there at the end really?

Well, it's so inspirational at the same time, so present in where it was going. And what was amazing about me is that in the days of the Gospel Coalition, when it came to birth to D.A.

carson and John Piper and then of course some Keller, I mean Piper retires and, and he kind of just leaves the public stage. He's still there, but he's, he's less. Of course Carson said health issues and then. But Keller seemed to get bigger in his retirement.

He was much more aware of the cultural dynamics at work in, in a way that was very new begin esque, I would say, and even some Kuiper and I know James Davison Hunter and all those different pieces. I'm just thankful that God used him in this moment. You have talked also in the book about recovering a communal life.

How do we help recover a communal life when the prevalent model, especially where I'm at right now is attractional in nature. How do you, how do we help change that narrative?

And not only is it attractional, but everyone's isolated, everyone's in their home, on their computers, on their phones. How do we help bring that back into the public life?

Look, I think 20 or 30 years ago in the, you know, I guess in some of the young, restless reformed crew, they were trying to reach that crowd that was, you know, as Driscoll would have said, playing video games in their basements. There's more going on than that, right? There's a fractured nature that technology will bring.

There's a suburban life that has you scattered in lots of different directions. And I don't think it's going to come about easily. Part of what I say and what I write is just turning up is half the gig.

And when I met people when I was pastoring, had been to five different churches in the last 10 years, and their kids, their teenage kids were in tow with them for the fifth time with dread in their faces, having to meet a new bunch of young people who they don't know and going, you are setting your family up for a fall and it's staying somewhere long enough and saying, you know what? See, I talk about how the bad life, you know, the deep, progressive, crazy stuff about anthropology will take some people away from Jesus.

But the thing most likely to take us away from Jesus is good life, right? It's wealth. It's the law of other things.

I'm saying that pastors need to think of ways to say, how can we even use the technology? We've got to keep people who are disparate and work miles away from someone and they turn up to church on the Sunday.

How do you do community together? You can use technology to do it. But I'm also saying if you could do two things a week at church, if it was stripped back, what would you do?

You do church together on Sunday every week, and you get together with other Christians, whether they're single, same sex, attracted, divorced, married, whatever, young, old, and have a meal with people who you normally wouldn't eat together outside of the fact that you're Christian and just share life together and pray. If you. If you were only allowed to do two things, that would be enough.

And somehow we've added all this other stuff that keeps us running at the same speed as the secular culture. It's no wonder a secular particular person doesn't want to become a Christian. They're busy enough and we're going, hey, we can make you busier.

How about that? I don't want that. It's just too much. We're running at a pace we can't afford.

I'm in total agreement. I know your time is short. What's a concluding water bottle that we can give to our people today?

I'd ran onto that one and say turn up each week and look for small ways to serve other people and just have meals together with other Christians.

If it means putting your phone in a bucket, you know, like you do at youth group, if it means the whole family does it round a meal, just do that with other families and bleed that out into the rest of your life. And I think that will actually work well.

How can people keep up with what you are doing or learn more about your ministry?

Stephen mcalpine.com, very humbly named website that I'm. That I have and that's my blog really.

New website coming up will be via that if they check in@stevenmacalpine.com it'll come through with my books Future Proof and my previous book being the Bad Guys and. But mainly Stephen mcalpine.com and I just riff on this stuff and post interviews and articles and things like that. So. And things like this.

I really enjoy these kind of conversations.

Yeah, you and me both. And I want to thank you for coming on the show. I've thoroughly enjoyed the conversation. I enjoyed the book.

I would recommend people get it go onto Amazon. Future Proof is the name of the book. But Steve, thank you for coming on Apollo Swattard.

Thanks so much, Travis, being great to be with you, having these conversations. Thank you.

As an Australian, Steve is living in the future. For many Americans, the process of secularization has gone further for them than it has for us. But we are in a seeming race to catch up.

Are we really any different though, than the world around us? I've been asking myself that question. Why aren't we? And if we aren't, then what are we really offering to the world?

Why would a secular person, an unbeliever, want one we have? And why would they believe what we believe or at least claim to believe. I always feel good. I have to be honest.

When a guest that we have mentions other writers and leaders that have been on our show, not because, oh, aren't we smart? We had them here.

Well, maybe a little bit of that, but because it confirms to us what we are thinking about and that we're thinking about these things, well, we're looking in the right direction for both the diagnosis and the action points. And I think Steve's diagnosis and his answers are more than helpful. The modern Western world promises us the world, and when it works, it works.

But when it doesn't, well, good luck to you because we're changing the channel on the next trend or celebrity or social media platform or politician so we don't even have to think about this. And then we are spiraling. And honestly, it's simply not sustainable.

As Christians, we need to ask ourselves, are we falling into the same patterns as our unbelieving neighbors? If we are, we need to take stock. Steve is right. The solution is not easy. It is going to take work. But it may well be surprisingly simple.

Simply show up after being in the church for so long. It's not about the flash and the bang. It's about being faithful and showing up. Have a meal, do it regularly, not just when it's convenient.

We often complain about polarization in our world, but we refuse to meet alone to talk to people who aren't like us. If we aren't, are we really looking like, much less living like Jesus? So this week, how can you show up? Who can you serve? Start there. Start simple.

How can you simply show up where you are and then how can you serve? If you're looking for a great introductory work on the things that we've talked about, I really do recommend Steve's book, Future Proof.

If you're a pastor or other church leader looking for something to work through with your leadership team or members of your church, this is a great place to begin. It's not too heavy and it will get the conversation going. But I want to pray for you.

I know that 90% of it is showing up and that's for each one of us. We are so burdened. We are so stressed. But let's do one thing at a time. Show up and ask, who can you serve? And allow me to pray for you.

Heavenly Father, I thank you for everyone that is listening to my voice right now. I thank you for their strength. I thank you for their sacrifice. I thank you for their honesty. I thank you for their authenticity.

And I pray that you strengthen them and give them the strength necessary to do what they need to do where they are. Lord, bless them, be with them. Show them that they are not alone and that you care abundantly for them.

Give them strength and help them not to grow weary in doing good. For as you have promised in your word, we will reap a harvest if we do not give up. Amen.

I want to thank our Apollos water team for helping us to water the world. And I want to thank you, the listener, for tuning in to our show.

Please feel free to check us out on our YouTube channel, connect with us via Facebook or Instagram, or simply just email me travispollowswatered.org and I would love to correspond with you. And that's it for today's show. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered. Stay watered, everybody.