Sunday School - Noah's Ark

[00:00:02] Speaker A: From Westside Church in Bend, Oregon. This is behind the message in this podcast. We take you behind what we teach here at Westside. I'm Ben Fleming. [00:00:17] Speaker B: I'm Evan Earwicker. Hi, Ben. Hey. [00:00:22] Speaker A: Your totally normal workday, Evan. We have on lifts and fixing lights. [00:00:26] Speaker B: Yeah. So here's the thing. We had a light project that was going to be like a team bonding project where we were replacing a bunch of burned out lights in our worship center. And so, you know, I want to be a leader of the people, you know, and really create opportunities to connect over shared work, much like the monks used to do, you know? And so I showed up. I was a little late. I felt bad about that. Justin, Sam, they were going to join me and yeah, I ended up finishing the whole project before Justin cared to show up. So, Justin, what time. What time did you arrive? I'm not Mike, so I can't. Yeah, I'll. I'll relay it. It was about 2:30. We had a 10:00 clock meeting. [00:01:04] Speaker A: Arrival time. [00:01:04] Speaker B: 10:00'? [00:01:04] Speaker A: Clock? [00:01:05] Speaker B: Yeah, it was good. [00:01:06] Speaker A: Did you like get everybody brunch and stuff like that too? And they. You just ate it all yourself? Feel better? [00:01:11] Speaker B: I had four breakfast burritos all by myself. A single tear running down my cheek. [00:01:15] Speaker A: As you should. [00:01:17] Speaker B: I'm sorry, I shouldn't throw you under the bus. Justin, you're not on Mike. And actually it was fine. It worked out. But you had a dentist appointment for your kid. Was it Kenton or Forrest? Forrest. How did he do? He did fine. Okay, good. Good. I don't know that I've ever taken either of my kids to the dentist. I've taken them to a lot of doctor's appointments, but not dentists for some reason. Job, I guess we didn't like, decide that. Yeah. [00:01:42] Speaker C: It's kind of strange that there are assignments just that naturally happen for spouses without really any discussion. Like, for some reason, Eric's the only one that takes out the garbage. I refuse. I will not. [00:01:52] Speaker A: Will you refuse or does he just do it? You would refuse if he gave you the option. No, I just refuse. [00:01:57] Speaker C: I won't. It's like a game of chicken when garbage starts getting put on the counter above the trash can. [00:02:03] Speaker A: You put it on the counter? [00:02:04] Speaker C: Yes, in protest. My job. [00:02:09] Speaker A: Trash can in a cupboard. Then. [00:02:10] Speaker C: And then you put it on the. Yeah, yeah. Yep. [00:02:12] Speaker A: That's a move. [00:02:14] Speaker C: It's a power move. [00:02:15] Speaker A: That's a whole move. [00:02:16] Speaker B: So before COVID um, our backyard wasn't really like. We never like, did anything in there with our backyard. And so the back slab became, we called it Trash World. And we would get by. By mid-2020, before summer hit, it was like we were months behind on our trash. It was embarrassing. I mean, just a mound of black trash bags right outside our. It's like we couldn't be bothered, you know, to take it all the way to the trash. And so it just became this. This garbage dump right outside our back door. [00:02:46] Speaker A: Wait, they weren't picking up the trash? [00:02:48] Speaker B: No, they were. It's just we couldn't. We couldn't catch up. You know, we'd fill the trash can, take it out, and there would still be, you know, six or seven weeks worth of trash. It was terrible, you guys. Amazing. Ah, like adult much, Evan? You know, I gotta be honest, I. [00:03:03] Speaker A: Would not have expected either of those stories from the both of you. That's a real surprise. [00:03:08] Speaker B: Just festering garbage on Lindsay's counter. I have trash yard, you know, Lindsay. [00:03:15] Speaker A: Delicately balancing things on top of each other. [00:03:18] Speaker C: Recycling too. Yeah, I won't. Yeah, it's his job. For some reason, in my mind, just like the dentist for Evan, apparently automatically Alyssa's. Huh. [00:03:29] Speaker B: Wow. Okay, so in your. In your relationships with your spouses, are there any tasks or duties that really cut against, like, traditional gender roles? [00:03:41] Speaker A: Man, great question. [00:03:43] Speaker C: Eric cooks a lot, I