#38 | Are We Messing Up God’s Mission?, Pt. 2 | Scott Moreau

It's watering time, everybody. It is time for Apollos Watered, a.

Podcast to saturate your faith with the.

Things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and.

I am your host.

And today we have one of our.

Deep conversations.

With my friend Scott Moreau. Actually, this is the second part of a two part conversation and if you've.

Not heard the first part yet, I.

Would recommend going back and checking that out.

This is the part of the conversation where Scott and I delved into demonology, as well as the state of the American evangelical church and what we can learn from our brothers and sisters pastors around the world.

I would encourage you to listen in and enjoy this conversation that we had as we talked about just spiritual warfare and what God is doing and why so many evangelicals have such a hard time processing or talking about spiritual warfare. Happy listening.

Now, another area that I wanted to touch on with you is that you've written a little bit on demonology and that's not a subject that always is at the forefront of many Western evangelicals minds, although global evangelicals have to deal with this and think about this subject a lot.

Why do you think that we in the west have such a poor understanding, or dare I say anemic understanding, or at least familiarity with the subject of demonology?

Number one, it scares the bejeebers out of people. And admitting that it's real is almost a trauma in itself when you've grown up in a secular society.

And for the most part, we're happy even as believers in this culture, we're happy to acknowledge God, to be in prayer with him, to be in communion with him, in fellowship with him, and the power of the Holy Spirit through Jesus Christ. We're happy to understand psychology, sociology, anthropology, all those other ologies that deal with the study of people.

But there's an entire middle realm. And as a matter of fact, if you're familiar with Lord of the Rings, it takes place in what's called Middle Earth.

And Middle Earth in Tolkien's worldview is the place where magic happens, where wizards live, where good and evil powers live, and they do combat with each other. And one missiologist, perhaps the best missiologist from an evangelical perspective in the 20th century. His name was Paul Hebert.

He was an anthropologist by training, but he coined this term the flaw of the excluded middle. And that excluded middle is we leave this area of demons, angels out of our everyday discourse.

Even though if you ask, as Newsweek did in the late 90s. Have you ever had a direct experience of God? And over 90% of those surveyed as Americans said, yes, I have at least once.

But it stays out of our conversation. I can tell you this at Wheaton.

One of the things I always had to be careful with at a place like Wheaton is I don't want to be known as the demon guy because to the extent I am, that's an academic form of death and I can get put into a box. And so I tend to keep it lower key. But it fits the Wheaton mindset.

It's funny, when psychology has students asking about demons and so on who are not from the west, they bring me in. When the Bible department has people who are not from the west asking about demons, they have me teach a class. Why?

Because it still is kind of toxic to them within their disciplines to consider it.

One of the best used systematic theologies that students use in seminaries by Millard Erickson had Satan on two pages, I think, out of over a thousand pages of material. That's crazy. So all that to say, and here's my punchline, Satan is a great contextualizer.

And in the US where we've had from the 60s on, modernism has been replaced with postmodernism and post postmodernism, yada yada yada. But in all of this time, we still have this underlying secular, excluded middle mindset who bridges that mindset.

Generally, it's the Pentecostals and the Charismatics.

And I'm convinced that's a big part of the reason why they are growing so explosively around the world, because they're addressing the territory that people around the world experience in ways we don't. And they're not growing as explosively here in the US as they are in the rest of the world.

But, you know, is the flaw of the excluded middle is a huge challenge. And that's part of what I want to address.

Remember, I have a science background, and so from my vantage point, my physics training had nothing to do with the demonic. You never studied demonic?

I might disagree with you there. Physics is really demonic to me.

But the demonic equations, you know, okay, okay, okay. Complex demonic calculus. No, we never studied that. And so I do have probably an engineer scientific mindset as I walk into it.

But for whatever reason, maybe it's my science fiction. I enjoy fantasy, but not the way I enjoy science fiction.

I'm willing to entertain the possibility of things I don't necessarily see, feel and experience every day. And I guess I've always kind of been that way. And so I came to Africa to teach in the seminary. I did my high school teaching in Swaziland.

I came back to the US and did seminary. Then I went back to, this time to Kenya, where I taught in my second semester there.

I looked at our Ugandan principal, who himself was a physics major, and I said, you know, how can we train African pastors and not teach them spiritual warfare? And he looked at me and he said, you're right. You will teach it next semester. And I said, no, that's not what I meant. Why don't you teach it?

He said, no, I'm deciding. I'm the principal. You are going to teach. I said, okay. And so that started my kind of academic framing.

