#259 | We Need Each Other: A Conversation with Jim Wilder on the Rediscovery of Relationships in the Christian Life, Pt. 1

Characteristic of God that's been passed off to us as far as the brain is concerned, is it's relational.

It looks for a connection with somebody else with the intention that we would share life with them.

And when we do it wrong, we're death giving to others.

And when we do it right, we're life giving to others.

Welcome to those who Serve the Lord, a podcast for those at the front lines of ministry.

You've given your life to serve, but what happened when the well runs dry?

If you've felt the weight of leadership, the tension between tradition and change, or the challenge of staying faithful while engaging culture, you're not alone.

I'm Travis Michael Fleming, founder and executive director of Apollos Watered, the Center for Discipleship and Cultural Apologetics.

I've been at the front lines for over 25 years, leading churches to become thriving testimonies of God's grace.

I've wrestled with the same questions you're facing, and I've seen how God brings renewal even in the hardest seasons.

Each week we have conversations with pastors, theologians, and cultural thinkers as we seek to equip you to lead well and stay rooted in Christ amid shifting cultural tides.

So grab your coffee and listen in, because your faith matters, your work is not in vain, and the Lord is still with you every step of the way.

Welcome back.

I want to start off today with a question.

Are you seeing genuine transformation in the people you serve?

For many of us, if we're being honest, we're ministering to people already familiar with Christianity.

They might know church.

They may have grown up in it.

They might even come from a long line of believers.

They're prodigals, and we love prodigals.

But I'm not talking about them today.

I'm asking this question.

Are you seeing real transformation in people who've never heard or followed Jesus?

People that may be from different backgrounds, different religions, different worldviews, different cultures.

Are you reaching them?

And I'm talking about the people in your neighborhood, in the front row of your life.

Maybe you are.

I hope you are.

But if we're being honest, most of us aren't seeing the kind of transformation that we long for.

For years, I believed that if I had the right theology, I had the right method or the right program, transformation would follow.

I thought if I preached like Martyn Lloyd Jones or John Piper or prayed like George Mueller, I'd see people make 180 degree turns.

And yes, I did see some change, but not enough.

See, the question haunted me.

How does real transformation actually happen.

Let me save you some anxiety before you go crazy and check out all my credentials.

I believe that it happens through the spirit of God, through prayer and through the Word.

These are non negotiables to me.

They are massive.

I would never diminish them.

But here's the thing.

I believe the greater framework around them is missing.

And I believe there's more.

So much more.

The question launched me on a journey going through the Word of God, church history, global missions, and conversations with leaders and thinkers around the world.

And what I discovered was surprising and yet profoundly simple.

I actually put it all together into a unique model I call Missio Holism.

Missio holism wasn't born in the academy.

It was born out of real pastoral ministry.

It's about pursuing Christ's lordship in all of life, especially in a pluralistic, post Christendom world.

It's built on four the gospel, the kingdom of God, the church and cultural engagement.

Everything else falls within that, and it's nourished by four tributaries.

So you know how these all came to Bible and theology, church history, missiology and neurotheology.

Why neurotheology?

That might be the new category.

It causes you to raise an eyebrow and a question mark.

Because we can now see literally how transformation happens on the brain.

And here's the startling truth about it.

What we're doing really today in our ministry isn't really working.

Not because it's wrong.

It's not because we're teaching the wrong things.

It's because it's incomplete.

Yes, we need prayer.

Yes, we need scripture.

But neurotheology helps us to recover what the early church knew instinctively, what the Bible quietly already assumes, that transformation is actually deeply relational.

It's just giving us the language and science behind it.

Now, that's all we can see, that it's deeply communal.

That's what this transformation that happens is.

And it's deeply embedded in the way God has wired our brains.

Let me illustrate.

When I lived in Chicago, we moved into the church parsonage.

It was an old bungalow and it had this carpet from the previous tenant.

It was worn, it was outdated.

But I wondered, and my wife wondered, is there anything underneath?

She hated the carpet, and I didn't like it too much either.

But I can live with anything.

She wanted to see what was underneath it.