suppose. [00:03:46] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:46] Speaker C: Yeah, that's a good one. [00:03:47] Speaker A: I cook way more than Rebecca. Rebecca doesn't cook. She's. Every once in a while she gets a wild hair to bake something. But that's like a fun activity. More like a. Playing a board game than it is closer to playing a board game than it is cooking for her. [00:04:00] Speaker B: She doesn't like to cook. So she goes off to work, saves lives, stops bleeding, sets bones, whatever. You have coffee with people, talk about the Bible. [00:04:12] Speaker A: Sound like her right now. [00:04:14] Speaker B: And then you. You cook up some food while she is still slaving away, saving lives. [00:04:19] Speaker A: 12 hour shifts. [00:04:20] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:04:21] Speaker A: Yeah. In my house, I've discovered this is a while ago. [00:04:23] Speaker B: I can't like her. [00:04:25] Speaker A: I don't come home. I don't come home and say, what a long day? I cannot say it. It doesn't work. At best, I just get a side eye, look, and I go, oh, I'm so sorry. [00:04:35] Speaker B: Yeah, she's dealing with burn victims. And you're like, oh, that podcast. Yeah, it was quite a conversation. [00:04:42] Speaker A: Sat down with my friends in a series of meetings today. One of them, we got lunch delivered. It was rough. Yeah, she's not buying it. [00:04:52] Speaker B: That's amazing. I don't know. [00:04:53] Speaker A: Other than that I like to work in the yard. And she doesn't love getting dirt on her. That's not her favorite thing. When it gets really hot, she likes to mow the yard. [00:05:04] Speaker B: Oh, really? [00:05:05] Speaker A: Which is weird. She just loves heat 100 degrees. Like, that's the only time she'll come out and, like, help with yard work because she likes the extra heat. But she. I don't like cleaning inside the house. Love cleaning outside the house. The garage. I love toting on the garage. My car. That's one thing where we're way different is she hates messes inside. And I can deal with it longer. I. I hate messes in the car where you're taking a corner and some slides and Rebecca just doesn't even hear it. Drives me crazy. [00:05:40] Speaker B: Yeah. A clunky water bottle. Oh, I will pull the car over so fast. Or a clicking sound. I remember we had the car loaded and there was like a carabiner on a bag that was just, like, up against the plastic. I pulled that car over. No. Find it 100%. I don't care how deep it is in this pile of luggage. You find it. [00:06:00] Speaker A: Absolutely true. [00:06:02] Speaker B: That is absolutely true. [00:06:03] Speaker A: I think her dad, when we got married, made her, like, a survival kit that goes in the car back of her SUV that we had. And that thing would just slide around all over the place. I remember hearing it when we dated and then we got married, and I was like, one thing that has to stop in this marriage. This is my survival kit. I don't care. Put it in the garbage house. I'd rather die in the snow than. [00:06:27] Speaker B: I would listen to this thing. Yeah. Or the winner. Like, the back row of seats isn't latched in to the track or whatever. And so you hard stop and just clunk. Oh, my goodness. [00:06:38] Speaker A: And so then you're. [00:06:39] Speaker B: I'd rather not drive. I'd rather walk. I'd rather be a pedestrian. [00:06:41] Speaker A: Gosh, I've never felt closer to you, Evan. [00:06:43] Speaker B: I know we're connecting. I just have a. I just had a conversation with somebody in the church today, and they were talking about our dynamic. And I said, honestly, how different we are really works. If we were the same personality, had the same interests. I don't know how you do it. Shared leadership, right? [00:07:05] Speaker A: Yeah. What would it be? Hard, Annoying, Ineffective. [00:07:11] Speaker B: Yeah. I just don't know. I don't know if you could both carve out different aspects of the job without it being like a job share. You show up to two days a week. I'll show up two days. But to Work together. I think it's kind of like a marriage a lot of times. Different personalities that's needed. Otherwise you just step on each other's toes. [00:07:30] Speaker A: And it seems to work for people that show up on Sundays. Like, there's this kind of nice rhythm to it. I could see. And I think we talked about