#82 | Why We Need A Theology of the Body | Timothy C. Tennent

Because this culture desperately needs authentic Christianity that's truly transformed. And they are not impressed by shallow Christianity. They're not impressed by all this.

And we will never change the world by this, because we ourselves aren't changed. But if we're changed, we can show radical forgiveness, radical love, radical acceptance, yet also ourselves radically transformed.

It's a powerful thing. I still believe in it. I believe it's very possible. I don't believe the world can ever spin too fast for us to walk to the Lord.

And I'm on a roll. It's watering time, everybody.

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

Our deep conversations.

A deep conversation with seminary president, scholar, missiologist, and author Timothy Tennant. You know, I don't know about you, but every time I go online or I see a video of some sort or I hear some type of news clip, I inevitably hear this.

I am not what my body is. You know, I've. I've heard other people say, why do you Christians care about what goes on in the bedroom? Just leave it alone. God does.

God's okay with that. I mean, really, is he? Why else would the Bible talk about sexuality so much?

And why do so many unbelievers today, and even so many believers have such a difficult time reconciling what the Bible says and what seems to be going on in the culture right now? I believe it's because we have an improper understanding or theology of our bodies. I mean, are we souls that have bodies? Is there a design for it?

Or is there something more entirely? What place does it really have in our understanding, in our theology? I mean, our bodies? What place does it have?

And what difference does that make in regards to all of the aforementioned subjects? I mean, think about homosexuality, gender reassignment surgery, abortion, euthanasia, or eating disorders.

What do all of these subjects have in common and how do they affect our body? And how do we understand that from a Christian perspective? That's what we're going to be talking about today.

He is a frequent conference speaker around the country and throughout the world. Prior to his coming to Asbury, Dr. Tennant was the professor of world missions and Indian studies at Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary.

He has taught annually as an adjunct professor at the New Theological College in Dehradun, India.

He is the author of numerous books and articles, and they include Building Christianity on Indian Foundations, Christianity at the Religious Roundtable, Theology in the Context of World Christianity, and Invitation to World Mission, A Trinitarian missiology for the 21st century, and his most recent book, for the Body, Recovering A Theology of Gender, Sexuality, and the human body. Dr. Tennant and his wife Julie, reside in Wilmore, Kentucky. They have two grown children, Jonathan and Bethany.

And I wanted him to come on the show to be able to talk about this subject because I believe that we have a very anemic understanding of the body. And that is what we're going to talk about today. How can we recover a theology of the body? Happy listening.

Tennant. Welcome to Apollos Watered.

Hey, Travis, it's great to be with you. Thank you so much.

I'm so excited to have you on the show. But here we go. We have our fast five. Are you ready?

I am ready for the fast five. Bring them on.

Okay, here we go. You are in Kentucky, but you're from Georgia. So here's the question. University of Kentucky or the University of Georgia?

University of Kentucky. They know how to throw a basketball.

Okay.

Okay, how about this one? You're also a missiologist. Strangest or weirdest food you have ever eaten.

The strain was a live octopus which you required to swallow whole in Korea. Yes, it went down my throat. Live.

The whole thing or just the tentacle?

Octopus. And it's served live and you take it as a little baby octopus and you swallow it whole. And the phalanges are squirming as they go down your throat.

It's quite an experience. Couldn't match it. I love Indian food, but this was a Korean experience. And raw. It's a raw thing, too.

All right, here we go. You did your doctoral work at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, right?

That's right.

Okay. Can you do a Scottish accent?

Oui. Blimey. So blimey so.

Yes.

Therefore, your honest, sonsy face, Great cheetah for the race. You have to learn how to ask for haggis there.

Oh, that's so good. That's so good.

I like it.

Oh, I love it when people can do A good Scottish accent. That's good. Okay, here we go. What is one of the perks that you enjoy is being the president of an evangelical seminary?

Well, they provide a beautiful home to live in. I live in the presidential home. And so people often come to it and say, wow, what an amazing house. And. And say, well, we're like renters here.

We just, we get to live here, but yeah, we get a nice, beautiful home to live in.

So this is not part of the Fast 5. But just because you have all your books. Timothy C. Tennant, do you ever tell people after you've been president that the C stand for chief?

You have a good idea.

Okay, here we go.

If you were amazed, it's not Stanford. Doesn't Stanford Calvinist? That's the one. I hadn't thought of the positive opportunity.

What does the C stand for?

It stands for Craig.

Oh, Timothy Craig.

Okay. What does that? Oh, yeah. Tells you a lot, doesn't it?

