#302 | Has Safety Become an Idol? | Jeremy Lundgren

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As Christians, I think we have a lot of good theological resources, a lot of biblical resources where we can think about the inner contentment versus the outer sufferings that Paul talks about.

But once you start pulling on that thread, you basically realize when you're trying to figure out what exactly am I trying to keep safe, and you get down to those issues of, oh, do I want inner wholeness or outer wholeness?

And what's the relationship between the two?

Right.

We know people that are physically safe, and they're a mess on the inside, and vice versa.

We live in a world obsessed with safety.

We want safe homes, safe neighborhoods, safe churches, safe schools, and safe futures for our children.

We want a safe faith.

And honestly, there's nothing wrong with any of that.

In fact, I remember hearing a Christian radio station, you might have heard it, too.

Advertise themselves with the slogan safe for the whole family.

Now, I understand what they're trying to communicate.

I mean, parents want to know that when they turn on the radio, they're not going to hear some horrible word pop out and have to explain it to their kids.

I appreciate that, but I've been really wondering about something.

When did safety become one of the primary ways we describe what's good for Christians?

Because the Christian faith has never really been described as safe in church history.

And have we become so concerned about keeping ourselves and our families safe that we've forgotten what it means to actually follow Jesus?

Think about it.

Jesus told his disciples to take up their crosses and follow him.

Not safe.

He sent them out into a world that was often hostile to their message.

Not safe.

And throughout church history, Christians have willingly sacrificed comfort, security, and sometimes their very lives for the sake of the gospel that is not in any way, shape or form safe.

Yet today, we approach ministry and life like rainbows and pillows.

We want to know the outcome before we make the decision.

We want assurances before we take the next step.

And when something seems way too risky, we simply avoid it.

So verses like Jesus talking about going and selling everything that you have and following me.

Too risky.

Not going to do it.

Not safe.

We all have experienced that.

We're all weighing that in our heart.

Would we actually do it?

I don't know.

And some people think, well, I'm being wise.

Well, is that wisdom or is it fear masquerading as wisdom?

And we just rationalize it.

Welcome to ministry.

Deep dive.

I'm your host, Travis Michael Fleming.

This is the podcast where we talk about this stuff, the stuff that no one else really talks about.

And today I am talking to Dr. Jeremy Lundgren, author of the book the Pursuit of A Theology of Danger, Risk, and Security.

And I have to tell you, this is a subject that's really challenged my thinking, and it's going to challenge yours as well.

We're going to explore how our understanding of safety has developed, how it shapes our parenting in our churches today, and what happens when something God created is a good.

Okay, safety is a good thing.

Becomes something that actually becomes primary, and in some respect, we worship it.

And this conversation really gets at the heart of what we're developing at Apollos Academy, because one of the greatest challenges facing the church today is that we've inherited ways of thinking and doing ministry that we rarely stop to question.

We may be operating with assumptions that owe more to the culture around us than to the scriptures we profess to believe.

And if we're going to advance the gospel by engaging our culture today, we need to recognize not only what's happening around us, but what's happening within us.

So how do we develop a biblical theology of safety?

And what does it mean to take risk for the kingdom of God today?

And how can pastors help their people distinguish between genuine wisdom, foolishness, and fear?

That's what we're exploring today on Ministry Deep Dive.

Let's dive in.

Jeremy Lundgren, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

Hi, Travis.

Thanks for having me on.

Okay, we're gonna get into this conversation pretty quick because I know some people are wondering, why are we talking about safety?

We need our churches to more safe, not less.

But we do.

We need to really think about this subject.

So let's start with what might seem like a very strange question.

What is wrong with pursuing safety?

Isn't that something that every responsible person should do?

A great question.

And as you were setting it up, I was thinking about conversations I've had in the past, back when I was doing my PhD telling people that this was a topic I was researching and studying.

And definitely had a number of people just kind of shrug their shoulders and look at me like, what's there to look at?

Isn't safety an obvious good?

What else would you want to do?

Go be?

I don't know.

What's the opposite of safety?

Dangerous or danger?

Yeah.

Injured or whatever that might be.

And yeah, it's a fair question.

I appreciate what you talked about, how it's a good thing that can become idolatrous and I think some good diagnostic questions to ask ourselves as we just assume safety.

That's one of the things I talk about in the book, that the culture that we live in just assumes that safety is a virtue.

It's kind of a cultural good.

I mean, that's how you end a conversation, right?

You just say, that's not safe, as if that's the ace card or the trump card to stop deliberation about what we should do.

So a couple questions to ask are, what precisely is it that you're trying to keep safe?

Like, really pause and think about that.

Don't just say, I want my kids to be safe.

Safety means you want them safe from danger, you want them whole, you want them something.

So again, to ask yourself, what is it precisely that you're trying to save or keep safe?

And then at what cost?

That's the other question to ask yourself.

What am I willing to give up for safety?

Am I willing to give up freedom?

Am I willing to give up the development of discipline and godly character?

What are other good things in this deliberation, in this negotiation that I'm willing to give up?

And you start asking those questions and you realize that there's just a lot that we assume in how we manage our churches, how we manage our ministries, what we assume about life.

You brought up kids.

That's always an important topic.

And you realize, oh, there's a lot more going on here.

There's a lot, whether it's messages from the world or from our own doubts and fears that we let that we just assume in our discussions about safety.

That's one of the reasons this was a good project for me to work on, is I just wanted to bring those assumptions to the surface, and maybe all the assumptions are right and we should keep doing things the way that we've been doing them.

But we can at least look at them, think about them, consider them in a.

