#297 | The Story You Don’t Know You’re Living | Michael Goheen, Pt. 1

Today's episode is brought to you by the Brothers family.

May the Lord bless you and keep you and make his face shine upon you and give you peace.

The biblical story is the shape of the Christian faith.

And if you allow the Christian faith to become a set of ideas and beliefs, those beliefs are going to be absorbed into the powerful Western story and be carried along by the stream of the Western story.

And what you need is an equally comprehensive and powerful vision of story and vision of the Christian life to be able to counter and to walk upstream against that story.

Welcome to Ministry Deep Dive, a podcast from Apollo's WaterD, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host.

And I want to start off today with a question.

What story is shaping the way you see the world?

That's one of those questions that sounds simple until you actually start trying to answer it.

Because all of us have been shaped by stories we didn't choose.

Stories about success, freedom, money, politics, technology, what makes a good life, what does it mean to be happy.

And many of those stories have become so normal to us that we don't even recognize them as stories anymore.

We just assume that's the way the world is.

And that's why I wanted you to hear today's conversation with my friend, Dr. Michael Gohen.

Mike is one of the leading scholars of the missionary theologian Leslie Newbegin, and he has spent decades thinking about the biblical story, the missionary identity of the church, and what it means for Christians in the west to learn to see our own culture with missionary eyes.

And if you've ever listened to Ministry Deep Dive before, you know that's something we talk about a lot around here.

How do we understand the culture we're living in without simply being absorbed by it?

It?

How do we recognize its idols when we've been surrounded by them for our entire lives?

And how do we become people who are shaped more deeply by the biblical story than by the competing stories around us?

Those questions are also at the heart of something we've been dreaming about for several years at Apollos Watered Apollos Academy.

And I finally have some really exciting news to share with you.

We've now raised about half of the funding we need for the first phase of Apollos Academy, and it's enough for us to get started.

So we are moving forward.

And Apollos Academy is being built to help pastors, ministry leaders, and serious Christians like you to go deeper to understand the biblical story, the gospel, the kingdom of God, the missionary identity of the church, and the culture in which God has placed us.

And I'm especially excited to tell you this today because Mike has agreed to be one of our teachers or teach one of our courses at Apollos Academy.

I am thrilled about that.

So what you're about to hear isn't disconnected from what we're building.

In many ways.

This conversation gives you a taste of it.

And we're going to have a whole lot more to tell you in the weeks ahead about the first three courses, our teachers, and when presales will open.

So if this sounds like something you've been looking for, make sure you're on our email list.

That's going to be the best way to follow along as we build the academy, to be among the first to know when those courses become available.

And if you believe in what we're building around here and you would like to help us fund the remainder of this first phase, there's an opportunity just for you to be a part of that as well.

Simply email me travispolowatered.org to learn more.

But right now I want you to hear from one of the people who's going to help us build it.

So let's get to my conversation with Dr. Michael Goheen.

Happy listening.

Mike Goheen, welcome back to Apollo's Watered.

Thank you.

Good to be here.

Are you ready for the fast five?

I guess as ready as I'm ever going to be for an old guy.

Here we go.

So you go back and forth between Phoenix and Vancouver, but Phoenix is most known for this kind of food.

And why?

Well, that's.

I'm probably not the right person to ask about this in a fast way.

Oh, that's right.

You're not a foodie.

I. I am the opposite of a foodie.

I'll tell you one thing I love in Phoenix, I love Texas barbecue.

So that's crazy.

It's a Texas barbecue in Phoenix and you can't get that in Vancouver.

Vancouver, it's British fish and chips, but in for me, in Phoenix, it's Texas barbecue.

Sorry about that.

Well, this is.

My other questions are going to be terrible.

My second question, it's also a food question, but because you're Canadian, I want to know what the best kind of poutine is.

I didn't know there are many kinds of poutines.

You just caught me.

There's poutineries.

I learned about poutineries.

I Had no idea there were many different kinds.

Again, I'm not being a foodie.

I enjoy poutine.

I just had it about a week ago before I came down here and enjoyed it.

But are there many kinds?

I suppose.

Different cheeses, different kinds of gravy?

I don't know.

Okay, so poutine is not the best question.

All right, how about this one?

Since you're in Phoenix, what's the best part of living in Phoenix?

Because I'd like to know, considering you've had how many days of 100 degrees in the high here right now.

My favorite thing about living in Phoenix, I do like the heat.

So I'm the raw.

Again, I'm the wrong guy to say it's bad to be hot.

I like the heat.

My wife does not.