I don't know what it tells me, but it tells me something. Okay, here we go.

If you were a make and model.

Of a car, what would it be and why?

If I was a make and model car, I don't know, probably a Ford Explorer, kind of like, you know, functional, but, you know, not have a little class to it, but not too fancy.

Nice.

I'm just kind of a workhorse. There we go.

That's good.

That's good.

I really like that. It's a great description.

I love that.

Okay, here we go. So tell us a bit about your story. You're a very eclectic guy.

I mean, you're from Georgia, you've gone to school at Princeton, you've studied Hinduism, you've studied Islam. I mean, just reading your bio, it's like this guy's been all over the place. Tell us a bit about who Dr. Timothy C. Craig. Timothy Craig Tennant is.

Well, I was born in Georgia and very early on I happened to grow up in. In a exclusively Jewish neighborhood in Atlanta. I was the only gentile in the neighborhood.

Wow.

So they called me goyim. I was like the local gentile boy. But I guess from the very beginning I was formed by what it was like to be an other.

Someone other than the Sunni communities.

I was a minority in my community, of course, and went to an all Jewish school and took Jewish girls to the prom and so forth, because that was my life. And so I had a real interest in learning about the world, about other people.

And the Lord opened up a lot of wonderful doors to work and serve in India. I Have a great love for India, especially north India. And so that opened up a lot of doors for me.

So that brought me into kind of the field of missions and of thinking about things cross culturally. And that led me through my life. I never actually thought about my career, like as a plan to do anything.

I was a pastor and I was going to be a pastor till I died. But then things opened up and exploded. Exploded next time. Now I was in Nigeria, you know, and one had another, I needed another degree.

I go back to school. So things kept happening.

And I actually said to someone recently, I know it sounds bizarre to say this, but I've actually never in my life applied for a job.

Wow.

Never applied for a job in my life. Every job came to me and I realized, oh, I guess this is the next step. So, you know, I wasn't going to be at Gordon Conwell until I died.

I never dreamed I'd be at Asbury. But things just came along and next thing I know, I'm answering the call of God. So I'd love to say I had some big, you know, plan. There was no plan.

It all just kind of unfolded haphazard way and here I am.

So, okay, so you've. You've gone to. You did a PhD in non Western Christianity at the University of Edinburgh, but yet you did a THM in Islam. Is that right?

Now, ecumenics.

I was going to say eurythmics, but that's not right. It's ecumenics.

Well, I was actually, I was working in India already before I went to Princeton. And I had a real burden for what could be done in universities in Africa.

So the organization iics, it's now called Global Scholars International History of Christian Studies in Those days, Daryl McCarthy, they contacted me and said, would you be interested in teaching in Africa? And so one led to another going to Nigeria. And I wanted to learn more about African Islam.

So the whole thing at Princeton was to learn about African Islam. But later when that kind of all blew up and I ended up back in the US My real heart was always in India.

So I decided on the doctoral level to pursue Hinduism and try to better understand why the church had so many problems propagated in India. What were the barriers? And that got me into missiology and I had a wonderful opportunity to study in Scotland.

So we were there for three years and had a great time. That's when I came to Gordon Conwell.

After that, you know, you've got such an education in such an eclectic background, and yet you've your Most recent book for the Body is a bit. It's different from what you've done in the past.

I mean, you've written on holiness, you've written on world missions, you've written on a lot of different things.

But this is a book that is not necessarily missiology in the classical sense of it, although I think it's equipping the church for a language in a theology to embrace and accomplish the mission of Christ in this world. But tell us a bit about the impetus behind this book for the body.

And it's not talking about for the body of Christ as much as it is our actual physical bodies and why we need to pay attention and have theology of the body, but talk to us a bit about the impetus behind it and why you wrote this book and what's in it.

Yeah. Travis, thank you. That book was a little bit of a surprise, and since it wasn't my normal kind of writing space, as you know, I'm a missiologist.

But as you know, Missions is about connecting text with context. And so in some ways it's a little like Leslie Newbegin.

And I'm trying to understand how to be a better communicator of the gospel to the Western world.

And right now, one of the biggest issues has to do with the body, particular gender reassignment and some of the challenges with our own bodily identity.

So my just surveying the evangelical church, and this is not to be critical, I think it's what always happens when these things come up at first is that I basically found that we hear a lot about what Christians are against, but we don't really hear what we're for. And I think a lot of the people in the culture seem to be to know we're against a lot of things they don't really know.

What is the grand vision that we're for.