In a godly light.

I really started to think about this concept of safety.

I was visiting the University of Illinois at Champaign Urbana or Urbana Champaign, and I was interacting with one of the college ministry directors that's there.

And I said, have you seen a shift?

This was probably five or six years ago.

Have you seen a shift in the kids?

And he said, yes.

And I asked him to describe that.

And he said, one of the things that we've seen, he goes, have you heard of helicopter parents?

And I'm like, yeah, of course we've.

We've all heard of that.

It's.

It's.

He goes, but have you heard of snowplow parents?

And I was like, what?

Like, I had not registered to me what he was talking about.

And he said, we find that these parents now are so concerned about their children's psychological safety, their physical safety, that they don't want their children to experience any opposition.

And so they just go through.

And so these kids now have no resiliency.

And I've seen that other places.

I actually had a kid in my youth group many years ago whose mother was paranoid about safety.

And so she would.

If they travel on a road trip, she would go into the bathroom at a gas station and disinfect it before he would use it.

So I'm just like, okay, that's nuts.

That's a little crazy.

Yeah.

Why.

Why is this such an important topic now?

Because like you said, we all want to have safe things, but it seems like it's gone too far now.

Yeah, the snowplow parent.

I think I heard that term once before, but I forgot it until you brought it up again of just getting everything out of the child's way.

And, boy, I just think that mother must be tired is one thing, that one thing that I think.

And then I think about the.

I mean, even in your home, where maybe you have the greatest level of control over the environment, you set up, like, frictions or resistance for your kids, even if it's just picking up after themselves, treating their sister nicely, whatever that might be.

Because again, and I guess the question of, what are you trying to keep safe?

And what is the purpose of parenting?

It's to see them develop into godly young men and women who fear and obey Christ, who trust in him.

And so, yeah, helicopter parenting, snowplow parenting.

And I also wonder if there is some pressure not directly related to safety, but just related to wanting good things for your kids.

And then I don't know exactly where that mentality comes from that I want things to be easy for my kids, but then they're not, like you said, building resilience.

I think there's something good about genuinely being stuck in a certain situation, whether you're lost, whether you're.

I don't know, just you're.

You're a kid and you're playing.

I remember a friend and I, we.

We built a ladder, if you want to call it that, when we were like, I don't know, fourth grade, fifth grade, something like.

And we were like, let's climb up on the.

On the roof of his house.

And so the the ladder, of course, broke as we got up on top of it.

And then we're up on the roof having fun.

But then we were genuinely stuck.

Like we're trying to figure out how are we.

How are we going to get down?

And.

And one of the neighbor guys said, wait, before you do anything, I want to go get some coffee.

I want to see how you.

How you figure this out.

And I think he was doing us a favor.

Right.

He didn't solve the problem for us.

He wanted to see what we were going to figure out.

And we, we found a low spot that we were able to just jump off.

And it wasn't, Wasn't too much tr.

But oftentimes I think we want to prevent our kids from having those things.

We're okay with artificial situations like that where you kind of set up a situation of like, what are you going to do?

Or what would you do?

But.

But to genuinely have ourselves, our children in.

Yeah.

Just in a situation.

And that's what risk is.

Right.

That's the world we live in where you're moving forward, but you don't know exactly what the outcome is going to be.

I think we live in a world where on a lot of different levels, not just with our kids, but with industry, with commerce, with manufacturing, with, you name it, we want to be able to control it in such a way where we know what the results are going to be before we start the process.

But life doesn't work that way.

We'd like it to.

Well, even reading you were kind of go through this in your book.

You go through this kind of history and development of risk and safety and walking through it in probability and how people, if there's danger, they should know it, they should prevent it.

And yet I look at just the subject matter.

First of all, just the subject matter intrigues me because, number one, no one is talking about this.

You're the first that I've really seen it.

So that makes me want to know, why is this such a subject that you're interested in?

Like, what brought it to the surface for you?

Yeah, first I'll say that there isn't.

There are some people talking about it.

There are a lot of different fields, sociology, psychology, economics, where the topic of risk is actually talked about quite a bit.

Yeah, but one of the reasons I wanted to do a theology, kind of theological exploration of this topic is because I had a real hard time finding a kind of a deep dive into the topic.

Found some stuff about the importance of taking risk, maybe in missions.

That's Where I found some work on this topic of being willing to step out and take risks for the sake of the Great Commission, things like that.

And actually I would say it was missions that got me started with this.

Actually before that, the first year my wife and I were married.

I've told this story before, but we were driving past an elementary school and the sign on the marquee said have a safe summer.

And that's what all the schools say.

And I made a comment to my new bride.

So something along the lines of kids don't want to have safe summers, they want to have fun summers or something like that.

And then we just started talking about that.

That's one of the earliest memories I have of kind of thinking about this topic of safety because it got me thinking, like what is it?

What kind of summer?

You're Talking to a 12 year old boy and it's the last day of school, he's exc.

Excited, he's ready and you ask him what kind of summer do you want to have?

He's not going to say, I really hope I have a safe summer.

And that's why 12 year old boys have mothers, because they do need some guidelines so they can make it to 13.

Exactly.

And so you just think, and then even if you talk to the parents, you talk to the teachers who genuinely care and want good for these kids.

Yeah, on a basic level, you don't want them to undergo serious physical harm, you don't want them to face unnecessary difficulties and things like that.

At the same time, one of the images that pop in my mind as I think about wanting our kids to have safe summers, and there's a lot of research on this how basically during the summertime the parks are often empty, the sidewalks, compared with a generation or two generations ago, the streets are just empty of kids.