I love the heat.

I love getting up every morning and jumping in my pool.

I like that kind of thing.

I guess what I like most about it is, to be honest, it's the cohorts that I teach.

Fifteen leaders, and they have become some of the most nourishing small groups, if you can put it, that I've ever had in our academic environment.

I love the people here.

I love the people that are the leaders in the church.

They are just wonderful.

I like that.

Well, how about this one?

Since it is a little odd, by the way, that you like heat and you're from Canada, but I guess that does exist.

So let me ask you this.

Some people like heat because they are from Canada.

That's true.

All right, how about this one?

I like to ask this one.

What people don't get about being Canadian is what.

What don't they get?

Well, for me, it's just about everything.

When I.

When I get down, I start to realize that we are Americans and Canadians are so different.

But the subtleties.

And sometimes you start to realize, okay, I think they're hearing me, but I think they're hearing me through a different grid.

But I think that.

I think Americans are much bolder and much more aggressive.

And I think that can be good and it can be bad.

And I think that sometimes the approach of Canadians and not being aggressive and bold can be seen as being timid, as being.

Being too passive, being nice.

Kings are nice.

And I think they.

That's a misunderstanding of Canadians.

Okay.

I mean, I think the whole world would be surprised if Canada led a war just because that flag is not intimidating.

Yeah, we don't have any tanks.

And if we did, we'd have three.

Three gears in reverse and one.

Okay, number five.

Now this is a little different question.

If you could pick one year to go back to in time non biblical and be a biblical, what year would you go to and why?

I would love to go back and sit in on the discipleship programs of the early church under Irenaeus.

Oh, I would.

To me, that model that Irenaeus has been using, that Irenaeus spells out, that has been.

That was worked its way through the early church.

That to me in many ways defines what I'm trying to do here at mtc.

And I see them, I see them doing that and I would love to know how they did it.

How is it that they were able to help new converts go through two years of this kind of rigorous discipleship?

And how did they do it?

How did they help them understand the biblical story?

How did they help them understand the Western story?

I mean, that was critical that you have to understand that the Western stories that are shaping you and you got to be.

Have be detoxified from the idolatry of those stories.

I'd like to see how they did that.

I'd love to see their practices and how they did it.

That'd be probably one of the times that comes to mind.

They have two years of intense discipleship.

Yep.

Before.

And then on the final.

On the end of two years, they would be in on Easter, there'd be a great baptism.

And so those, you know, that that lengthy time period that was quite intense.

The idea was you're.

You're going to get to know the biblical story.

You're going to what you're, you're going to get to know the Roman story that's been shaping you.

And what you're going to do is you're going.

We're.

If you don't not only come to know these stories, but start living in such a way that you look like Jesus and are making the biblical story attractive to people.

You don't do that, we don't baptize you.

I mean it was pretty.

It was.

There's a lot of stuff that's been that I've appreciated that's been written recently on some of that whole catechetical process.

I want to learn more.

What year is that about?

Well, Irenaeus wrote his.

His in the second century.

Okay.

So yeah, his.

Yeah.

If you're interested, the person that's written two or three books on this just died recently.

Church historian named Alan Kreider, K R E I D E R. And he's the one that's really been showing that the vision of that early church catechism involved the biblical story.

Yes, that's it.

That's it.

Yeah, yeah, that's one of them.

There's one or two other smaller books that I don't have the title right now, but smaller books that actually focus even more on some of this.

But they're saying these catechisms are saying you got to live into the biblical story with Christ as the fulfillment.

You've got to understand the Western culture and story that's been shaping you.

And all this for the purpose of being good news, looking like Jesus for the sake of the world.

I have talked with other people.

Scott Sundquist talked a bit about this book and I actually had it.

But I keep hearing more and more people refer to it.

I mean, of course he died, so I wouldn't be able to interview him.

But I love the.

I love what I've read so far in the book.

And I think we need those type of counter those catechesis methods that you talked about, which leads us to your book.

I want to talk about the church and its vocation.

Leslie Newbegin's Missionary Ecclesiology.

Now, this is a book that most people are going to go, what are you talking about?

I have no idea.

So let's start a bit with learning about Less than you begin who, first of all, who is he and how did you get into Leslie Newbiggin?

The guy named Leslie?

I mean, that's a little bit strange there, but.

And with two S's.

With two S's, too.

It's like, what, what, where is he from anyway?

Many scholars spell his name with one S and then put two GS in Newbiggin.

And he always wondered if they're compensating or something.

Who is he and how did I get into our good are great questions.