So she had me pull back the corner of the carpet and voila.

There were beautiful oak floors.

She was right.

There was something gorgeous underneath it.

So we tore out the carpets, stripped the floors and polished them until their original beauty Came through.

You see, that's what we're doing at Apollo's watered.

We're pulling back the layers, the layers of Christendom, some of the bad theology that's crept up and market driven methods to see what was underneath.

And when we do, we find something's been there the entire time.

It's timeless.

The scripture talks about it, the early church knew it.

And the mission field has already worked this out.

And they're all pointing out in the same direction, Missio.

Holism.

And it's changing everything.

That's why I wanted to bring you this conversation.

It's from our archives and it features Jim Wilder, a neurotheologian and author of the Other Half of Church, Enemy Mode, Joyful Journey, Rare Leadership, and many more.

Jim was deeply influenced by Dallas Willard, and together they explored how spiritual formation really works.

In this episode, Jim takes us deep into neurotheology, how God actually designed our brains to change and grow.

And this, this doesn't challenge God's word in any way.

It supports it.

Matter of fact, it's found throughout.

Helps us to see how the early church grew, how effective missions is done, and how it's all right there in the word of God, the Bible.

I hope you're intrigued.

Now I want you to listen in.

Here's my conversation with Jim Wilder.

Jim Wilder, welcome to Apollo's Watered.

Great to be with you, Travis.

Are you ready for the fast five?

Whoa.

Never ready for anything too fast.

Okay, here we go.

I know you live in the Rockies, but also you grew up in the Andes.

So the Andes or the Rockies?

The Andes are taller.

But is that why, is that why you like them?

Because they're taller?

Well, yeah, there's more diversity there.

I mean, you get all the way from dry deserts, the driest on the world, snowy mountains, to jungles.

You know, it's got it all mixed in there.

But in terms of just a lovely place to live, I'm glad I picked the Rockies.

Did you ever think that, Hey, I why I picked the Rockies is because I grew up in the Indies?

Oh, yeah.

There's no doubt about it at all.

I was for a while living in sort of flatter land and I thought, I gotta find someplace where there's mountains.

So that's why I wanted to go to the Rockies, and here I am.

There you go.

So you've also spent a lot of time doing cross cultural work.

I mean, it's pretty clear in your books.

But what is the funniest cross cultural experience you've ever had?

Well, I think it was the time I was in Sri Lanka, and I'd been there for a while, hadn't seen a vegetable in a great long time.

So it came out this plate that I thought was green beans.

And so I just grabbed some of those green beans and just, you know, started eating them.

First bite, I realized these are the hot peppers locally.

And I'm in front of this big group.

You know, I'm not either going to spit this out because I got a mouthful of the hottest peppers they got there, or I ended up swallowed whole, and I decided to swallow it whole for the next day and a half.

I traced my digestive tract.

Oh, that is really good.

That's really good.

Okay, here's the third question.

Let's do a little desert island.

All right, so if you were stranded on a desert island with one book outside of the Bible that you have to have for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?

Well, if you can take the trilogy of Lord of the Rings and make one book out of it, I think that's one I would read.

I mean, there's always something in there.

No one's ever figured out what he's talking about on many different levels and, you know, just be fascinated.

You know, that whole different world that he.

That Tolkien creates would.

I think that would be the book I would be working on.

Wow.

That is a challenge, though, and I think you're right.

I don't know how many people really know what he was talking about.

All right, here we go.

Number four.

Because you travel so much, here's a question for you.

If you were an airline, what would be your catchphrase and why?

We'll bring you back down.

Yeah.

You know, you put you in a big tin can and throw you across the sky real fast.

You know, that's the one thing I want to know, that they'll bring me back down.

Bring you back down.

I mean, you might get a lot of customers that way.

I don't know, but that's a funny one.

All right, here's the last question.

If you're a store, what store would you be and why?

Oh, now you're really getting out of my area.

You know, shopping is not my specialty, so I think I'd be bakery, because I've never been to a bakery and couldn't find something I liked.

You know, I thought taking a tour of the world's bakeries and waterfalls would be a really nice kind of trip.