And where are they?

They're in the basement on a screen.

And then that's where you ask yourself, is your kid riding his bike in traffic in more danger than your 12 year old boy on a screen in the basement?

And that's where you have start thinking about what are the dangers that he's facing.

There are moral dangers, there are, you know, just, just social dangers, all sorts of things that can cause trouble.

But we've for a variety of reasons kind of prioritized keeping them physically safe, wanting to control where they're at.

And now I think a lot of the questions parents are have is those, those new questions of if I keep them off the street where they can't crash their bike or get hit by a car.

There are other things that my kids are facing that they're struggling with, a lot of difficulties that they're deal.

So anyways, you asked the question how I got interested in this.

So I don't know, we just started thinking, having conversations many years ago about those sorts of things.

And then my wife and I were missionaries in Kazakhstan for a couple years and loved that.

A great country, wonderful people.

Saw fruit in our ministry and just kind of on a societal level, basic things we would think about, like traffic safety, construction safety.

There was a little bazaar right outside our apartment window.

And every morning there would be a fresh cow's head sitting there, there with piles of meat, with flies swarming around.

But every day the butcher there or the guy selling it, he sold off that meat.

And then the next day there would be more there.

And so on that level of food safety or something like that, there were just a lot of things like that.

They were very different from how it's kind of prioritized, how it's controlled in America.

So that was another experience that got me.

Yeah, just thinking a lot of conversations.

And then, of course, coming back to America, those things I'd been thinking about were really highlighted for me.

Oh, this is America.

This is the culture I live in.

And just noticing how often in signage, in conversations, in the way institutions and organizations operate, again, safety is this underlying thing that's just often assumed.

Another train of thought I would often entertain was on the one level, I would just say, I can't really pick on america in the 21st century.

You go to any culture, any time and place, and there's this fundamental, almost instinctual desire to get away from danger, to have some level of control of the world around you, whether it's animals or diseases or other people, whatever that might be.

So I think that's the level on which we would say that desire for safety is kind of common to all humanity.

But just looking at how we in particular pursue safety, and then, yeah, just trying to say, what does scripture say about this?

How can we think about these things, evaluate these things, and decide just how we're going to live our lives, what we're going to do?

When you mentioned about kids being in the basement, I was immediately thinking of Jonathan Heights book the Anxious Generation.

And in it, he makes two comments.

Number one, he's like, our kids are overprotected outside and under, protected inside.

Yeah, that's a great quote.

Yeah, I thought that was a great way of putting it.

But one of the things that he talked about in the book, and I don't know if you've read the book, but in it he tells this story about being in front of a group of adults speaking.

He would often start this group meeting with asking this question, how old were they when they were able to travel two miles away from home?

And he said, if you were 5 and younger, raise your hand.

And there would be a group of people that would raise their hand.

And he would say, okay, if you were 10 and younger, raise your hand.

And then another group would raise their hand.

And he said, okay, if 10 and over you were 15 and below.

And then even more people raised their hand.

But what was fascinating is he said it was interesting because you could see the ages of the people.

According to the response, he said when they were younger, they were able to travel.

When they were younger, he said they were usually over 70.

And the younger they got, the more they wouldn't be able to travel that far away.

It's making so the world is changing where we're more aware of the dangers that are around.

Is that part of what we're dealing with now is that the pendulum wasn't far enough for a time, but it's swinging now to the other way because we do want to keep people safe.

Like you said, food safety.

I don't want flies all over the meat that I go get at the grocery store.

Think you do either?

Seriously, I don't want to be like buying the milk that's expired.

I, I don't want all that.

I want food safety.

I'm all for food safety, but how far do we go?

And it stepped out of the bounds of what God intended.

One thought I had related to food safety is, and this is something I talk about in the book, this is kind of a side comment, but you look at kind of pre modern concepts of safety modern and then late modern or postmodern.

And one of the kind of late modern or postmodern reflections on safet is kind of a feedback loop where the more things you do to try to be safe, you add a new set of dangers.

So with food safety, there's kind of this irony where a lot of people want to go back to basically the older ways of eating and preparing food more natural or organic, whatever that might be.

Because in the name of food safety, you have genetic modifications you have pesticides, you have things like that that a lot of people are developing allergies to and things like that.

So that was more of a side just to say, like, you want food safety and we want food safety, but then you realize there are limits to it or you bring in new dangers.

So that that complicates the situation where nowadays there are a lot of people where there are dangers related to the food that they eat.

Had a conversation with a friend recently where one of his kids had a severe allergic reaction to some food and had to go to the doctor and all those sorts of things.

So anyways, that's a side comment, but as we think about, you know, how far children go away from home, I guess one question to ask is, Those people over 70, did they live in rural or less densely populated areas where their closest friend was two miles away?

And so that's what they needed to do.

Whereas if you live in densely populated suburbs, within a mile you've got, you know, thousands and thousands of people.

As there might just be some logistical things related to that, which is okay.

But one of the things that I think about is just the relationship between our desire for knowledge of what's going on in the world around us and then our desire to control things.

And in some ways, I think, again, in a paradoxical way, it doesn't broaden our world, it shrinks our world.

Here's what I mean.

When I went off to college, no cell phones.

I had, you know, the phone in my dorm room that my parents would call.

I remember my mom even set up a way for me to call home without having to pay long distance is that long ago?

I could call a 18 number and call home, because otherwise it was calling collect or something like that.

So that was the world that I lived in.

So when I wasn't in my dorm room, my parents had no way of knowing where I was or what I was doing.

They couldn't get ahold of me.