So I taught a course in what we call angelology, and it was angels and demons. We wanted to look at the good guys as much as we looked at the bad guys. And I began a learning curve. My students taught me as I taught them.

I taught them biblical passages, wrestling with them, understanding them, exegetical options. They taught me real life. And so it was a mutual learning experience. But that's what started me off.

And then I came to Wheaton, and I was thinking myself, and I told my department chair my first year here, okay, good, I don't need to teach this course anymore. He said, no, that's one of the reasons we brought you here. We want you teaching this course. So, okay, okay, I'm stuck.

You know, you do bring that up, and I agree with you. I'm familiar with Paul Hebert's the flaw of that excluded middle.

And I do find that many evangelicals, especially white evangelicals, this is a real area of. I mean, they don't want to touch it. They can talk about growth, principles, best practices in business.

We can talk about all of these different things. But rarely, if ever, do you ever hear a discussion about demonology, spiritual warfare.

I mean, there's a tacit head nod to spiritual warfare, but then it's quickly pivot onto something I can talk about. Yeah.

Something that's comfortable to me. Yeah, yeah. You talk about awkward conversations, and this is where you need the phrase awkward is awesome. And talking, being able to open the door.

But again, I think we're at a stage. You know, C.S. lewis coined this term in.

I think it was that hideous strength, the materialist magician belief, or belief against the supernatural, but belief in magic. Think of the Marvel Universe and the DC world. These days, we're training people through our Hollywood movies to be materialist magicians.

And they know that's not real, but they want to say, what's my superpower? And they want kind of both ends of the coin.

And I think Lewis was prescient 70 years ago, arguing that this was one of Satan's ploys in England at the time was to develop the materialist magician denies supernatural reality of God, but acknowledges supernatural reality of power, but not demons or angels either. So it's this split, this bifurcated, this self contradictory worldview.

And I'm seeing, at least from my vantage point, that's part of the North American landscape right now, and no less so in the evangelical churches.

But do you think that's changing with the colorization that's going on of evangelicalism?

Because you and I both know that most evangelical or outside of the United States, you're seeing still the white nationalism aspect that's going on within evangelicalism.

But I'm just seeing with so many different ethnicities, so many different cultures, to me, if we are going to interact, if we are going to have a church that is truly global, let's say, and multiethnic representative of the nations, we have to bring and create a robust understanding of, even of demonology and spiritual warfare.

Do you agree with that? Absolutely, absolutely.

But I would say that's one piece of the larger puzzle of why I think the white evangelical church is becoming increasingly marginalized in the global movement of the Kingdom of God.

To the extent that the white church, the white suburban evangelical church attaches itself to a political landscape and it focuses itself on issues of what it means to be a patriot and what it means to be an American.

And you know, I could go into a whole host of things, I'm trying to walk carefully with the words I'm using here, but those are the types of things that increasingly the world says, eh, who cares about that? And when I say the world, I would say the global church.

And when they're looking at the American church right now, I mean, I heard from a lot of people internationally on January 6th or shortly thereafter, what is going on and in what way are American Christians involved with this? Because their vantage point as outsiders was the American evangelical church has lost its way.

And so to the extent that the world is at our doorstep now because of migration, refugee, you name it, that part of the church is decreasingly seen on the political landscape. I mean, there are some elements of it, absolutely.

But the white church is stuck in this, the white evangelical suburban church is stuck in this area right now. And I hope by the grace of God, we can Move past it.

And it probably will take our global sisters and brothers or our migrants here who are newer to this country to be able to enable us to stand back from ourselves and see what kind of traps we've fallen into or have put ourselves into now.

Why do you think that Americans have such. American Western white Christians have such a difficult time?

Because I know that many of them think that they're doing exactly what God wants them to do. They're standing up for life.

They're trying to stand up for God's view of world and how it should function, and that there should be law, there should be personal responsibility taken, there should be a right and a wrong. And what they see on the opposite side of the political sphere is basically kind of a wiping away, if you will.

Not a wiping away, but meaning a graying or removing the lines. Blurring the lines would perhaps be a better terminology for it.

And they feel like they're doing the right thing, but they perhaps employ the wrong means by doing that.

How do we change that perspective and help people to see the Kingdom of God with a greater and more global lens that enables us to be unified, not stuck in such nationalism.

Americans suffer from what I call monocultural myopia. For those who have never left suburban life, even if they moved eight times like I did growing up.