So I'll be a bakery.

I'm sure there's probably some Facebook group about that.

I'm sure there is waterfalls and bakeries that somebody's going to write a book based on that.

So let's get to your story.

I mean, you've written a lot, you've helped a lot of people, but I'm not sure how many people really know who you are.

Like the Jim Wilder story.

What is the.

The Jim Wilder story?

Well, I guess the thing about it is I was curious and always been curious about how the mind and body work.

I think possibly partly because I had a stroke when I was two years old, which is sort of unusual.

That was one of these really nasty tropical viruses that made me blow out a blood vessel.

And so this whole curiosity of how things work and also just added to that that Jesus ended up with a physical body which he's going to use for all eternity.

And so, you know, these things are meant to combine in some way.

And, you know, how does that work together?

Because, you know, from as early as I remember, there's this fight going on between science and Christianity, you know, more or less.

And, you know, it's something that should have harmonized.

And so my curiosity of how things work, you know, from taking apart everything I could as a kid, you know, trying to put it back together, to looking at plants and animals and ecosystems and humans and cultures and traveling from one culture to another, realizing, you know, the Christians in one culture look so different from the Christians in another culture, but they look more like their own culture than they do Christians elsewhere.

How do people work?

This is a very strange thing.

So that fascination keeps me going because every day I wake up curious about something.

You also, though, grew up in a cross cultural environment.

I mean, or were you born in the Andes or did you go there?

Yeah, Spanish was my first language.

Yeah.

Wow.

We were raised in a small little village up in the Andes.

First telephone I think we got when we were.

When we were 15.

I was 15.

And so television wasn't around and, you know, we rode horses and stuff like that.

So it's almost like growing up in a different century.

Really.

Yeah.

And among indigenous peoples groups and seeing quite a variety of different cultures.

Yeah, it was a very fascinating place to grow up.

And on the other side, they were having a civil war where about a quarter of a million people were killed sort of Rwandan style.

And so you got to see some of the, you know, ugly side of human nature as well.

So very diverse.

Well, you mentioned that in the book too.

You talk about that in Rare Leadership.

And I'm Curious, though, how did you go from being in the Andes with this other century where there's.

There's strife, there's violence, you're on horses, you don't have a telephone to brain science.

I mean, you go from kind of one extreme to the other.

What led to that journey?

Part of it's a little hard to guess, but just my fascination with science.

The thing I wanted most as a boy was a microscope, because there's all these things swimming in the water.

You can't see and you don't want to drink, and just kind of this curiosity of what's going on inside.

I originally wanted to be a medical doctor, and then I happened to witness somebody being healed in response to prayer from a psychological trauma.

And I thought, ooh, how does that work?

And so my interest moved over to psychology to try and see how the mind worked, because that was a whole new mechanism I'd never witnessed before.

And it made me very fascinated then with how do we get to become the people God wants us to be?

Which, from my own personal struggle, I tried following all the rules and doing it right and, you know, never seemed to work for me at all.

So I figured whatever the secret was to the church working the way we saw in the New Testament, I hadn't come across it yet, and these, you know, these streams sort of mixed together.

But all through school, the brain was the least of my interests.

So it was like, yeah, I don't want to study.

That's too technical.

But I kept getting assigned to these brain labs and, you know, VA hospital doing neurological assessment.

And it was like, well, I'll never use this stuff until, you know, the day that God sort of put it all together.

And it was like, whoa.

I had no idea I was getting prepared to do this.

How old were you when you came to the United States?

17.

So you jumped right from one culture right into the next.

I mean, that's pretty extreme.

Was that a massive cultural adjustment for you?

Yes, it was.

For one thing, I ended up in a very conservative Christian school in the south, and moving from a community where I knew everybody to a school where it was mostly about following rules and stuff like that.

That didn't make any sense to me.

And then the next year, I went to a public school where they had rock and roll bands and all that sort of thing.

This country seemed to be really peculiar.

To me, I'm sure.

And you said you were 17.

So what year are we talking about?

About 67.

1967, which is already in a huge tumultuous.

Move, a cultural shift.