So I think I had a voice or what do you call those things?

Answering machine, Something like that.

And that was it.

And so in some ways, I was out of their sight.

They couldn't do anything about it.

I know they prayed for me, they cared for me, but they couldn't know, like, oh, Jeremy's going with these people to this place, and should he be doing that?

And so they had to just kind of let me go, in a sense.

And I've got young adult children, so I'm going through that process myself.

But then I would come home for A weekend, and it'd be Saturday and I'd be leaving, and my mom is asking me all sorts of questions.

And I remember there was this dissonance where I'm thinking, but I was just at college for a month, and I went all over the place doing all sorts of things, and I never had to tell you once or explain or get your permission for what I was doing.

But since I'm home and you see me grabbing the keys and leaving, you want to know what's going on.

So you take that and you apply that to Life360, to find my iPhone, to all the basically ways that we are surveilled and we surveil each other.

And there's this idea like, well, if I know where my kid is all the time, I'll know more, and therefore I'll have a bit more control and things will be better.

And so a question to ask yourself for your listeners is, since you installed Life360 on your phone, would you say your anxiety overall has increased or decreased?

Like, which way has it gone?

And there might be a variety of answers to those things, but again, it's one worth worth thinking through, worth worth asking those questions, these things that you're using.

And I think you would say, because you.

You want to decrease the anxiety, which is whether you feel safe or not, but you're also seeking to increase the safety of your children, of your family, whatever that might be.

Okay, I want to know something you mentioned.

We're talking about safety.

What kind of safety are we talking about here?

Are we talking about physical, financial, emotional?

I mean, what kind of safety are we talking about?

About.

I talk about this in the introduction to my book, where I'm primarily focused in my research and thinking on physical safety, just because that's kind of in the world around us.

That's how it first presented itself to me.

My undergrad major was construction management, so we would take construction safety classes.

You go on a job site, you see the signs all over the place, things like that.

And so looking at our desire to control the physical world around us, that's where you see, with the rise of industrialization, modernity, manufacturing, all those sorts of things.

That's where kind of that slogan, safety first associated with the railroad industry and then in manufacturing, things like that, that's where kind of the public face of safety first came into American culture and other industrialized cultures.

So that was the starting point.

But you're right that you start thinking about that and you start getting into relationships.

Spiritual, spiritual safety.

Any category of life that you can think of.

You can find something where they're talking about the safety of that, of that sort of thing.

And so I thought a lot about kind of how those things all tie in together with each other, try to make connections throughout the book.

And that gets back to that question I asked earlier of what precisely is it that you're trying to keep safe and right.

Jesus talks about those who can destroy the body but can't destroy the soul.

And so as Christians, I think we have a lot of good theological resources, a lot of biblical resources where we can think about the inner contentment versus the outer sufferings that Paul talks about.

And so anyways, I don't know if that's a direct answer to your question, but once you start pulling on that thread, you basically realize when you're trying to figure out what exactly am I trying to keep safe, and you get down to those issues of, oh, do I want inner wholeness or outer wholeness, and what's the relationship between the two, and can I have.

Right.

We know people that are physically safe and they're a mess on the inside and vice versa.

So I wonder.

It's a hard question to answer.

Well, it is.

But this is where I find that missions actually plays a huge role because I look at missionaries and I look at a lot of Western people and I see the variety of ailments that many Westerners have to deal with.

And some are very real and some of them I don't struggle with, and I wonder if they are real.

I'm just being very frank.

I'm just like, what, what is this?

I, I, I can't imagine my grandparents generation sitting around talking about the trauma that their parents parented them with.

I just can't.

They were World War II, the greatest generation.

They're not sitting around going, they didn't hold me enough or spend time with me enough.

They just didn't think that way.

Now, granted, it's a different time.

We need to have even, I would say, a theology of culture and how culture advances.

And it brings, like you mentioned in, even in your book, with new technologies there's new dangers.

With the automobile, that's a great thing, but it brought a whole lot of new dangers with it.

The same with the Internet.

And now with AI high, it's even shifting even further.

And so it's happening now going to kind of harmut Rosa's thesis of acceleration theory, which is not necessarily for this conversation today.

But the faster that culture gets, the more we're dependent on it.

And it's harder to remove ourselves from it because we do want to protect ourselves.

We know the harm, we know the trauma.

We know all of those different things.

And I'm going a little beyond your thesis, but I'm looking at the church and I'm going, how do pastors do this?

This.

Because they're not gonna.

They're not gonna protect their people all the time.

And they can either cater to that idol, which, again, that creational good.

As you mentioned, I want my children to feel safe.

I've been at churches where we put in doors and procedures to protect kids.

We wanted people to know that we were taking this seriously, that their children were safe.

So that's a good thing.

That's something we all need to do.

We all know about active shift shooters in our world today.

We need to have that kind of training that's good, keeping people safe.

But when people move into certain neighborhoods and they refuse to interact with people from other neighborhoods because it's not safe, or send their children to a certain place because they're fearful of their kids not being safe, and yet I look at them and I go, your kid is no earthly good.

You're removing the salt and light from the places that it could go.

And I know that it's a nuance.

Right.

This is the thing that we got to figure out.

How do you then.

How do you.

You go about helping Christians and pastors to understand how to recognize the idolatrous elements and the creational goods within their churches and in their cultures?

Yeah.

What are you keeping your life safe for?

What is your life supposed to be used for?

Well, what does Jesus say?

Right, that you live to follow him, to serve other people.

And so you gave the example of, you know, a kid in a certain neighborhood who's not interacting with other people.