This book is really trying to lay out the positive vision for the body, the human body and the body as an icon or a pointer to the resurrection, the incarnation, the Trinity. The whole book really goes through and shows how God has designed the body as a pointer to spiritual realities.

The book really does provide, I think, hopefully, a positive vision for why we think practices like gender reassignment are very troubling trend for our society. And so this book plays out that case.

Why do you think that we've really missed this idea? I mean, we've talked about what we're for.

And I know in the book you talk about being in a post Christian culture, and that's one of the things that we talk a lot about on this show is that our culture shift. And while there are pockets of Christendom definitely in the west that we see, and people can operate within that for a sphere.

But if you're engaging with the greater Western society as it started to change, we have to learn how to engage that we need to have a proper theology of the body, something that the church has not largely done in the west very well traditionally. Why do you think that is? Why do we have such a hard time having such a view or a proper theology of our bodies?

It's a great question. If you look back at the early church, the first two, three centuries, Gnosticism was the biggest challenge they faced.

And Gnosticism was a view of the body which denigrated the body and basically said, what really matters is the real you inside of you. You could be literally a man trapped in another body or a spirit, the true spirit inside of you.

All things we hear today were very much a part of the early church's challenge. And so New Testament is born out of that context. But then it became the church prevailed over that.

And essentially you've had a very positive, robust view of the body throughout most of Western civilization. So we've just basically forgotten that this problem could re emerge. We didn't think it could reemerge.

And we basically have a neo Gnosticism reemerging today in the church and in the culture. And as the Christian worldview has receded, that has been replaced by non Christian worldviews. And one of those is a new form of Gnosticism.

So we're having to relearn what the church had already learned, unfortunately in the past. This is not a new issue. It's just an issue we had to revisit and to recapture. And the church basically always forgets yesterday's battles.

We only think about the battles that we have.

And so unfortunately, we're gonna have to go back and do our homework and think about why did John say, you know, we have seen him with our eyes, we've touched him, our hands have handled. Because John, and if anyone is not, does not believe that Jesus has come in the flesh, he's the Antichrist.

And John really, I mean, it's bold language.

Yeah, he goes after that.

Paul was saying, if this is just a Greek idea, this is just a philosophy, then this is not the Christian gospel. It's about something happened in the flesh, and therefore the flesh must be trustworthy and must be.

You know, the Christian gospels always said that the body is trustworthy. The heart is deceitful and the culture of course has flipped that and said the body is completely untrustworthy. But you can always trust your heart.

And that's the thing the church has to readdress today it seems like what we've seen.

And I had a conversation with Nancy Pearcey a while back and we were talking about the difference between hardware and software.

And we have the hardware and usually you used to want to make the software fit the hardware, but now we're trying to get the hardware to fit the software. I mean we talk about Gnosticism and a lot of people then kind of tune out. They don't really know what Gnosticism is.

I mean they hear the term we say Gnosis, knowledge, that's where you get back to the root of it. But let's talk here for a moment just to draw this out, to really bring people into this.

I mean we know what it is historically and you might want to give just a brief definition but then draw that out in how it is affecting us in our understanding in the here and now.

Yeah, great question. There was a lot of mystical movements, special knowledge movements in the early church around that time.

And so one of these is kind of called collectively Gnosticism. But it's actually this is not a movement like we would say Christianity like the movement.

This is actually multiple movements which are collectively called Gnosticism.

And the one that we hadn't had in, in common, these mystery movements was they believed that God could not create the world because the world would sully God, it would make him, he was above all of that. And so he had to create some space in God and the world, these so called demiurges or some kind of separate being between God.

And so there was not a real strong doctrine of creation. So one thing the Jews had was of course a very powerful doctrine of creation. In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.

And so you have this direct sense that God fashioned and made the world. Well, the Gnostics didn't accept that, they didn't believe that. And so therefore they didn't have a very.

This whole thing is really based in a weak view of creation. So once you lose your view of creation, then of course you lose your own view of yourself as a body.

So they said, going back to, you know, Plato, et cetera, they're saying, well the real, the real vibrancy of a person is not the body, but the spirit within the body.

You know, the real you is not your body, it's you and the Jewish worldview and the Christian worldview along with that believed in the connectivity between the body and the Spirit. These are one, these are not separate things. We don't denigrate the body.

So the early church was fighting this a lot and it became an ongoing challenge. It really comes down to a weak view of creation.

The problem is if you weak view of creation, it immediately follows on that you can't have a strong view of the incarnation, which is the real main point that the church had to fight.