I wouldn't be able to walk into that.

And then to, to, to shape all that.

And then Vietnam War and all that stuff going on.

Yeah.

So then you're, you're going into studies, you're, you're being shaped into this brain science.

But what was the impetus?

And maybe it's, it's several different incremental steps that really led from you, you're walking with God.

And then you started to go, okay, how does brain science or how does the brain affect this?

What, what really set that off?

I mean, you've given a bit of a hint of it, but what, what else was there?

Well, at one point we were seeing about 1,200 trauma victims a month in this counseling center that I worked at.

And we realized that the trauma had somehow impacted them.

And the ones that were recovering or sustaining their recovery in some way were part of church groups that acted like an extended family and they were recovering.

The ones that were just getting therapy were not sustaining their recovery very well.

And we wanted to know what the difference was and why some people seem to not make any recovery at all.

And it was at that point that we started trying to develop a model of how life worked that we called the life model and trying to keep it sort of not cross cultural.

But we wanted something that could be made sense of for non Western cultures as much as for Western culture.

So the best of, of Western science and the best of more relational cultures.

And it was at that point when we had sort of lined up what does the Bible say about how people develop?

That we encountered the brain science.

It says at all stages, like between child and infant and parent and adult, those stages.

There was a significant change in the brain that required us learning something about being human.

And the people that weren't recovering had no one to teach them how to be human.

They had people to teach them theology, but no one to show them how to be human.

And so all of a sudden how the brain developed became very, very important to us.

And I was working with Dallas Willard's wife, Jean Willard.

And so Dallas was a consultant.

So he's working on the spiritual formation side and we're working on the emotional development side and realizing, you know, there's some element from each that has to be incorporated if you're going to end up maturing and starting to look and act like Jesus.

And so that's where the fascination with, well, we got to really figure this out showed up.

I want to park on something that you mentioned.

Go back to Something just for a second.

You mentioned that people that were struggling had people to teach them theology, but not how to be human.

Explain that for a bit, because I think that's very, very true.

We have a lot of theology, but not a lot of humanity.

Explain that, if you would.

You don't mind?

Well, if you have noticed with children, when they're born, they don't have a very good idea of how to be human and how to interact with other people, how to use language, how to control their own bodies, how to get along in groups, all those sorts of things.

And the brain actually has to learn this sort of from scratch, you might say.

It's pretty disorganized going in.

And the way the brain does it is by attaching to somebody and then say, I'm going to copy them.

And so if they speak English, we learn English.

If they speak Spanish, we learn Spanish.

If they speak Hausa, they learn Hausa, and they learn the habits and customs and everything.

So basically they're learning how to be human.

But the most important thing is learning to understand how a mind that's older, bigger and wiser than mine thinks so that I can become like that mind.

That's basically what the brain is designed to do.

Find a bigger, better, smarter model with more experience that can show me how do I live now.

And that's what we model after.

Now, suppose your parents have severe psychological disorders.

They were raised under, you know, severe trauma.

So some of the people we had had been in the Holocaust.

Some of the people were.

Their parents were criminally insane and locked up in the state prisons for the criminally insane.

And so they had copied some pretty disturbed experiences and minds of whatever is going on.

So when we want to understand, how does God think?

When he loves me, he's taking care of me.

If everybody that I know of has abused me, your brain says, I don't understand this language.

I can't.

Can't track it.

And simply becoming Christian doesn't do that any better than it does with our other language.

For instance, I've yet to meet anyone who, because they became Christian, were suddenly fluent in Hebrew and Greek and could read the original texts.

You know, they had to learn that.

So to learn the relational language that helps us get along with other people and understand what they're thinking, we also have to have experiences with relatively honest and available minds.

And so that's what people were gaining from these church families was that kind of practice.

But at the time, we couldn't tell you what the elements were.

And the brain Science said specifically here things that your brain must be able to do if you want to understand other minds.

And so we've been practicing teaching the people that don't have those skills how to do them or how to learn from somebody who does have the skills and then spread that to other people in the interest of helping them understand God in his mind.

Were those churches that you were interacting with, were those different ethnic churches, or were those just normal churches in that area that had already a better focus on these issues?