It's funny when I look back on it every time I move. My parents looked for the best school districts. I know that was part of their thinking. We always managed to land in a white suburb.

And so growing up, I had zero experience with people who were other than me. And it wasn't until I read the Autobiography of Malcolm X that I realized how shallow my thinking, my approach, my worldview was.

But we need to pray for awakening and not awakening to a new Americanization. You know, God, country, apple pie, or truth, justice in the American way.

You can name, from Chevrolet to Superman, you can name the taglines that remain a part of our culture, even though we don't use those words in the same way anymore. And we kind of laugh at those words, but yet those are still driving factors in the lives of many Americans.

And there's a loss in some respect of a dream, because too many, dare I say it, and this is going to be kind of blunt, too many white suburban Americans dream of a white suburban United States. And that boat has sailed.

And until we come to grips with that and embrace the fact that this is a country of migrants who are different than I am, and maybe I need to open the door a bit, we're going to become increasingly isolated and increasingly marginalized. And yet I understand the dream because it's threatening, doggone it. It's scary. And if I can use this word, we tend to demonize our enemies.

My daughter once came to me and said, dad. And she was in a public school. They're teaching evolution in school. And I said, yeah, so what? And she said, well, what do I do?

I said, you need to understand evolution so well that you can explain to them what they believe. And they say, you're right. Then you can begin the process of wrestling with it and dealing with apologetics.

But until you really understand it from their vantage point, they're not going to listen to you. You're just going to be another evangelical voice, you know, honking in the breeze. I guess I'm thinking of geese when I say that. Why?

Because they migrate around here too much. But, you know, it's a component that I think is part of our culture, our white culture.

I received a metaphorical slap in the face during the time this summer when the race demonstrations were going on. A black faculty member at Wheaton wrote an article in a journal called Christianity Today.

And in it he said, one thing you have to understand is the American dream was never the black man's dream. And I had never. I mean, it shows my. Dare I use the words here, my white privilege, that I never even had to think of that.

But when I think of the history of blacks in this country, 300 years of slavery, 100 years of Jim Crow laws, finally civil rights, but still, you've got redlining practices remain redlining, where the government decides who can live in what areas, and they discriminate on the basis of ethnicity. And these are realities that my black sisters and brothers have faced that I did not face.

I never had to train my children how to behave around a policeman the way all of my black fathers and mothers do. They're not mine.

But all black mothers and fathers have to, because their children don't see the police as a protector, because that's the world they grew up in. And part of the dynamic. I know I've gone astray here from what we were talking about, but.

But when I think of the white American dream, I don't know how we get the church to let go of that, because the American dream is not Christ's dream.

Well, you know, there's overlap.

There's overlap, but they're not identical.

Yeah, of course.

And I think what's happening is something that you already mentioned, where you said that the world is Kind of leaving the white evangelical church behind. Now again, I know that the white evangelical church has been really beat down as of late. And I recognize it's not just one person.

There are people and there are good people in the white evangelical church. And I think personally there's a lot of things that white evangelicalism has to offer the world.

I'm a white evangelical and I go to a white evangelical church, even though we're becoming more and more multicultural as time goes by.

And so, yeah, so we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. We don't want to say that everything is evil. Just like in any culture, there's the good, there's the bad.

We want to affirm the good and support it and strengthen it. And what's bad is we want to correct and replace as best as we possibly can.

You just did a great definition of contextualization there, by the way.

How so?

Affirm what is good and change what is not good.

I knew it. My mother was wrong. I'm a genius.

You literally, literally. I'm going to eat chocolate in your honor after I get off this podcast.

But I do think that we do need to affirm the good, as you said, in any culture. But I do think that as the Western church in America, I think that the church is shifting and I think that. Not that the era of the megachurch.

Is over, not by any means.

Yeah, right. But I think that the future of the church is going to be smaller, much more multi ethnic.

I think that there will be a uniting again of the gospel with justice and understandings of justice that I think we in the west have separated that necessarily weren't there and that our brothers and sisters in different parts of the world can help correct for us as they come alongside.

I'm going to push back a little bit on that because I don't think the church is necessarily going to get smaller. I think the mega churches are going to continue to thrive. They will find a way.

And in one sense, when you're part of a mega church, you are the world. And I don't mean that globally and I don't mean that ethnically and I don't mean that linguistically, but that is your world.

And when you're part of that, then there's a comfort, there's an assurance, there's a type of solidarity that's an independent individualistic solidarity, but nonetheless a solidarity. And so I don't think they are going to go away. I would love to see a proliferation of smaller house Type churches, but that's.