Here's how I got.

I was teaching my first Worldview course and I asked a worldview scholar who'd been teaching for years, what are you using?

He was using his own book, as you might expect.

He was using another fairly well known book by Niebuhr called Christ and Culture.

And then he's reading and then he using this third book called Foolishness to the Greeks by Leslie Nubian.

And I said, what is that book and who is Leslie Newbegin?

Well, this came at the end of about seven years.

I'd been a church planter.

I planted the church and I was pastoring it.

It was in the Toronto, Canada area, very neopagan.

And I am trying to understand what it means to Bring the gospel to this area.

And then I read this book by Leslie Newbegin called Foolishness to the Greeks.

I'd love to tell you more about this, but for the first 20 pages of that book, I read over and over and over again.

And I was saying, this guy is onto something.

And I don't know what it is, but he's onto something that is speaking to me as a church planter that is frustrated.

I'm frustrated because I'm being offered a confessionalism that is conservative on the one side.

It's wonderfully biblical and theological, but not relevant.

And the church growth movement on the other side.

This wonderfully relevant, but not rooted in scripture and theology.

And I don't know a way forward other than balancing on both feet.

And here is someone that is bringing me into a new paradigm, a new vision that's going to help me understand what I've been doing for seven years.

And so I'm reading these 20 pages over and over, trying to make sense of them.

In the meantime, running down to my wife about every hour saying, you got to hear this, you got to hear this.

This is resolving so many of my issues.

You got to hear this.

And I tried to figure out what he was doing.

To make a long story short, I started realizing that here is a man that was one of the best known Christians of this time, one of the best known authors.

This is in the late 80s.

I began church planting in the early 80s.

I'm reading his book in the late 80s and I'm starting to realize that this is one, that the books of this man are some of the best selling books going on right now.

He's written two or three books that are exploding on the scene.

And I realize I'm not the only one that this is happening to.

I'm one of many that this is happening to.

And so I find out who is this man.

And I realize here's who he is in a nutshell.

He's a fellow that has a long history in India.

He's been 40 years a missionary in India.

He's been a public figure for long through that period.

But he's been a missionary in India for 40 years.

He's now returned to England after 40 years, and he's now looking at England and the whole of Europe and for that matter, the whole of Western culture through a new set of lenses.

It's almost like his 40 years of experience has given him a new set of glasses to look at the culture in a missionary way, the way a missionary when it goes to a Hindu or a Muslim or a Buddhist culture and the way they have to understand how that culture deeply affects everything.

Now he's coming back to a culture that is claiming to either be Christian or neutral, and he's realizing it's neither.

What it is is neopagan.

It's deeply humanistic, and it is a religion that is just as dangerous, if not more so, than Hinduism or Islamic.

And so he's coming back and with his new missionary eyes, he's asking huge questions about how the church is to live faithfully in that culture.

And he writes an article that is an article that has become quite famous where he says that the Western church is an advanced case of syncretism.

An advanced case of syncretism.

Now what is syncretism?

Syncretism.

Here's one of his stories.

Syncretism is when he goes into a Hindu temple.

That Hindu temple has many figures around the temple.

And over here on this one side is a picture of Jesus with an altar before it, where on Christmas Day you come before the altar of Jesus, offer food to him, and you pray and worship Jesus on that day among many other gods.

He said missionaries would recognize quickly that's not Christianity, that's not a foothold for Christ in Hindu culture.

That's syncretism.

Christ has been absorbed into the idolatry of Hindu culture.

And he says he started to realize that this is exactly what was happening in the West.

The west, because they thought the culture was neutral or Christian, had allowed the gospel and their lives to be absorbed syncretistically into the idolatry of humanist neopagan culture.

And so he mounts a challenge to that and starts writing books that start to expose the idolatrous roots and the way it's beginning to shape the Western church.

And so here am, I a young, not quite 40 something, I guess, Pastor kind of turning towards the academy at the time, toward starting a PhD work, starting to say, oh my goodness, he's speaking my language.

He is speaking what I have seen in the Toronto area.

He is speaking to the exact things.

And I'm starting to realize that this church growth movement is deeply syncretistic.

And the problem is with this confessionalism, it's got great stuff from a contextualized past that's not speaking to the present.

What I need is somehow to bring that tradition and the gospel forward into the present in a way that begins to challenge the syncretism of the Canadian church.

So that was my exposure, my coming into Newbegin.

And he's using this Language of a missionary encounter with culture.

And I'm saying, what in the world is that?

What is a missionary encounter with culture?