No, actually what we found out was that none of the people who are participating with church were part of a program that the church had initiated.

It turns out it was a spontaneously merging from a small group or encounter of people that decided they wanted to do a little bit more of life together and support each other.

You know, so these are spontaneous gatherings that sort of formed out of churches, never out of an intentional program by the church.

Not that churches weren't running lots of intentional programs, but they weren't doing the thing we needed.

It was people who kind of looked at somebody go, hey, you need a family, you need somebody to be with on Thanksgiving, you need someplace to go camping on the weekend, come along with us, you know, and they were just basically sharing life together with other people and from a lot of different churches.

But so it was diverse, but not by intention.

A lot of churches do programs well, they do management well.

You know, the whole trellis in the vine.

The trellis is great, but there, there is not, I don't want to say there's not an awareness.

There's a greater awareness now on the self in a good way.

I mean, of course you've got people talking about God centered and Jesus centered.

We all want to be that.

But at Apollos Water, one of the things we talk about is we're to love the Lord our God with all of our heart, soul, mind and strength.

That's the first and greatest commandment.

The second is like it is to love our neighbor as ourself.

And that's the part that I think people miss, is that because the culture has become so self absorbed that they don't have a proper balance.

I mean, we know that the devil takes one thing and goes to an extreme, but we do have to have a proper understanding of the self and the relational aspect of things in a body.

Because I think, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, but a lot of times when people do choose churches, it's not always because of the theology, although that should be it, but it's about the community, about the identity, about feeling a part of that group.

As you've done this research and you're helping people see that, why the greater focus on this now?

I mean, why have we had to come to a point where we need to understand this relational aspect that we've lost?

Because being in church history, looking over time, I don't know how much those in the second and third century were talking in this same way.

And one of the things that I've struggled with is saying, okay, we have this language now.

We're able to kind of parse our experience, our feelings, our emotions.

Not to say that they didn't then, but they didn't have the much language.

And it was more of a survival in a lot of ways.

And a lot of those things were much more intuitive within the culture.

What has happened that has brought this desire to understand the self and our relationships?

And if I'm saying something incorrect, please feel free to correct me that we need to talk about this now.

Well, I think the changes in our culture are going on at a rate at which they've never, Yes, I agree, done before.

And we have at least two major changes that I can point to.

One is the Industrial Revolution.

Just thinking that when that hit, we no longer spent most of the time with our family in multi generational context, we are now pretty much in work groups for large parts of the day.

So whereas previously, if I was, let's say, a stonemason, I would have spent most of my time with my family and we're going to work together and we would have, you know, my grandfather was probably there, he probably been damaged by some accident at work.

So he helped raise me when I was little.

And then I went work with my dad, who is, you know, whatever it is, and my children, would he be expected to follow those kind of things that just made multigenerational life make sense.

And we didn't move anywhere very often.

So most of the people who I know, and that's one of the things that growing up in South America, most of the people there could tell you what the grandparents of any particular person in the village had been like.

So if your grandfather had been a wonderful person, your family was esteemed in the town, and if your grandfather had been a jerk, your family was looked at with some suspicion.

That's the downside of.

But here we have the long term effects of being human.

Very obvious from at least three or four generations.

Like whatever I'm doing is going to impact my grandchildren, at least probably my Great grandchildren.

And that's completely disappeared from culture then.

The second thing is that it takes practice to relate to other people.

And currently most people are spending about eight hours a day looking at computer screen.

Computer screens are not people.

They don't interact, they don't track us the same way that other people will.

The consequences are our behaviors don't, you know, they're not too obvious.

And so we've, you know, you can be very rude with a computer screen and if you walk away feeling like a hero, you can't do that in a village where your grandchildren are going to remember that you were a jerk.

You know, so these kind of things that formed us into human helped us understand how our cultures and communities work.

And even the practice time we need to interact with other people has rapidly fallen apart.

And then there's been the other philosophical changes and stuff like that.

A lot of moving that didn't happen before.

So when you move someplace, you kind of leave your past behind you.