And they will continue to the extent that they exist. They will be marginalized simply because the larger movement. We want big success stories. That's the American way. We want bigger is better.

And think of what happens to the stock market when a company stops growing. Even if that company is healthy, their stock loses value because we value growth that much. How much of that mindset infects the church? Go ahead.

No, I was going to say, but taking that mindset just to kind of react to that a little bit and just kind of. I want to understand further as you're talking about that, because I do think that we are in love with the bigger is better.

But yet I can drive down the street in my city and I can see these big giant church buildings that are albatrosses. There's very small group of people in that church. They can't afford to keep it going.

I'm reminded of a man in India who gave me probably the best advice I've ever received. He said, it's one thing to pay for the elephant, it's another thing to feed it.

I like that.

I love that. I do think, though, that in our culture, we do think buildings, buildings, buildings. And then we use the term stewardship.

And I understand stewardship. And if it's a legitimate cause for stewardship, then great, fantastic. But I think that our culture is becoming a lot more like Europe.

And we're seeing, you know, you can look at the churches in Europe and they're largely vacant. They're just become, in many ways, museums of a bygone era. And so now, I mean, we don't have that yet in the West.

I mean, here in the United States, I mean, and we're seeing again, the churches that are growing are largely, though, migrant, refugee immigrants. When I was pastoring in New England, the white churches were dying, but the growing churches were refugees and migrants and all those other things.

So how do we then change that mindset? Or do we. Because it seems that we are addicted to bigger is better. But is there a corrective going on? What about COVID Is Covid changing that?

Because I know many pastors are fearful that people aren't going to come back once this quarantine is lifted. They've gotten so used to hearing whoever they want to, they can just stay in their pajamas having church.

Or has the culture shifted so much that it is not as advantageous to be a Christian any longer and you can just leave church behind? I mean, how do you respond to those kind of things?

Ryan Burge is a statistician who's a sociologist at Eastern Illinois University, and he notes that the evangelical churches have continued to grow even in the age of the nones in the N o N E S. I know you knew what I meant, but some of the listeners might not. The age of people saying, I have zero religious affiliation and we're seeing this.

But the loss, he argues, rightly so, has been not outside of the evangelical orbit, but more on the mainline side of churches than it has been on the evangelical side. I would say you are seeing those big empty buildings.

My guess, and you can correct me where I'm wrong, is that's more of an urban center than a suburban center, because in the suburbs I'm still seeing the big boxes and they're still working. And isn't it funny, Churches.

Bam, mic drop.

Yeah. And I would say the same thing now applies to. Well, I don't go to. I go to Best Buy Community Church. I go to Walmart Community Church.

Churches have become multipurpose centers, but they sure do. At least where I live, they sure do look a lot like big boxes.

One church in Naperville was even called the Big Yellow Box because it was a yellowish color. And you get the best out of architecture when it's a box. But it's also a reminder that businesses are boxes.

And to the extent that church models itself after business, we're a far ways away from letting go of the biggest better. And I agree with you that Covid offers a reset point, and none of us know what that reset will be.

It's going to affect businesses who are now, you know, I mean, the word was five months in. Hey, people like working at home.

And the question is, the business question is to be asked, are you getting better work out of them when they're at home, or is the work productivity really declining because they're at home? And if the latter is the case, then businesses are going to want to bring people back into an office. If the former is a case.

It seems that this is a reset time for a lot of the big businesses. And you wonder how that's going to impact the churches as well. I suspect you're going to see a surge when we're able to go back.

I'm not a prophet by any stretch of the imagination because people want that connection, but I don't know if that surge is going to remain.

And to the extent that churches continue to provide the same online services in two years from now that they do now, the idea of virtual church is anathema to me. But Covid has kind of forced us to do virtual church.

You know, it's a lot easier to get up at 5 to 9 and go down and be cozy and watch an hour long church service than it is to go up and shovel the driveway as I had to this morning, to get dressed, to clean off the car, to warm it up, to drive in the snow, to go to church on a day like today. If today was a Sunday, our church normally would be empty. Now it will be virtually empty even if we were allowed to meet there post Covid.

But you're right, Covid offers a reset point and we don't know what the reset's going to be.

I totally agree with you.

And in talking with some pastor friends of mine, they've actually, some have obviously ceased their services or meeting together, but I'm more aware of those.