Because if the incarnation is not trustworthy, if God could not come in the flesh, then you have a real problem because the gospel is predicated on that fact. So you don't have a trustworthy creation, you don't have a trustworthy incarnation.

And so that became really the nexus around which the whole thing surrounded then. Today, of course, now for at least 50 years, we've lost a strong doctrine of creation in our culture, that God created the world.

So it only follows in due course of time we lose a doctrine of the body. And so this is really a re emergence of the same basic ideas that floated around for several centuries in the.

Early church because we're talking about Gnosticism.

And again, people are still trying to figure out this bridge between Gnosticism back then, but back then they're saying the body matter, that's what we're saying is that the view was the body didn't matter. And that affected our understanding of the incarnation because if the body didn't matter, I mean, Jesus didn't come in the flesh, but he did.

We know that he did. He ate. I mean, John makes special emphasis on that, that he ate, that he said, touch me, interact with me.

And we see then that there's this unification then our understanding of the Incarnation, as you just mentioned. And then today though, people are saying that I'm not my body, I'm not.

My gender, I'm not my, my.

I'm not what my biology dictates that I am. It's what I feel on the inside. And then, so, so we, we, we hear that going on everywhere today and we see it all over our culture.

So your idea is, is we have to then recover an understanding of creation, that it is good that God made.

Us as created, gendered beings.

Right?

Exactly. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And then in that there's a purpose.

Yeah, I believe that it's very important to see that our bodies are actually designed to point to spiritual mysteries. I use the word icon, but icon just means a window into something spiritual. So if you, if you actually Take an icon.

The icons were designed so that you always focus your eye on, on it would always direct the eye convicted to your own eyes. And so it's meant to be not a picture like just a painting, but a window to a spiritual reality.

But you could just say, you know, it's a pointer, but a spiritual pointer. But the idea is that your body is a pointer to the Incarnation. You know, we all know that the husband and wife is a pointer to Christ in the church.

Right, right.

We all know that childbearing to have father, mother, child is a pointer to the Trinity. The communion of the Trinity is meant to be mirrored in the community of the family, all of these things.

So once you destroy the body, once you destroy marriage, the fruitfulness of marriage and childbearing, all those things, you lose that which they point to the spiritual mysteries. And so John Paul II began to lecture on this pretty strongly back in his, in his papacy in the 80s.

And it was very influential throughout the Roman Catholic world.

But it was not really brought very clearly into this Protestant world until a man named Christopher west began to write books really directed to the Protestant world and opened up a lot of new scholarship. I mean, Nancy pearceyou mentioned her.

A lot of us were writing on this theme and we owe a lot to the Roman Catholic work on this area that's been going on.

And we're trying to now put it kind of in our own terms, our own ways, about how what it means to embody the gospel and not just preach it, but actually see that we embody it in our daily lives.

Where do you think that understanding went awry?

Because I see the church today, the modern Western evangelical church, it's very pragmatic and it's very business oriented, although we talk about Jesus. But it's more of you follow Christ, you surrender your life to him, which is awesome.

But there's not a theology of how this affects or permeates different aspects of our lives. And that's what you're calling the church back to in a form of catechism. And you talk about that in the book of catechesis, of instructing people.

How can the church then grasp onto this? So I have two parts to this. Where did the church go awry and how basically can we recapture this idea?

That we can definitely recapture. Yeah. Problem is that the church quit catechizing new members into disciple them into the faith. That's the basic problem.

So in my world, the Western world, we call this the first half of the gospel and the second half of the gospel the first half of the gospel being justification, second half being sanctification and growth and suppleship.

And I think unfortunately in the modern period there's been such an emphasis on lowering the bar, making the gospel simple, reducing it to very, you know, kind of bite sized pieces. You could actually go into many of the kind of big box churches today.

What you're actually hearing is not a message of salvation, but a message of justification. Now praise God for that. We're not against that.

But the point is you can't confuse justification with salvation because salvation is a much larger transformational project that God's involved in with us. And so part of our concern is that we have not really passed on the faith well. We aren't trained our children well.

And it used to be that for a while we survived on kind of cultural cues where it was a kind of a cultural Christianity where certain things were passed on through the culture, but that's obviously now evaporated. So we're left essentially with a church that's uncategized. That's a serious problem.

No church can survive that because the culture is doing a lot of catechesis day in and day out. So if you think about the full force of cultural formation is very powerful in this culture.

So to counteract that, we need more than a 20 minute sermon on Sunday morning. We need some more serious.