And what he's saying is, it's basically what a missionary does when he goes to Hindu culture and he realizes the categories he uses, the way he lives, all of it is being shaped by the idolatry of the culture.

And somehow he's got to find a way forward that faithfully communicates the gospel, faithfully allows him to live the gospel in that culture and make the good news known without allowing it to fall prey to the idolatry of Hindu culture.

And so that really began a journey for me.

The journey affected me deeply.

Very quick, just, I know you want to get in here and ask some questions, so I'll stop in a moment.

But here, the journey it started, I'm the end of the 80s.

I'm into my PhD work.

I'm realizing probably being a pastor is not my main vocation.

I need to be in the academy.

I'm into my doctoral dissertation, and I'm studying systematic theology, specifically the work of Herman Bobink.

And then I started to realize I don't want to study Western systematic theology.

What I want to study is the.

I want to study missiology.

I want to study theology from the standpoint of missiology, because this is where Neubigen has got his insights.

He's got it from this long tradition of missiology that's been narrowed to a very small part of the theological curriculum.

And I realized that this area of missiology has a lot to say to the church today, has a lot to say to theological curriculum.

And so I do something that Travis, if you do a PhD, don't you dare do this.

What I did is I switched horses in midstream.

I was finished all my doctoral classwork and orals in systematic theology, and I'm ready.

I'm working on Bavinck.

And I realized, no, I want to do missiology.

And so I had to spend another 10 years studying missiology and reading all the reading through the whole 20th century of missiology to get to know this area.

And I had to get to know Newbegin.

I had to get to understand how he fit into this bigger story.

And in doing that, through those, it wasn't quite a decade, but little less than a decade, it started to reorient me.

And then I was ready to write a dissertation on Leslie Newbegin.

And so I almost got fired from my university because it took so long to get the PhD, but it wasn't because I was being slack or lazy.

It was just that I had to get into this whole new area of study and I had to get into it from a different angle.

Not as someone who wanted to be a cross cultural missionary in the colonial era, in the colonial paradigm, but missiology that spoke powerfully to what we needed to hear today.

So that's my origins in Leslie Newbiggin.

But with Newbegin, you write about his though missionary ecclesiology.

You also talk about a missionary identity.

So what does he mean by a missionary identity and a missionary ecclesiology?

Yeah, good question.

The problem with the word mission is it's not a biblical word, it's a theological word.

And theological words are like suitcases.

You pack a bunch of stuff into it and then with that little one suitcase you're able to communicate a lot quickly.

And.

And if you want to know what's in that suitcase, you got to unpack it.

And the suitcase, mission suitcase, that's been used for many years has been the idea of going from home base to the mission field.

It was first used in the 16th century.

But the word mission is a theological word.

Like Trinity, like providence.

They're not in the Bible, but they're trying to pack biblical stuff into it.

So one word.

And so when you start unpacking it and you start saying, okay, mission is about cross cultural missions in the colonial paradigm, you say, well, that's marginal, if it's even faithful anymore in light of the colonial paradigm.

But I started realizing that there's a lot more.

It was very different suitcase for Newbegin and for many others.

So I start with a missionary encounter with culture, a church being faithful, not being syncretistically absorbed.

So my next step back is, well, what's the church anyway?

And that's what Newbegin was talking about, a missional church.

And what he meant by that, forget what maybe others do.

What he meant by that is that the whole biblical story has a missional direction, meaning by that the Bible moves from one man to all the nations.

It moves from Abraham to, to all the nations in the book of Revelation.

And that missional direction of moving from one man through one nation, through the one man Jesus, through the Jewish church in Jerusalem, out to the nations and using the community, God uses that community, Israel, then the church to accomplish his purposes, to bring the good news to the nations, that that is a missional direction.

And the people of God have a missional vocation or identity, meaning that they have a role to play in this story that God is restoring the Blessing of creation in them, but not only in them, through them, to the world.

And so this missional identity is not simply doing evangelism or going overseas.

It's about being the true humanity that God intended human beings to be for the sake of the world.

So basically, God creates Adam.

Adam thwarts God's purpose for the creation.

God chooses Abraham, and he's going to form a new humanity out of the old humanity, to be what Adamic humanity failed to be.

And he begins to create this new humanity that will be what Adamic humanity failed to be.

And that is going to be the people of God through the story.

And they're to be that new humanity as God works in them, but not just for their own sake, but so that they can be a light to the nations, so that their lives can be attractive before the nations.