And you have to ask yourself, you know, for yourself, for.

Again, for your kids, like, what does God have you here for?

What are you supposed to be doing?

And it's to serve others, which means going out your front door, looking other people in the eye, talking to them, engaging with people you don't know, starting tasks, doing things, and you don't know how they're going to end up beginning a relationship where you, You.

You just can't.

You can't proceduralize relationships if you want them to be meaningful.

And so, yeah, again, getting that back to that question, like, you want your kids to be safe for what.

What direction are they moving?

What are you preparing them for?

And when you lose sight of that and you're Just focused on the.

The right now.

And there's probably often some selfishness in that, as well as a parent where you don't want to see your kid go out and do things, we want to maintain control of them.

But you think about in the Book of Acts, when the first Christians were persecuted, there's Stephen, obviously, who died.

But then you think about those thrown in prison and the response that they had when they let out, that they rejoiced, that they were counted worthy to suffer for the name of Christ.

And so you think about, oh, that's a privilege to suffer for Christ in service of him.

That's an honor that God would count me worthy.

And so you look in the church and when Christians go through difficulties, consistent testimony throughout church history of the fellowship with God, the fellowship with other Christians, the good things, the blessings that come from that persecution, from that pressure that's put on them, even to the point of martyrdom.

But then it quickly raised an important question in the early church, which was basically this.

If there are these blessings that come from facing enduring hardships, from taking risks, so to speak, to what extent should you go out and find that difficulty?

And to what extent do you let it come to you?

And to what extent when you find persecution coming, if you've read the martyrdom of Polycarp that he a number of times fled, but then eventually he said, I'm an old man, I'm done running.

They can come take me.

And so those are some really important questions.

I think they're directly applicable to our lives today.

Where you think about in your household, to what extent do you, as a training thing, set up artificial scenarios to walk through?

And then to what extent, again, do you walk into a situation or give others around you freedom to go into those situations where there's going to be some difficulty?

But then, like you were saying, with churches and things like that, we have a responsibility.

I'm here at Silver Birch Ranch at camp, and we think all the time about the safety of those who come, how we can serve them.

We want them to have fun, riding horses, going swimming, zip lining, things like that.

I teach a class here with some young people on Bible study methods, and we were having a conversation recently about the law in the Old Testament about building parapet walls and okay, what does that mean?

And fundamentally, it's under that category of loving your neighbor.

If you have a house and there's a roof that people can go up on top of, top of, build a parapet wall to serve them so they don't stumble off at night or something like that.

And so, yeah, when you're, when you've got a nursery at the church, when you've got people doing things, we want to serve them by maintaining their safety.

But one of the themes in my book was just recognizing the limit of those controls.

And that's one of the weaknesses, I would say, in the church right now, is that we've adopted the world's pursuit of safety, which ultimately, and there's literature out there, secular literature on safety and where there are people that are pushing for, well, if we can control 10% of the things that went wrong, why can't we control 20%?

If we can control 20%, and you follow this logic of if we can control some of these things that aren't going the way we want them to do, shouldn't we be able to have a highway system in America where there are no longer any fatal accidents?

And then you say, oh, so can we get to total control of things?

And that gets into theological anthropology, the nature of humanity, that we have some control, but we never have total control.

And so for us as Christians, questions to just think through.

Are we prepared in seeking to adequately pursue safety or provide safety for those that are with us?

And then when we recognize that there are some things out of our control, do we have the theology, do we have a view of God where we can respond appropriately to that as well?

Let me change gears slightly because I find this conversation absolutely fascinating.

Just because there's so much involved with safety and responsibility, risk.

Now, I remember reading James Dobson years ago, like, bringing up boys.

And he tells the story in the book about these two boys that stole their uncle's dirt bike and they rode it from their house to the practice football field and started going in circles around the field, and they're about 12 years old and they get pulled over by the police.

And the problem is, is that what the police didn't realize and didn't believe is both boys were blind and they were running.

That's the, that's the incredible thing about this story and the whole thesis is, is that people are going to do risky things, especially young men.

They take risk.

Now, again, my wife would say it's because their brains aren't developed yet.

There's.

There's some truth to that, right?

We're all.

I'm not going to disagree with her on that regard, but I think I've been reading Harmut Rose's book, the Uncontrollability of the World, the German sociologist, and he's basically saying, is we try to control so many different things, even artificial.

Artificial snow.

And he's saying, we want to control the environment, we want to control everything.

But ultimately, when we start to control everything, then there's something within us that doesn't have resonance with the world anymore, and it kind of dies.

Like we're made to take some aspect of risk.

This is where I wonder, has our desire for safety while a creational good and necessary become idolatrous?

And how do we help pastors, Pastors help our people to be able to recognize when it has become idolatrous, when they have taken on that definition of the world and its definition of safety.

How do we help prepare our pastors to be able to understand and recognize this?

You have any thoughts on that?

Yeah.

If you are a pastor, where are you trying to take your congregation?

Where are you trying to get to?

And heaven.

I know, ultimately, but in this life, the ministry that God has given you, and if you want things just nice and controlled, then keep things nice and keep them controlled.

But that's not what you want as a pastor.

And again, this is where there's that tension of, you do want the moms with the strollers to have a place to go and take care of the babies and all those things.

So you provide those things as a service to others.

But then I think you have to ask yourself that question, what ultimately are you trying to accomplish?

And even ask those difficult questions of what is a good thing that I would be willing, willing to give up the physical safety of my congregation for?

And that's a hard question to ask.

And again, back to the early church and martyrdom, because there were some people who found out that the church was being persecuted, and so they basically raised their hands or they went and volunteered themselves.