So the sense of, you know, we make a difference long term in the world is mostly disappeared from human interactions.

And now we just, it's a question of how well we do our job, becoming sort of the, the mainstay of identity and, but I think in the west both, both men and women are, you know, being reduced to how well they perform whatever their job function is.

There's really quite a big bit of difference from a relational world where we all learn these things.

So now we have to teach people what, you know, your grandfather couldn't teach you because you've never seen him, or you only, you know, vacationed with him twice when you went back to visit, you know, for a week.

Taking that then into consideration, I mean, it's, it's, it's kind of a rediscover of our humanity.

As we become much more individualistic, we become more separated, we become more technological and isolated.

It seems that you're calling people back to a lot of the practices that majority world cultures have managed to hold on to that have been taken for granted.

But the Bible already talks about and you're just giving the brain science behind why this occurs the way that it does.

Is that correct?

Yeah, that's.

We're basically saying here's the mechanism and you know, the, the worse you are at it, the better it is to know the way the brain works.

If you're, if your culture is all very good at, let's say, treating people with respect, you'll have learned, you know, hundred a thousand ways to show respect for other people.

If you've been raised watching sitcoms where people are rude to each other and that's how you get the most laughs.

And, you know, social media, where, you know, a smart comment gets more likes than other things, those kind of responses mean we need a lot of practice, and it'd be better to learn it the way the brain learns it.

So the more efficient we become, because we've got now a small window to put it in, the more efficient we become, the more important that detail becomes as part of our life and as far as the world's concerned.

I was speaking to the Christian universities of Asia and they were lamenting the fact that most of their students, even two decades ago, came knowing who their people were and what their identities were.

Now most of these young people have created their own community online with people their parents and community have no idea they're interacting with.

And they're coming in quite confused about who are my people and what are we like and what do we do and what do we value?

The Korean youth in high school now are beginning to show signs that we would consider Alzheimer's, early signs of dementia from simply excessive screen exposure.

Cultures that 20 years ago were very well established are disintegrating before our eyes around the world.

The rapid spread of technology is just having massive impact.

And so how are we going to put back in to people's minds?

Here's how you understand your people to be the people of God.

And how do you teach other people how to look and act like Jesus?

One more comment I'll throw in is that when we pray or study the scripture, we often have a spiritual revelation of a kind of life that we hadn't imagined.

But your brain doesn't get good at it under duress unless you practice it with other people.

So in other words, I can know that God loves me, but as soon as you cut me off in traffic, I forget that God loves me unless I've practiced it with other people.

Then that practice in my brain reminds me, oh, yeah, yeah, even when people cut you off, God loves you.

So we want to be loving in this context.

And so, you know, we have to have the truth on the one side, but we have to have the practice with people on the other side if we're going to do it under duress.

You mentioned someone cutting you off in traffic.

My question is not does God love me?

It's does God love them?

Now, if you're God's face in traffic, people will be looking at you to see the answer.

That's true.

That's true.

Talk about that for a minute.

You mentioned that in the other half of church, you talk about seeing the necessity of the face.

And even in the Aaronic blessing, the Lord causes face to shine upon you.

This idea the scripture talks about is the face.

What is the significance both theologically and for us spiritually?

And understanding the face?

Yeah, that's really, to me, very, very fascinating because babies develop their identity looking at faces before they can ever understand words.

So by the time you have a vocabulary of 50 words, you've pretty much figured out how to interact with other human beings.

You'll be about 18 months old.

And so the brain is already designed to look at people's face and look who are the eyes looking at?

Me.

Who's glad to be with me, who shares my distress.

And then I'll copy how they act.

And all of that is registered on the face.

It's the primary means of communication, and it happens much faster than spoken communication.

So you and I might.

We're giving very long paragraphs in between our comments.

Right.

But that would say we have one exchange that goes on every, you know, two or three minutes.

But face to face communication runs back and forth six times per second.

So I actually, since we're watching each other on video cameras, the fact that you nodded right there, the audience can't see it or smile just now, all these things communicate to me much faster than any words ever would.

What's going on in your mind?

And that's how we learn to be human and understand each other through the face.