So what we're trying to do is now I have another book coming out this year on catechesis, which lays out kind of the whole vision. But the church has to understand in the early church they had two phases of it.

One phase was during Advent, the whole period before Lent, before Easter. During Lent, they would go through instruction.

You become a Christian, baptized at Easter, and then another phase where you learn what it's like to be a member of the church called Mystic Gogi, which went all the way to Pentecost. So the church actually had two phases of instruction for everybody. One phase before you became a Christian justification.

One phase as you received the Spirit and grew in your faith. And all that's pretty much evaporated into very either nothing or very short kinds of things.

Because we've moved to this kind of user friendly, ask no questions, make it simple kind of Christianity, which is not reproducible in the long run.

Is that just an American gospel?

Well, unfortunately, this is a global challenge. It's not simply an American problem. This has been a problem around the world.

Now, it's true some churches have stronger commitment to catechesis than others, but this is really kind of it's not really an American gospel so much as it is as a have a shallow gospel that is taking one part of the gospel, making that the whole thing and baptizing that. And that's. Unfortunately, that happens in all across Africa, Asia, happens all over the world.

So how does the rediscovery then of this doctrine of the body, and you're really calling for a rediscovery of the doctrine of creation itself, but let's set it aside here under that umbrella of the doctrine of creation. But how does the rediscovery of this grow an understanding of who Christ is? I can hear a lot of pastors right now saying, you don't know my people.

They're not going to sit around for this. They're so busy, we can barely get them on a Sunday morning anymore. This is extra. This is superfluous. This is just. This is more on than what I need.

It's great if we get to it, but I just don't see that being a part of it. What would you say to that mentality and mindset?

Well, I'll say that in time we will see more of a hunger for it, because as the culture crunches down, people we're going to want to learn and know more about their faith.

And so we're seeing this in many of our churches that are in highly contested areas where the culture and this is both true in India as well as here, we do see a growing hunger for learning and growth in the gospel. So the idea that we should assume that people really can't be bothered. People have a lot of discretionary time, a lot of discretionary time.

And the church's problem is that we're not willing to ask for that time. We should have the boldness to ask.

But that being said, we have to also, and this is to the pastor's point, we sometimes think that everything has to be reduced to programmatic activity in the church, where you come out at a certain day or night or whatever to do things. And a lot of the good gospel work can happen in organic ways in the midst of life itself.

And so there's a lot of ways we can help understand how growth can happen in ways that accommodate our busy lives, etc. But I do think we should ask for more. We also should be more creative.

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In this next part of the conversation, we transition away from the book, but only a little.

We.

While the book is talking about the body, there are many different subjects that fall under the umbrella of the body. Part of that is an understanding of time, rest, how we go about our lives, what do we value, what are we showing by our bodies and how we live.

Now, that's all under an understanding of the body. Because if we don't believe that our body needs rest, then we won't rest.

If we believe that we're machines, if we believe that we're just there to get more done, and we become so regimented and then we become worn out because really, we weren't designed to be that way. We were designed to need rest. And so we talk a bit about that.

And in doing so, our conversation transitions away from an understanding of the body in regards to sexuality, and we start talking about time and really getting into how we are living and how our culture is shaping us. You know, there's a lot of conversation today about the world, catechizing or evangelizing us.

Catechesis just simply means training, and he's going to use that term. How do we catechize? How do we train our people to think, to know, to follow Jesus? And we are all being catechized by something.

And our world is catechizing us in many ways. It's communicating, meaning each and every day, even when we don't realize it. It's in the shows we watch, it's in the busyness we feel.

It's in the values that we espouse and that we fight for. It's in the pressure and in the stress that comes upon our bodies. And all of that has been meaning that has been communicated to us through.

Through our families, through our friends, through our schools, through our media. We are being catechized each and every day.

But in our society, and especially within the modern Western church, we have tried to boil it down to make it the lowest common denominator in order to get people in the door to get them saved. At least that's what we tell ourselves. But in doing so, we actually offer a very an anemic idea of what salvation really is.

And that has disastrous effects as we go on. That's why this conversation is so important.

If we don't have a proper understanding of the body and our human limitations, then we won't understand a need for rest, a need for thinking, and a need for pulling away to find a different rhythm with God. It's not just about the sexual sphere. It's not just about gender reassignment or eating disorders or sexual issues.

It has such a greater effect than we often realize. And we're going to be talking about that.

And then he's going to get pretty personal and how he has taken time to really go deeper with God because the world is hungering for a deeper knowledge and experience with him. Happy listening.