And the consensus among the early church was that's outside of the logic of the gospel.

We're not hunting for suffering like that, but we're ready and willing to accept it when it comes.

And so what are the things that you're called to do that take you out of that sphere of control, or at least the sphere of appearance, the appearance of control.

And I don't know.

I think.

I just think that's a fundamental question to ask.

And for some, for a lot of times, it's maybe more in that category of we.

We want to be emotionally safe, we want to be relationally safe.

And so maybe for a lot of people, it's not that imminent physical danger, but maybe it is.

You have to be willing to put yourself out there and just Talk to strangers, engage with other people, overcome those fears, those, those excuses you have for you can't just love, love other people by reaching out to them.

So however you would answer that question specifically, I think is the, that that's my thought.

Do you have any criteria that you go through when you think through that?

Like I hate to say proceduralism.

Cause you refer to that earlier.

Yeah.

But I, I, I do wonder like a person we've had on the show is Nick Ripken, who is the insanity of, of God.

A missionary who saw all the churches that he planted, everyone get killed.

I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

When Jesus bids a man, he bids him come and die.

I think of the persecution that's gone on throughout the 21st century.

And I look at the church globally and I see the church in America and I'm like, there's a huge difference here in our willingness to suffer and what we're willing to go through.

And of course, hopefully we're all willing to, willing to do that.

But how many of us are actually willing to take that theology of risk?

So that's the other question.

We have a theology of safety that we're developing that you've drawn attention to.

What then is a good theology of risk at the same time?

So the classical definition of risk is there's something you go do and you don't know what the outcome is going to be.

It could be, if you're successful, that there's a reward.

But if you fail, there are going to be some consequences.

And often, oftentimes when we talk about risks today, we just talk about the negative possibilities.

We don't talk much about the positive outcome that there could be.

So usually or oftentimes a risk is just synonymous with a danger, something that could cause you harm.

And so in thinking about how we understand risks, we probably need to re engage with that positive aspect to it or maybe just a thrill seeker.

We'll talk about, I love taking risks.

But to say, and again, not in the same sense of gambling or in there's a lot of worldly ways that you could take risks.

Where I'm giving this my shot and I hope it's successful.

But for us as Christians, and we know the fundamental grounding is that my life is hid with Christ in God and that ultimately I'm not taking risks.

And for us as Christians, we have to figure that out.

To say Christ already attained the goal.

He already was victorious over death.

And so as I think about this life, I, I mean it doesn't just erase all the contingencies of life in this world.

So when we're thinking about risks as Christians, we look at it and say, I win in Christ.

I know where I'm going.

Romans 8 type stuff.

That nothing could separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus.

And then you look at this world and you say, you know what, though?

I might be a missionary who goes and does something where I don't know the outcome, I don't know if I'm going to be successful or not, or you're doing evangelism as a local pastor, and you don't know how that's going to go.

You don't know what's going to happen with your church, those sorts of things.

So in that sense, we experience those things in our lives as risks, things where we are seeking to accomplish something good.

But again, we don't know the outcome.

And that, again, is where we get back to for us as Christians, how do we think as a church, and maybe how we treat each other when things don't go as planned.

And so I guess an easy way to put that is, do you want to be a successful church planter or a faithful church planter?

Well, I want to be successful, or if I'm faithful, God has to make me successful, Right?

Doesn't he?

No, he doesn't.

You could be a faithful church planter, but not a successful church planter.

Again, depending on how you want to define success.

But we know how we define success by size and numbers and then those sorts of things.

So you were asking some questions, kind of.

You bring up these ideas of safety, and there's this instinct where we want to know, where do we draw that line?

At what point has safety become an idol?

If I install these three things, is that okay?

But if I install this fourth thing or this fourth procedure, has it become an idol?

And it's kind of one of those slippery things.

I know I've frustrated a lot of people in conversations about this, even in the book where I'm careful to avoid telling parents, yeah, when your kid is three years old, he can cross the street, and when he's 5 years old, he can go do this to set out those specific things, because again, that's what we want.

And so it's a matter of the heart, and it's a matter of wisdom in applying just.

Just faith in God and what he's called you to do, what risks he's called you to take, and.

And the obligations you have, like who.

Who has he put under your care that you need to Keep safe as part of what you're supposed to do for them.

But, but other ways that you want to develop those people.

And so, yeah, I've always been very hesitant to kind of draw strict lines in the sand and say, here's where, because then you're externalizing idolatry instead of, instead of looking at the heart.

I like the idea of the externalizing the idolatry part.

What I didn't mean you have this, this kid is not supposed to do that or that age.

I'm more referring to what are the questions that you ask your own heart to evaluate whether your, your heart has become idolatrous.

So here's an example.

Starting a ministry, selling my home, liquidating my retirement.

Everybody says you're an idiot, you know, because now we're doing it for Jesus.

And yet it can be either foolish and it, or it could be faithful.

It could be a step of faith, but it also could be a step of foolishness.

And I, it's a case by case basis.

It depends on the person's heart.

It's not that they just took that step of faith and God has to honor it.

God maybe not had called them that.

It could be their own idolatry, it could been their own pride.

It could be, could be a lot of things.

But that to me is where that rubber meets the road.

I'm not looking for a rule that says a, this kid can't do this or can't do that.

I'm looking going, what questions do you ask your heart to discern whether or not something is, is a risky thing, but for the kingdom and it's of faith, you're not being safe.

And it's, it's risky, but it's your own foolishness.

Does that make sense?

It does, yeah.