You talk about the face you talk about.

The life model works.

You talk about rare leadership.

I find this particularly fascinating because as we discussed in the pre show walkthrough, you've given words to stuff and experiences that many people have felt were missing in their world.

Why is it then imperative that we understand the face?

Why do we understand this life model that is there?

Because people have gravitated toward it.

Their lives have been changed by it.

What is it hitting that we're missing?

Well, what it's hitting is that we're essentially relational beings.

The number one characteristic of God that's been passed off to us as far as the brain is concerned, is it's relational.

It looks for a connection with somebody else with the intention that we would share life with them.

And when we do it wrong, we're death giving to others.

And when we do it right, we're life giving to others.

And it's the difference between wisdom and folly.

All of those things come back to how Am I relating to you?

And so the part of the brain that creates our identity and character and responses is all the relational circuits in the brain.

Then we have the linguistic and analytical part of the brain.

And the problem with that is it's way downstream of all the things that give us our character.

So by the time you put beliefs and understanding in their truths, which are very useful to have, by the way, but they don't really change our character very readily or very easily.

It's a very, very slow process because traffic in the brain is one way, one directional traffic.

So with, if you put, on the other hand, oh, let's put it this way, we're much more changed by who we love than what we believe.

And so we're trying to move the Christianity back to where it was about a thousand years ago, which was primarily about our loves.

And so the love of God was more central than our understanding theologically of what he was like.

Is he totally other, is he not?

We don't know.

We love to God as we look for him in our daily lives and we practice that with others.

You mentioned you're moving it back to a thousand years ago.

Yes, we've gone through the industrial revolution and all these different things.

What has the church then lost that we are trying to recover?

And do you see it being lost globally, or is it something that's more of a Western phenomenon that has kind of jump the seas, if you will, because of the influence of the Western church on the world that it's starting to trickle into those other churches?

Well, I think there's quite a difference globally to begin with, although the same kind of problems we're having are spreading around the globe at an amazing rate.

So that said, the biggest problems in the Western church happened with four great ideas that sort of ruined the church.

So in the Enlightenment, we start with I think, therefore I am.

And so that raised thinking to the most important thing about humans.

And what they meant by thinking was conscious, logical sort of thoughts.

And so the church thought, well, you know, if you want to think and you want logical thoughts, you want truth, we've got truth.

So we then started making truth available to culture.

The only problem is that at that point truth began to eclipse love as the, as the, as our central message.

We began arguing about truth.

And then the volunteers came along and he said, well, it doesn't matter what you believe if you can't make a choice.

So making the right choice became the sort of the central thing for the gospel.

And so we made becoming a Christian, choosing Jesus as your Savior and the solution to all problems were making better choices.

You hear that all around the church in the west don't hear that much in the Eastern church or a lot of other cultures, but we, you know, and of course we want to make good choices, but that doesn't make as big a difference as who we love.

And after that, then came the will to power.

What's the point in having a will and making choices if you don't have the power to have it?

And so Nietzsche and all the power people came along and the Nazis and the people that wanted to implement that power.

So, and Christianity, that went to power as well, you know, going to have a powerful experience.

You know, you don't want a Christianity without power.

So we began looking for whatever was a powerful thing.

And so the most common comment I hear about worship is, wow, that was powerful.

Because that's, you know, the value we picked up.

And of course we don't want to have inert Christianity.

Right.

But power is not as important as who you love.

And then when the truth and the, the right choices and the power of the spirit, all of those were failing to do things like prevent divorces and the rest of that.

The church then went with culture in the direction of, well, if you're going to be loving, what that means is you're just going to be tolerant of everybody.

And so at this junction and culture, we have people being tolerant and defining love as being just accepting of everybody else.

And, you know, because there's really nothing you can do about the problems of the world anyway.

Now in the rest of the world, I think the operant condition is that they're surrounded by enemies of Christianity.

And when you're surrounded by enemies of Christianity, the only thing that really digs in and helps you is if you can spontaneously love your enemies and that practice, well, you know, the truth, everyone could tell you, you should love your enemies.