Deuteronomy 4 speaks, Where Moses speaks to Israel, says, now you're going into the land, and if you live out this Torah, this law that shapes you in a way of love and justice and wisdom before the nations, they will ask the question, who is your God?

Where is this law?

And they'll be attracted to me as the living God.

That's what missional is all about.

But the problem with today, and I won't continue the story, is that now that people are not an ethnic people defined by politics, political community.

They're now communities in every idolatrous nation of the world, whether that be India, whether that be the United States, Canada, Britain, Korea.

And now they're called to be what Israel failed to be, the new humanity in every part of the world.

And so their vocation is to be that new humanity.

Said, this is God's purpose for humanity in the midst of the world.

This is a new humanity that one day will inherit and populate the new earth.

Don't you want to join us and become part of this new humanity?

Only to the degree we're offering a new way of being human and inviting people into that, not allowing the idolatry of our culture to dehumanize us.

Only to that degree are we being faithful.

So I realized that his whole concern for encountering the idols of culture was bound up with his view of a missionary church, a missional church, being in their identity of being the new humanity, living into the story and calling others into it.

So that's what that language would try to convey.

You have mentioned numerous times the idolatries of a culture or a nation and even in the church.

What are some of the idolatries that you see you referred to syncretism that we have combined in the American church.

Being Canadian, coming in, seeing it a little bit of an outsider's eyes.

What are some of the idolatries that you see that are at work in the American church?

If I go to the deepest level, the Canadian church is bound up in many of the same idolatries because we're part of a bigger Western civilization complex with the same idolatrous roots.

On the other hand, it takes a different form.

And in many ways you can look at the different forms the way European.

It's an older Western culture, the United States that was a culture formed during the Enlightenment and then post enlightenment cultures like Canada, New Zealand, Australia, that have a different shape yet, but all of them have the same kind of idolatries, but have expressed them differently.

So what idols then would I see in the United States and many of them in Canada as well, but in the United States?

Well, I think one of the major ones is freedom.

The whole notion of liberalism in its old 19th century sense of the free, autonomous individual that undergirds the whole shaping of American culture.

I am free to be and do whatever I want.

And that expresses itself in the right wing and in the left wing.

It's just a matter of what you're free to do and be whatever you want.

And so I think freedom, the whole is which I think that's misusing a biblical word.

It's not freedom.

A much better word is autonomy.

Autonomy.

I am a law unto myself.

I don't have to live under God's law.

I'm a law to myself.

My freedom is about the individual.

I was struck between the difference between Canada and the U.S. the whole area of COVID When Covid hit in the US and Canada, I was both countries.

Canada, there was still some sense of British common law, of the common good.

And Canadians kind of said, well, of course you do these things to take care of one another.

This is part of what it means to live as community.

Whereas there's this sense of individual autonomy.

You can't tell me to wear a mask.

You can't tell me to get these vaccines.

You can't tell me to social distance now whether there are good reasons or not behind those what underlay it is a sense of autonomy.

I can be what I want as an individual and no one's going to tell me what to do.

So there's no sense of the common good.

And so I think that freedom, I think secondly, I think the biggest, one of the biggest idols is consumerism.

It's Lived for decades, for centuries now, by making the economy central to our culture, a growing economy, and we've moved from a sort of a producing, industrial society into one where the goods are now being consumed.

Consumption has become more than a consumption of goods.

It's become a consumption of experiences.

And I think that we're now consuming everything from marriages to missions, trips to worship.

And so consumption, I think a consumerist worldview that begins to engulf everything in consumption is a big, huge idol in the West.

I think political ideologies are enormous.

I think the ideologies of the right and the left are idolatrous.

They're focusing and taking one aspect of public life, whatever that might be, and they're building whole stories and whole political visions around that without being able to listen to the other person.

And so I think you've got the different political ideologies, right, that are ripping apart American culture.

Both of them are deeply idolatrous.

I think this would be part of the freedom.

But I think we have made idols out of sexuality.

This is what's led, I think, to a lot of the gender issues and the sexuality issues.

I can make my body and I can do with my sexuality what I want.

And I think all that has come from the sexual revolution of the past and making sex very much of an idol not keeping in its place.

So I think in post modernity, there's a number of idols at work there.

They rightly recognize that reason and technology are not going to build a better world.

And I think it's led to a number of idolatrous movements that are showing themselves both in the WOKE movement and the Trumpist movement.

And I suppose if I could just think of one more, I mean, I could go on for a while, but technicism, I think technology is an enormous.

And I think technology is ruining our lives in all kinds of ways.

And if it's not ruining it, at least we can say it's emptying it.