How do we then recapture that mentality in our churches? Because you're right, this creation idea does, to me, permeate everything.

And it is an antithesis to the culture or an antidote to the world that seems to be coming in everywhere we turn. I mean, it's busyness, its idea of. Of time, its idea of how we view relationships, the transient value, or I think it was St.

Benedict that called it the gyro vagues. Those who are in and out all the time. And we can't find any depth of relationship.

You're saying, it seems that you're saying is that I'm calling for a depth to take root, to get to know. I mean, rediscover who God is, rediscover who we are as created individuals.

And then that will permeate every relationship that we have, which is itself an understanding or an outworking of what the gospel is. Now elaborate on that. I mean, do you agree? Do you disagree or. I'm only getting a smidge of it.

No, it's a good point. I think we have to, you know, we have to assess what do we really value?

What do we really want to do with our lives and how we want to form our lives. And I know in my own life, I'M the president. My life is completely packed from stem to stern.

When I came to Asbury, I had the spirituality of a professor from Gordon Conwell.

And when I got here, I realized early on that I was not spiritually equipped to handle the responsibilities and the decisions and all that I had to face and just the endless issues that are before me. And yet my time is. I mean, I'm traveling every weekend. I'm speaking all over the country. It's very difficult to work it out.

And so my wife and I realized at some point I either had to leave the position and just give it up and say, you know, I got to go back to what I know, which is teaching in the classroom, or I have to have. Go to a deeper place in the Lord. So I had. I would say if you looked at my schedule, you would say, I have no discretionary time.

We decided to carve out an hour a day, an extra hour a day on top of everything else, to spend time completely in prayer and in the Psalms every day, the two of us together. And so we said, let's do this for 150 days and just see what happens after 150 days. So we did that.

Wow.

What I found was, despite me, if I'm traveling, I might be in India or whatever. We still do it over the phone even, or Skype or whatever. We do it.

It doesn't matter where I am, what I'm doing in an airplane, in the airport, or whatever. We do it.

And so I had been, like a lot of Christians. I'd become a Christian early on. I'd gone through kind of the normal kind of growth spurt you have.

But then I went through years of just kind of, like, almost flat. I wasn't. I didn't. I was growing. I was just simply maintaining my faith.

And suddenly I found myself in a growth period again, like I haven't had since I was a young Christian. It was very, very powerful for me.

And it taught me that if we are hungry enough to really want to be formed by the gospel, the Lord will give us space and show us space in our lives to do it. And we found that true in our lives.

And my life, if anything, the last eight years has gotten, for 10 years now since I started this, gotten more complicated. And yet we are just persistently determined to keep growing in our faith. That's the church that we have to see reborn.

And is that determination to stay before God? Because this culture desperately needs authentic Christianity that's truly transformed. And they are not impressed by shallow Christianity.

They're not impressed by all this. And we will never change the world by this because we ourselves aren't changed.

But if we're changed and we can show radical forgiveness, radical love, radical acceptance, yet also ourselves radically transformed, it's a powerful thing. I still believe in it. I believe it's very possible. And I don't believe the world can ever spin too fast for us to walk with the Lord.

That's good. Let's pass the plate.

That was good.

I'm serious. I mean, I make a joke, but that is where people live.

And that's actually what we are about at Apollos Water, because we see how the culture is just creeping in and it's come down to this justification only Christianity, where it's the surface level. And actually we've identified what we call not a new form of discipleship. We just put a name on it.

We call it missio holistic where it is, it's a holistic understanding of the body, the mind, all of those aspects, and even the spiritual realm, which we as Westerners don't do well with. And we know that our global brothers and sisters understand that world much better than we do.

But we're saying, looking at discipleship and also the lens, putting the lens of culture on it, and it's all used to accomplish the mission of Christ.

And that's what we're trying to articulate is how do we help people follow Christ in the middle of an ever changing, postmodern, pluralistic, whatever ism you want to throw on at world? It's changing all around us. And it's so encouraging to me to hear you guys going back and saying, this is what we're going to do.

We're going to try this. And you said for 150 days, I'm assuming because of 150 Psalms. Is that how you did it? So Psalm 119 probably took you guys a while. I mean, 176 verses.

Come on.

It was seven days. It was seven days. Yeah. Think smart enough to say we should have 157 days. I think we've now been through the Psalter.

I think it's now in our 17th trip through something like that.

Wow.

Davis Psalm 101, for example. But yes, we do that every single day.

An hour. You do it for an hour?