Knowing the truth hasn't made anyone that I know of love them.

Trying to make better choices, like I'm just going to love them, you know, doesn't do it.

I mean, all those things don't work as a formula because the only thing that makes us love our enemies is when we love God and we see his love for our enemies as well.

We share that love and go like, well, yeah, God loved me when I needed help.

How can I not love the people that he loves?

And so that shared love, which is part of non Western cultures in communities, very often it just makes sense to them.

This is what we do and if you're living that life of loving the people that God loves even before they love you back, you know, while they're still enemies.

And I think God was that way before, while we were still his enemies, he loved us.

That is the thing that transforms people, because they understand in the relational context already, you know, if you become.

If I love you, you will become one of my people.

And especially if I remember growing up in South America, as soon as someone became a Christian, they were part of the group trying to kill us, and they had to be taken into our group immediately and become one of our people if they were going to survive, because now their people were trying to kill them.

And so this sense that, you know, if we make this change of kingdoms, we must enter into relationship and share life together is really very prominent in the areas where Christianity is much more transforming than it is in the West.

There's so many different things to unpack there.

You mentioned in the book about the difference between an accountability group and an identity group.

And when we've talked a lot about identity, we're talking about group identity in the West.

Course it's very individualistic.

We're not a collective society.

But we are all looking for our identity in something, and that's the flavor of the time.

Everyone's searching for identity.

The rise of transgenderism, everyone is searching for that identity.

What, though, is the difference?

If we bring it back just for a moment to the small group idea, what is the difference between an identity group?

Why is that so important rather than an accountability group?

Yeah, that's an excellent distinction.

Let me throw out two little things first, and then I'll get back to that particular question.

The first is the brain is configured in such a way as it cannot see its own identity.

So the foolish thing about Western culture is you just leave people to discover who they really are.

You're talking about using your brain to see something it can't see.

The brain is configured in such a way that we see our identity by how other people look at us.

So the only question then is, are they seeing us correctly or are they seeing us distortedly?

And, you know, the world of flesh and the devil are always that see a distorted view of who we are.

But if that's all our brain knows, it becomes us.

And so that's, you know, the first problem.

We're going out looking for our identity using a method that's guaranteed not to work.

It'll just lead to confused people confused about all, everything about their identity.

What's my gender?

What's my sexuality, what's my, what are my people, what are my groups, what are my.

All those things, you know, you just left that all up to chance.

Now then, at age 14, your brain goes through an apoptotic period, which means it's programmed cell death kills off a bunch of itself.

In order to make my individual identity less important than my group identity, which is where we have all the peer groups and everything that develop around age 14, suddenly my people and their survival becomes more important to your brain than your own.

Now it's very important to say, well, who are my people?

And so since the number one thing that comes out of an accountability group is I'm keeping an eye on you and how well you're doing, the focus is on you and your choices and all that sort of thing.

So I'm sort of patrolling your, your behavior.

But an identity group says, we're going to teach you how to be the kind of people we want to be.

And it really works with the strongest system in the brain.

From 14, 8 on, it's like, who are my people and how do I become like them?

What do they see in me that has yet to grow?

And that's the wonderful thing about who God's created us to be.

Most of what he has in mind hasn't had a chance to grow because no one's seen it.

And so an identity group can say to you, once you were a thief, but now you can work with your hands and give something and have something to give to others, which Paul tells his congregations, you know, you came from all these things.

That's what you were before.

That's not who you really are intended to be.

100, 200 years from now, you won't be that.

We see that and will help you to grow.

And so an identity group puts into words the things that you would have never imagined were true about you and which accountability can't do.

So that's why the identity then becomes infinitely more important, because accountability fails really, because it's more about rule keeping than anything else, rather than the understanding of who one is.

And it runs on that things that if I could just make the right choices and make myself do it, it's which is not the thing that changes our character.

You know, it's again, we're going back to our identities formed by the people we love.

And that would be what an identity group would be, people who love each other and bring out what Christ is trying to grow in one another.

Jim has given us an incredible look into how formation happens.

I can't wait to get to the second part of this conversation next week, and I hope you'll join me.

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