And I think we desperately need to ask how our cell phones and computers and social media, the way it's affecting us so deeply, we put our trust in technology a couple hundred years ago or 150 years ago, start building a better culture.

And the way idolatry works is, you put your trust in me, Great.

I'll give you some benefits and I'll own you very quickly.

And technology has done just that.

It's given us tremendous benefits, but it's increasingly owning us as well.

So I say technology is one of those idols as well.

You and I share a same Vision for that.

We see the idolatries at work.

And I know right now many of our people are listening, saying, what did you call an idol?

How are these things breaking down?

I think you've given us a pretty good description.

I think, though, it's very difficult for many of our people in the churches to see that as an idolatry.

How do we help people to see that's an idolatry when they're already divided so much?

And we know that we're going to be inundated with emails, possibly called to an account, maybe even fired, if you're a pastor of a church, because you and I both know that's where the fights, where people will fight to the.

To the death to make these positions known.

How do we help convince our people that these are idolatries and that they really have combined these ideas with the Christian faith and it's not the Christian faith.

I wish I had a silver bullet for you, Travis.

I wish I could just say.

I wish I could say, here's how you do it.

So I'm just going to just say a few things.

I'm saying, basically, that is.

That is what I've been giving my life to, my whole academic life to.

So that's a huge.

That would be a huge answer.

But for many years, I taught in the university, I taught worldview studies, and in the worldview studies, I was trying to help students understand their idolatries, how it affected their public life and vocation.

So for me, one of the ways of doing it was opening up the meaning of the gospel, opening up the meeting of the biblical story.

And it was then a lot of it was just helping them understand their story, helping them understand how the Western story had so deeply shaped us today.

And a lot of them just said we had no idea about the story and how we'd been shaped by it.

So a lot of it is just telling the story.

That's what I used to do in the university.

Now in the last 12 years, I've been doing that with leaders and pastors and trying to help them wrestle through these issues.

And what I do is I start.

I just started a new freshman group yesterday of leaders, or actually Tuesday.

And what I did in there is I always start with the gospel.

What is the gospel?

What was this gospel Jesus proclaimed?

Well, the gospel he proclaimed wasn't what a lot of Americans say it is already.

That's been syncretistically absorbed into individualism.

But the gospel that Jesus proclaims is good news.

The kingdom of God has Come.

That is God's power to renew and heal the creation and all of human life is broken into history in the life, death and resurrection of Jesus.

That already begins to open eyes to these leaders that this gospel is much bigger than simply individual salvation in the future.

It's about Christ ruling our lives.

Now.

Then secondly, I take them, spend a long time taking them to the biblical story and why it's so urgent.

The biblical story is the shape of the Christian faith.

And if you allow the Christian faith to become a set of ideas and beliefs, those beliefs are going to be absorbed into the powerful Western story and be carried along by the stream of the Western story.

And what you need is an equally comprehensive and powerful vision of story and vision of the Christian life to be able to counter and to walk upstream against that story.

I mean, that was a view.

That was a vision Neubigen had and that's a view that Abraham Kuyper had.

Both of them said, how do we get a comprehensive vision to stand against this powerful cultural stream?

Well, Newbiggin said, and I believe it's the biblical story.

It's the only way.

If you don't have a story, your beliefs are going to get absorbed into this powerful cultural story.

And then the third step from gospel to story, the third step is to help people see this is their missionary identity.

The people of God are not a religious institution catering to individuals to help them nurture their individual salvation for the future.

The church is the community called to be the new humanity for the sake of the world, to live out the gospel in every area of their lives for the sake of the world.

And then thirdly and fourthly, rather, it's encountering the culture.

And that's what most, I would say, most leaders would say that's the most revolutionary part.

The first three, Gospel story and missional identity.

Click.

In the fourth section when I begin to talk a missionary encounter with culture.

I take them through the Western story from the pre Socratics right through till today.

And as I take them through the story, I'm indicating at various points where our different beliefs have come from and why they're now shaping us.

And by the end of that first year, I know I've heard it so many times, their heads are spinning and they're realizing, my goodness, I never understood our culture from that standpoint till all of a sudden.

Understanding that story has helped me see what is there.

And then the rest of the four years, to continue with this, answering your question, the rest of the four years are then okay.

Within that story.

Let me help you see where technicism, consumerism, liberalism, racism, sexual identity and gender, the problems with issues with gender, economism.

Let me help you see where those come and how they're shaping the whole of life and what is creationally good about these things and what's idolatrously twisted about these things so we can seize and embrace what's good and say no to their cultural distortion.