But the ones that I've been personally interacting with, they've kept the services going and they've just been telling me how much their churches have grown. And when you probe down deep though, you find that they've grown through those guys that close the doors. Like those guys that close the doors.

The people were frustrated and now they should shift. Exactly. Because so many people are saying, I'm so tired of this. Some are saying I want fellowship, I can't take it anymore.

Others, it's much more of a political thing that they're so frustrated that people have capitulated in their minds to the culture and something that they feel like is not as big as deal to them.

And again, in their thought processes and even in the services that I've seen, I mean, some churches obviously are doing the masks and trying to do social distancing and obeying the government mandates. Others are saying we don't care and we're just, we're taking the masks off and we're going to have fellowship and.

We'Re going to sing.

Yeah, and we're going to sing, we're.

Going to worship, we're going to be super spreaders, but we're not because God is going to protect us all.

Yeah. Some that see that, some that just don't care. It's just a crazy time.

It's a huge spectrum, isn't it?

Is such a crazy time.

And I think with all of this stuff going on culturally as well, we've seen, of course, the racial protests and the marches that have gone on due to injustice. We've seen, of course, all of the different things with COVID And then you have everything going on politically.

And the question now is, how do we live in our world now? I mean, how do we represent Christ now? And it's my contention that our culture has shifted in such a way that we are in many ways Babylon.

And I'm not talking about it politically, I'm looking at it.

Just our culture has so shifted that as you mentioned, your daughter's learning evolution from years ago, but now it's the whole transgender philosophy, sexual identity. And how do we as Christians. Because many can't withdraw. There are some that are saying you need to withdraw your kids, you need to homeschool.

And I know many families that would love to, but they lack the training, they lack the money, they have to work two jobs, they're doing everything they can, and that's the world that they have to stay in. And I think it's my contention we have to learn how to navigate that world in such a way, in many ways, like Daniel did.

I mean, Daniel had to be castrated. He had to be in a pagan seminary, take a pagan name and learn pagan history. And yet he thrived. And it's my contention that we can do the same.

As our culture continues to shift and change, in some ways the shift is good from a multi ethnic standpoint. Previous injustices need to be righted, need to be addressed and fixed as much as we possibly can.

And I also think that we need to be able to chart a pathway forward as the church to show the unity of Christ and the glory of Christ displayed in our unity. And so just all of those things that I know you've kind of touched on, what's contextualization?

We've talked about culture and demonology, and it's been a real wonderful conversation. I've had a lot of fun. And I've got two books that I think that you need to write.

One is called, or at least an article, Satan the Great Contextualizer or Pimple Church. Let's pop it together. So those are my.

All right, all right. Pimple Church, that's a catchy title. Yeah. Purple Church, the Zitology of American Evangelicalism.

So as we get ready to wrap up here today, how can people find out more about you and what you're doing and just kind of follow along with your ministry? Or how can they just learn more about what you've written? What are some ways that they can follow or learn more about what you're doing.

I think most of the books I've either written or edited are available through Amazon. If they want to do that, certainly they can just Google my name.

But they need to be careful because there is a Scott Moreau who's a Johnny Cash imitator and very good, very good. He was on the.

Of course he is.

Yeah, he was a part of the Million Dollar Quartet. But that is not me. And please don't get confused as to who you're looking at.

But if you, if you Google me, you'll find out more about me than you ever wanted to know. More than I wish was ever up online. But, but that, that's. That's the way it goes these days, isn't it?

It is. It is. So we'll tell people to look you.

Up on Amazon and if they want.

To know more, maybe they can enroll at a class at Wheaton Graduate School and learn more of that.

I'd love that. Yeah. Yeah.

But I wanted to thank you again. Coming on Apollos Watered. You've been a delight as a guest and I look forward to continuing our conversation sometime in the future.

Thank you. It was really fun for me as well, too. I appreciate having the opportunity to be here.

All right, Take care, Scott.

You too.

I hope you enjoyed that deep conversation.

We talked about a lot of stuff.

Whether it was demonology or the state of the Western evangelical church, as well as what church is going to look like post Covid. It was a lot of fun, probably way too much fun to have in a conversation that is so deep.

I also want to thank our sponsor for the show, Kathy Brothers of Keller Williams Innovate. If you're looking to buy or sell a home in the Chicagoland area, then you need to give Kathy Kathy Brothers a call.

She comes with years of experience and loves people. She's trustworthy and really does care about our clients. I know because I am one of them. She's my agent.

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Tell her Travis sent you.

Well, that's it for today's episode.

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Water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered.

Stay watered, everybody.