We do it for at least an hour. Sometimes an hour and a half. At least an hour every day.

So what does that mean when you do it? An hour? You guys reading to each other? What are you doing?

What we did, we took all the psalms and we put them into metrical form. Of course, metrical psalters have been done all over the world. We wanted to actually make one available to anybody.

So we spent two years and turned every Psalm into regular meter so it could be sung to tunes that we all know and love. So what we do is. And by the way, those are all available on Psalms cbed.com which is the site that are on.

But you can go and listen to the tunes, you can read through the Psalms, but we pray, we actually sing the Psalm and then we talk about it and we reflect on it. And what's amazing is the Psalms are like, you know, bring. It's basically 150 life journeys that puts out there before you.

And those hundred fifty journeys, some short, some long, as you said, they will give you basically the catechesis for 150, you know, potential situations in all of life. I found every psalm fits something I'm dealing with. And this is a joke on the side, though. When my wife and I were doing this, the.

The medical Psalters, it took a lot of work, took two years of work. And so we would. I would do a psalm, she would do a psalm.

And so one point I said to her, sweetheart, I tell you what, if you do Psalm, I'll do Psalm 117. You do Psalm 117.

What's it got?

Three verses.

Get our Psalter and get Psalm 119. My wife gets credit for that. God bless. A really good job anyway. But we sing, then we talk, then we pray to the Psalm, verse by verse.

And it's very, very formative. And by the way, we have started not just a psalm singing, but Asbury started these small group like Wesley had.

We're redoing the band meetings and the class meetings all over the country, all over the world. So we have thousands, thousands, Travis of these band meetings right now taking place over the world through our new room conference.

Our seedbed and so what you have is people that are. These are pastors that are, you know, they're very busy. They had no. And yet they're coming together in these bands.

And what we found was, amazingly, that the bands actually work even better under Covid requirements. Because if you have a.

If you're band with somebody and you live in Georgia and your band partner lives in California, in some ways you're more vulnerable to that person in California because they don't owe your world that much. And part of the band, you ask people, how is it with your soul, you know, what unconfessed sins are in your life?

You know, it's this serious conversation about your life, your life.

And people are finding in these bands the spiritual permission slip to share openly what they're dealing with, what their problems are and what their issues are. And you can imagine what they might be all over the map, and they're finding spiritual healing.

And we began to have this conference bringing people together. I never forget one time we were at a. We call these new room conferences. They're always in the fall. And we had probably 3,000 pastors there.

And these are pastors that all have very good, solid ministries. I never forget one night, a Thursday night. We had nothing planned. It was restaurant night. It's back to my point about priorities.

This was the restaurant night where everybody goes out Thursday night and just, you know, goes to a restaurant and just relaxes a little bit. So the leader of our. Of our new room conference, J.D.

waltz, said, I feel the Lord is just calling us to spend Thursday night in prayer, come back and pray. It's not on our schedule. You don't have to do it, you know, but if you. If you feel led, I think God's calling us to come back and pray.

So we went out, got a quick bite to eat, came back, and I walked in the auditorium. I was shocked. It was absolutely packed. Everyone came back. It was packed. I couldn't see any empty seats. And the Lord moved.

And I remember seeing pastors, ranks and ranks of pastors on their face before God, weeping, confessing their sins, being transformed. And at the end of that whole thing, I still get letters to this day about that night where pastors say, that night my ministry was saved.

That night I was brought to a new place.

And they, of course, they probably needed to have a night off and they needed to have go to the restaurants, all that, but they realized there was something deeper they needed that brought even deeper refreshment. And I really believe that if we call our Pastors to really, really get serious.

They'll respond and they will deal with the sin in their lives, and they will find themselves being sanctified and cleansed, filled with the Spirit. And I hope all these things are okay in your show, talking about things like this.

But we believe in people being filled with the Holy Spirit and empowered, and the transformative power of that is very, very important. It's not just for Pentecostals. It's for everybody.

Right? No, I agree. I agree. I totally agree. And I want to thank you.

I know your time is limited and you got to run because you already said your schedule is pretty packed out. I want to thank you for coming on the show. Would you let people know how they can follow you or know more about what you're.

Well, I have a blog, just simple blog, Timothy Tennant.com and so I put my blogs out there, and my sermons are there and things I've written or whatever, whatever I do is put on that blog site. They're welcome to follow me there. But most importantly, I always say the purpose of Asbury Seminary is to grow fruit on other people's trees.

We don't do anything. We're producing people that hopefully go out and bear fruit.