So it's a long process.

There's no silver bullet, Travis.

It's a long process of a deepening discipleship into the Gospel, a deepening discipleship into the story of the Bible, a deepening discipleship into what it means to be the people of God.

God, and a deepening discipleship into knowing our culture and its religious core.

So it's a long process, telling the story, wrestling with its individual.

Its.

Its religious core, and then seeing how that core has affected institutions and practices within culture and then learning how to live within them.

Oh, my.

I just, I spill out a whole.

Agenda that is like several classes, as you've already alluded to.

And I know some people.

No, it's.

No, it's.

No, it's not several classes.

It's years.

It's a whole life of discipleship.

You know, this deep.

I know many of our people that are listening are still.

Their heads are still spinning.

But when you said it's not just an individual is salvation and getting into heaven, but getting really that heaven into you.

Now, this idea, and I think it goes back, if we were looking at it biblically, just as one verse, where Jesus comes preaching and teaching that preaching the gospel, the kingdom of God is at hand, but it says Gospel there.

And the question is, what was he preaching if he hadn't died yet?

And that's where you get the understanding of the kingdom and the fact that the New Testament talks about kingdoms so often, it's something that many evangelicals have largely lost, and it's affected so many different areas of our lives in our Christian faith.

And like you said, it's because of the Western cultural story.

We've imbibed that.

Speaking of that story, what is that story for our people?

So that they might understand it?

They're like, I've never heard this Western culture story.

What are you talking about here?

What do you mean by the Western cultural story?

How long do you want?

I want.

Just give it.

Give it.

Well, this.

I'm not sure where to start, because if I start back in the Presocratics, we're going to be here for a while.

If I start at the Enlightenment that has begun to deeply affect American culture, that's a good place to start because that's the place of a real conversion in many ways, in Western culture.

But the trouble is to understand that conversion got to know what's gone before, what led into it.

So this is.

Let me.

Let me see if I can.

Let me see if I can do it this way.

Michael Polani has used an image, and he says that the explosion of Western culture is lighting the flame of Western pagan Greek humanism in the oxygen of the gospel.

See a light, this pagan humanism that came from the early Greeks in the.

The oxygen of the gospel.

Now he's talking about a late explosion.

But the reality is that it's been the gospel and it's been the pagan humanism of people like Plato and Aristotle that have formed a syncretistic alliance and shaped European culture.

Now, I would love to talk about that, but I'm going to let that go.

But as we move into the modern era, what begins to happen with the Renaissance and on into the scientific revolution, the Enlightenment, is that humanism begins to separate itself, as it were, from the Christian faith, no longer forming this nice partnership.

The way you might say it to children is there was a marriage of people that were incompatible through the Middle Ages, but now, all of a sudden at the Renaissance, they start realizing they're incompatible and they start to push away.

And so what we're talking about is secularism here.

As the humanist worldview starts to push itself away more and more from the Gospel, it continues to be deeply shaped by the gospel.

But now humanism is beginning to exert its freedom that paganism is going to become a neo paganism by the time we reach the late 20th century.

And so what happened between the Renaissance, where the Christian faith was still very strong with humanism, and the Enlightenment, when finally there is this conversion to humanism, what happened in between?

Well, there's two main theses that historians talk about.

First was in the scientific revolution, they were given a choice, and you're given a choice between the Christian faith and science.

Either the Christian faith was true and the earth was at the center of the universe and so forth, or science was true.

And more and more people rejected the Christian faith, saying, we can see what we can see.

And so that led to the diminishment of the Christian faith.

But the second thing that was probably even more problematic was after the Reformation, there were all these religious wars.

Calvinists were killing Lutherans, Lutherans were killing Catholics, Catholics were killing the Lutherans, everybody was killing each other.

And the thing is that everybody was killing the poor Anabaptists.

And so what you've got is Europe being soaked with the blood of Christians.

And you see people like Voltaire and people like Descartes saying, oh, if this is the Christian faith that holds culture together, we want to reject it because this is what it leads to.

And so there's this growing rejection of the Christian faith because of what it leads to, this kind of hostility.

And so in the next century, the Enlightenment, there is the conversion of Western culture to a humanist vision.

That humanist vision holds onto a lot of Christian stuff, but now reshapes it.

And that Enlightenment vision is, we will build the new creation, but we're going to build it.

God will not build it.

And the way we are going to build it is by science coming to understand our world.

And as we understand that world, we apply it to the world first of all through technology that enables us to control the non human creation.