That's a, I appreciate the clarification on that.

And, and I wish I knew my own heart to know.

Don't we all?

Well enough if on some levels I just say, you know, if you're going to sin, sin boldly.

You know, I think that's Luther, where you've got something and maybe you're being a fool, fine, be a fool for Christ and do it.

Because it's hard to know.

Yeah, like am I being a fool or am I being faithful?

But by doing this radical, radical thing and a question, a way of thinking about that that's been helpful to me is to say I'm going to do all those things, sell my house, liquidate the retirement, start this new ministry.

And as best as I can tell, I'M doing it in obedience to Christ and the desire that he would guide me and provide for me.

And then to say, if I fall flat on my face, was this still the right thing to do?

Am I willing to give up these things?

And even if it goes poor, I'm okay with that.

And that's been helpful for me to think about.

I'll tell you what, though.

There have been situations in my own life, and we all have situations where you put that to the test.

And again, when it comes back to, oh, there are real people who will experience real loss and suffering if this doesn't go through the way I want it to go.

And so you realize that the actions you're taking are going to affect other people.

But again, and it might be something as basic as giving your child the next level of freedom, but you have those what if?

Questions in your mind, even if it's a very small chance that something could go wrong when you give your child that next level of freedom and to just look and say before God, what are my obligations to this child?

I am called by God to train this child up in the way he should go and to live in this world as it is, and to just recognize as a parent, there are limits to my ability to control the world.

And we know that.

We know that there are those sad situations where there are traffic accidents, where there are.

There are sicknesses and diseases, where there are evil people who harm children and those things like that.

And so, boy, that's where it really pulls on our heart.

And again, when we're aware of particular dangers, we have an obligation to take steps to protect our children or to protect others from those things.

But if you're frozen in fear because of all the possibilities of things that are out there, that might be a good indication that you're seeking to control things outside of the realm of responsibility that God's given you.

When you have that conviction, what do you do then?

So if I'm a pastor, and I know some people in my church, some moms, some dads, they live by fear.

They're ruled by fear.

Now, it looks like it's all about the guise of safety, but it's more.

They're being ruled by fear, and it's become idolatrous.

How do I confess?

Confront that.

That's hard.

And we don't live in a chaotic world, right, where everything's just completely disordered and uncontrollable.

And again, you think about the world God created.

And so you.

What do you do?

You ask questions of the heart of.

I don't know.

I think those what if questions, I'm stumbling over my thoughts, but those what if questions of like, think about the worst possible thing that could happen and what if that happens?

Is God still good?

A quick story.

I remember years ago, a young mom said that the worst thing happened.

And it's like, oh, the worst thing happened.

And what she said was, I forgot to pick up my daughter from soccer practice.

Everyone else left.

She's just there alone in the park, on the field after dark, and everyone else is gone.

And the way she described it was kind of the worst possible thing imaginable happened.

And then you think it through and you think, no, that's not the worst possible thing imaginable because you found your daughter and she was okay.

And that was a difficult situation, but it was what could have happened.

Right.

That's the worst possible thing, is that your daughter was in a situation where something, something could have happened.

And so I think a lot of people are controlled by fear in those.

Those situations where they're.

Where they're thinking through not what could happen, but like the next step back from that Abena situation where I didn't know I wasn't in.

In control.

You know what?

I find this very interesting because here we talk about Jesus and I go, I'm thinking of CS Lewis at the end of the lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, where of course, Lucy is having a conversation, if I remember right, and she's like, he's not safe.

Jesus isn't safe, but he is good.

How do we juxtapose the call of discipleship in this modern world with this safety that seems to.

At every corner of our existence.

Yeah, I think it's just helpful to have conversations about it.

When you look at measures of safety that you want to implement or things going on, even if there's expectations put on you.

And again, I keep coming back to this, but it's.

What's been very helpful for me is to say, there's something that I want or there's something we should be pursuing that's better than safety.

As good as safety is, there's something that's better than that and how do we pursue that?

And like, at what point are you willing to give up?

Start with yourself, right?

At what point are you willing to give up your own physical safety?

And you say, for those that I love, a lot of people would say that I'd happily give up my safety for the sake of someone else.

Well, in our minds there's this heroic, like, One time stand and take the bullet for the person that you love and then say, okay, now apply that on a daily level.

What are some little ways where you're willing to give up your own well being for the sake of others?

Trusting God to provide for you, trusting God to protect you as you would.

And that might mean, yeah, on a very, very basic level, putting yourself in some sort of exposure, some sort of danger where you help someone change the tire on the side of the road or give someone a ride, or you have money that you give the money to someone and there's a chance that they're going to misuse it.

So I don't know what all those practical ways might be, but you look at that and say, what is more important than safety?

And therefore how do I have safety serve a higher.

Instead of everything else, serving safety, where it's the ultimate end, which gets back to, I think, churches and ministries and things like that.

And hopefully you hear my conversation where there's like this negotiation where we're dancing around.

We don't want to shove safety aside as something that's not good.

We don't want to neglect the responsibilities God's given us to other people.

But yeah, what I just keep in my mind thinking through, towards what end, what higher goal does safety serve?

And then it can be put in its place, it can be tamed, it can be on a leash.

We can recognize that there are limits to it because, yeah, in our world today, and I think in our fearful hearts, its tendency is to just gobble up everything and say everything has to be, has to serve this end of safety.

But if you can come along and just say, actually, and it's so inspiring when we read the stories or when we have people that talk to us and there's this good, healthy, inspiring way in which we can call people beyond that to say, yeah, you know what, safety is a great thing, but there's something bigger than that, there's something higher than that.