And I think the best way to test any ministry is to not look at the ministry itself, but look at the effects of it around the world.

I know you're doing that for your podcast, Travis, and think about the possibilities, if you someday will know what will happen in your life through the people that you touch. And when I left Gordon Conwell, I was in a spiritual crisis because I love three things. I love teaching. I loved having sabbaticals and writing books.

I realized that all that was going to come to a stop basically by coming to Asbury, which it basically did.

A lot of my stuff came to a halt, but the Lord spoke to me and said, you know, the greatest impact of your life is not what you do, but what you enable others to do.

And I think that that, to me, is really what it's all about, is it's not about necessarily what I write or what I say, but really, you look at the fruit of our ministries, people that come through our lives, what they do when they go out and graduate or go out from our churches. That's the real test, real fruit of our ministries. That's what I pray for all of us.

That's a good word. Well, I just want to thank you again for coming on Apollos Water. Thank you for coming on the show.

God bless you. Bye. Bye.

This is such an important conversation because it affects so many different areas of our lives.

If we fail to have a proper biblical understanding of the body, then we open ourselves up to serious error, which is what we see going on in many parts of the church today where people think that it's okay to be gay, or it's okay to have sex before you're married, or it's okay to, to do whatever, fill in the blank. We have such an improper understanding of the body.

In fact, it's amazing to me how cyclical things are because we've really become Gnostics all over again. And that was a heresy that the early church had to battle time and time again. It had infiltrated so many different parts of the church.

In fact, in the Gospel of John, John takes great pain and, and not only in his gospel, but in his letters to address the various issues that Gnosticism was propagating, which really comes down to this. The body does matter to them. It didn't. But to John it did. Because if it didn't, then what was the purpose of the resurrection?

It's not just some fanciful tale, but it's a true event. And John took great pains to record details for us to show it.

There is a reason that John tells us of Jesus encountering Thomas after his resurrection. Thomas, remember, refused to believe he hadn't been there when Jesus had previously appeared to the disciples.

And after he heard their testimony about Jesus resurrection and them seeing him, he said, I won't believe it unless I see the nail wounds in his hands, put my fingers into them and place my hand into the wound in his side. Then John records Jesus appearing to him, saying, here, put your finger here and look at my hands. Put your hand into the wound in my side.

Don't be faithless any longer. Believe.

I mean, John goes so far as to record Jesus making breakfast for the disciples, which is why he does that, to show that Jesus is not simply just some spirit or apparition, but a real fleshly body. The early church understood that we needed to have a proper understanding of the body, and it's no less true in our day.

Many Christians, including many pastors, have a great misunderstanding of the body and its place in Christian theology. Such anemic teaching leads us to a place where a person says, I am not my body. That's where it comes down to. Or, my genitals don't make me who I am.

We are souls and bodies united.

Our bodies may die, but we will receive a resurrected body at the resurrection of the dead and our genitals are simply a way of revealing who we are as gendered beings embodied in flesh. We experience the world as men and women. We also have to teach a proper understanding of the body.

We have to teach our children that the bodies we have are good things and then model it. I mean, there's a reason why we have so many different eating disorders today. It's because we have an improper understanding of the body.

We have to take care of our bodies, getting enough rest, exercise, eating right, and modeling the sexuality that God has designed our bodies for. One man and one woman united in a covenant of matrimony.

We are to treat our bodies well because it is through them that we experience the world and glorify God. I would recommend checking out Tim's book For the Body Recovering A Theology of Gender, Sexuality and the Human Body.

It gives a great theological underpinning to why we need to have a proper theology of the body. And if this episode has helped you, would you consider partnering with us?

We are in our Ready to Fly Giving campaign where we are looking for 80 new giving partners before the end of the year and here is an incentive for those new partners. We will be giving you an Apollos Water drop logo T shirt sign up and someone from our team will be in contact with you to get your information.

And for those who have already partnered with us again, a big thank you because we wouldn't be where we are today without you and we would also love to have more people grow from connecting with Apollo's Watered if you've been impacted impacted by while listening to a podcast, would you screen the shot of the podcast, text it to a friend or share it on stories or simply share it directly from your podcast platform? Subscribing and leaving a review also puts it out there to more people.

Remember, there's content on Instagram, Facebook and our website that is shareable together. Let's leave a trickle of truth and encouragement around the world and watch people grow. And again, much thanks to our Apollos Watered team.

Kevin, Melissa, Donovan, Eliana, Rebecca and Audrey Water your faith, Water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Watered. Stay watered everybody.