And then we're able to control it by applying it to the social area, by forming economic and political and judicial and media systems shaped by science.

And when we get a good economic system, let's say capitalism, and a good political system, let's say democracy, that's deeply shaped by science.

And we are rigorous in making sure that scientific science undergirds those institutions, will shape a society where we can build this better world.

And so in many ways, the modern worldview that's controlled by the United States and North America for 200 years is a vision of science and technology building a better world and progressing to this better world.

What are you seeing in the late 20th century, beginning in the.

That was my generation.

I used to actually have hair down to here.

You'd never believe it, but in that hippie generation, you had a whole generation of people growing up saying, this worldview is not working.

Look what it's leading to.

And you see this enormous revolution in the 60s that is saying this is not working.

And this is the origins and the beginning of post modernity that is saying that story didn't work.

It's led to more oppression, more injustice, more destruction of our world.

And he says, that is not working.

And in many ways what you see in the United States back in this time is really polarization.

Let's hold on to our humanist past, but of course that's considered to be Christian.

Let's hold on to our humanist past.

And you See people saying, no, no, These godless liberals are saying that it's not working.

You know, that story, that history is not working.

It's destroying our culture.

And that's evolved.

And we could talk about its evolution in the late 20th, early 21st century.

But now you're in a situation where in many ways, you've got a culture that's at culture wars precisely because that vision of life did not work.

That vision of life that was embodied in the founding fathers of the United States, that Enlightenment vision that's embodied in the founding fathers of the United States, it did not work.

It wasn't a Christian vision.

It was an Enlightenment vision, and it did not work.

And the fragmentation is.

What do we do how in the world?

What do we do now in a culture that.

Where we see its failure?

Well, that's probably way too general, probably raises all kinds of red flags.

But I think that that has to be worked out concretely and showing that this is.

We're in.

We're in the midst.

The way I like to put it, we're in the midst in our culture at this moment of the failure of idols that idols, as my friend Chris Wright says, idols never fail to fail.

Idols never fail to fail.

And the good gift of science, the good gift of technology, the good gift of economic freedom, the good gift of democratic visions, of politics, the good understandings of justice that came from all that is failing to deliver the new creation that we want to see.

And so those gifts have become idols.

And what idols do is they say, give your heart to me.

When you give me your heart, I will give you something in return.

Because they're powers of creation, technology, science.

They'll give you stuff.

But soon as I give you some of these gifts from creation, I'll soon take over your heart, and I will dominate you and I'll dehumanize you.

That's the way idolatry works.

I think.

We're seeing so much of that in our culture today.

I want to leave you with something Mike said in that conversation.

There isn't a silver bullet for any of this.

Learning to recognize the stories and idols that shape us and learning to live faithfully in the midst of them isn't something we figure out in a single podcast episode.

It's a whole life of discipleship.

We have to know the gospel.

We have to know the biblical stories.

We have to understand who we are as the people of God, and we have to learn to see the culture around us clearly enough that we can live faithfully within it without simply being absorbed by it.

And that's exactly why we're building Apollos Academy.

We want to create a place where pastors, ministry leaders, and serious Christians can wrestle with these things at a much deeper level and learn from people like Mike who have spent their lives thinking about them.

And now, after several years of dreaming about this, we actually get to build it.

We've raised about half of what we need for this first phase.

That's enough for us to begin production, and we're moving forward with our first three courses.

So here's what I'd love for you to do.

If you're interested in Apollos Academy, get on our email list.

It's that simple.

That's where we're going to announce the first three courses.

Courses introduce you to the teachers, take you behind the scenes as we're building this and let you know as soon as pre sales open.

Simply sign up in your show notes and if you're listening to this and thinking, I believe in this, I want to help make it happen.

We're still raising the remaining funding for this first phase, and we'd love to have you partner with us.

Simply go to ApolloSWater.org and click the Donate or support us button.

I'm incredibly grateful for those out there who have already stepped forward and made it possible for us to begin.

Thank you.

This has been a vision for several years, and to finally be at the place where we can start building it is incredibly exciting.

There's a lot of work ahead for us, but we're building and I can't wait to show you what's coming.

And we're not finished with Mike either.

In the next part of our conversation, we're going to keep digging into Western culture.

What's good in it, where its idols have distorted us, the central place of discipleship and what it means to recover the bigness of the gospel.

Until then, make sure you've subscribed to Ministry Deep Dive and make sure you're on the Apollos Watered email list so you don't want to miss what's coming with Apollos Academy.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off for Ministry Deep Dive.

Stay watered, everybody.