Safety serves.

I just find that.

So I find that very comforting.

I find that, I find that very motivating.

That's actually a very encouraging thing to help us think through this.

We are running out of time today.

Is there a concluding thing that you want to leave our audience with?

A water bottle that they can sip on in the week to come?

Yes.

As, as you think about safety as a good thing, I would just encourage you to think through where is your heart at when you come to the limits of safety.

And safety has to do with being able to control the world.

Around us, make it the want it to so it doesn't harm us, the things we own, the people we love.

And so just to say, when you reach those limits of what you're able to control, where is your heart at?

How do you respond to your limitations as a human being created by God and loved by God, but not able to control as much as we would like to control.

I really want to say that I appreciate the conversation.

I thank you for writing the book.

Again, it's nice to see someone who's trying to develop a theology of safety and draw attention to this while I am in full agreement, as I think we all would.

We want our churches to be safe places.

We don't want shooters to run out and shoot people or kill anyone.

We don't want sexual predators.

We want to see our children safe.

We want to see our neighborhood safe.

We want to see all of those things safe.

But we also have to be careful of discerning our own hearts.

And this is where I'm grateful for this conversation because it actually helps us to start to think through these things and the implications where God has us.

Because we are in different places, we are facing different issues.

Issues.

But in our culture today, we also need that equal theology of risk to know that Jesus calls us to die.

And how do we do that at the same time being called to live a quiet life and work with our hands.

So it's those.

There are times where it's peace and quiet, where he has us in the everyday.

But there are those radical concerns.

Not radical, but just the cost of discipleship, where he has us.

So I'm very grateful for the conversation and I want to just encourage my pastoral friends, my ministry leader friends out there that are wrestling with this issue, that want to know more about this issue.

You can check out the book the Pursuit of Safety.

He spends a great deal of time kind of walking through a lot of these different things.

I'm sure he'd be open for a dialogue.

You can just reach out to Jeremy Lundgren.

I know you're teaching at the Nicolet Bible Institute up in Wisconsin.

You can find you online, I'm sure, with the Silver Birch website and learn more.

But, Jeremy, I want to thank you so much for coming on and ministry deep dive.

You're welcome.

I appreciate it.

You know, one of the things that struck me during my conversation with Jeremy is just how easily something good can become something that actually keeps us from following Jesus.

And I hate to admit it, because safety is actually one of those things we want to protect our families.

I want to protect my family.

And I know you want to protect your family.

You want your church to be places where people feel secure.

I want that too.

We want to make wise decisions, and we should.

But here's the question that I keep coming back to.

What happens when our desire to be safe becomes greater than our willingness to be faithful?

Because following Jesus has never been about eliminating risk.

It's impossible.

It's about trusting the One who calls us to follow him, even when we don't know how things are going to turn out.

And I think that's especially important for those of us in ministry ministry today we can become so concerned with protecting our churches, preserving our institutions, and avoiding failure that we lose sight of why God has placed us here in the first place.

I I really appreciated Jeremy's reminder that faithfulness and success aren't necessarily the same thing.

I needed to hear that we can do exactly what God has called us to do and still experience disappointment, opposition, or so suffering.

But that doesn't mean we failed.

So here's something I'd encourage you to think about this week.

Where has your desire for safety, comfort, or control kept you from doing something you know you ought to do now?

My mentor said whenever I'd ask him a question like that, like how do I know the Lord is trying to show me this?

He said, wherever the Holy Spirit puts his finger on it, that's when you know.

So if the Holy Spirit puts his finger on something that you think about, then you know you ought to do something about it.

Maybe it's having a difficult conversation with someone.

Maybe it's reaching out to someone outside your comfort zone.

Or maybe it's taking a step of faith in ministry when you have no guarantee of the outcome.

Whatever it is, remember that God hasn't called us to live without risk.

He's called called us to live faithfully.

And that's one of the reasons I'm so excited about what we're developing through Apollos Academy, and I so badly want you to be a part of this.

We are convinced that if the church is going to engage our culture faithfully today, we have to begin by examining the assumptions that have shaped us.

Not everything we've inherited is biblical, and not everything we've accepted as normal is necessarily good.

Through Apollos Academy, we want to train ministry leaders to advance the gospel faithfully, or by faithfully engaging the culture with biblical wisdom, theological depth, and missional purpose.

If you'd like to learn more about the academy and what we're developing head over to ApolloSweater.org and sign up for our newsletter or it's in your show notes.

Just scroll to the bottom, click it.

It's the best way to stay connected, hear about upcoming episodes and get updates on the launch of Apollo's Academy.

And if there is something you would like us to talk about on this show, just email me travispollowswater.org just put in the subject line an idea for you.

That's it.

And I'll look at it.

I'm not promising we'll do something with it, but we want to hear from you about what you want to hear from us.

And if you're enjoying Ministry Deep Dive, and I know you are, because it's awesome, would you do me a favor?

Take a minute to leave us a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast.

It helps other people discover these conversations and it really does make a difference.

And don't keep this episode to yourself.

And after all, why would you?

Because it's awesome.

Think of a pastor, ministry leader, or friend who might benefit from this conversation and share it with them.

I want to thank Dr. Jeremy Lundgren for joining me today.

I encourage you to pick up a copy of his book, the Pursuit of Safety.

It's really an important reminder that we need to think carefully not only about what we're protecting ourselves from, but what we're protecting ourselves for.

That's deep right there.

That's deep.

That'll preach.

That'll preach.

So thank you for listening.

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

Stay watered, everybody.

Ra.