it going the opposite way of like, well, what if you just like one of them and then what do you do? You probably quit right after a little while and say it's not worth it. [00:07:44] Speaker B: 50% of the time isn't enough to enjoy church. [00:07:47] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. But it hasn't seemed that way. [00:07:49] Speaker B: I referenced that on Sunday lightheartedly, but talking about how we don't do every other week so people can't get in the rhythm of the person they like. You know, we gotta shake it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's probably true. You know, you have, you have your favorite speaker, preacher or whatever. [00:08:03] Speaker A: Sure. I think you always have somebody that jives with you or you like the style of storytelling or the depth at which they jump into the theology and all that kind of stuff. And we've talked about there's an art form to all of it and different strokes for different folks. Folks is kind of one thing, but a lot of people can exist inside the spectrum of great speaker teachers. And it's kind of about enjoying and appreciating the different perspectives more than it is finding your own. But we're human beings and we kind of like what we like. Right. And you're probably going to want one person over another group or whatever. [00:08:36] Speaker B: And a lot of churches, if there's a single lead pastor, senior pastor, if it's somebody and you like that person, if it's somebody else, there's a sense like, oh, we didn't get the main person, we didn't get the main pastor. With two of us, you just have to. You actually have to face the facts that maybe you don't like. [00:08:52] Speaker A: They're both the main guys. [00:08:53] Speaker B: Maybe you don't like one of them. That's right. Yeah. [00:08:56] Speaker A: It's not about where they exist on the org chart. [00:08:58] Speaker B: Yeah. I just don't like Evan, you know, And I want people to be honest about that. [00:09:02] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's one of the things is I do. I really like listening to you speak. It's. [00:09:10] Speaker B: Thanks, you're up there. [00:09:11] Speaker A: One of my favorite preachers there. I'm serious. We're back to the self congratulatory thing. This week was a great example, actually. We talked about. I got to be really Careful in this conversation. I mix Jonah and Noah the names all the time. I don't mix the stories, but I'll mix the names. [00:09:28] Speaker B: And you're preaching on Jonah, so buckle up. [00:09:30] Speaker A: I know, yeah, I'm gonna have to have a little line for everybody at the beginning of that one too. But. But you did a great job of not just talking about the Sunday school story as we know it, but giving people an opportunity to wrestle with the Old Testament in a way that not everyone is always given the invitation to while telling the story and then making it Christ centered, which is. It's a pretty big task, actually, when you jump into that. [00:09:56] Speaker B: Yeah. And this is the first of our sermons on these Old Testament stories, so I wanted to lay a little bit of kind of groundwork for it on how we read these stories. A couple passages really stuck out. One is where Jesus is talking to the Pharisees. And I quoted this out of John 5, where he says, you search the Scriptures thinking you're going to find eternal life in there, and yet you don't know God and you've never seen him and you never heard Him. Wow. So this idea that we can just ingest Scripture, especially the Old Testament, and. And that's all the work that has to be done just in the mere reading of it. We've done what it requires of us. Jesus would say, actually, no. Unless you find me in these stories, you're missing the point. And I'm sure I've read that 100 times. But in the context of getting ready to teach out of the Old Testament, hearing Jesus say, look for me, or you're missing God just in black and white or red and white on the page was really helpful to give me the confidence to really call out bad readings of the Old Testament which are out there. [00:10:59] Speaker A: So that is intended to get us out of the habit of a few things, probably. Right. But one of the primary things is to try to just automatically insert yourself into the narrative of the story, find yourself, see yourself, and then say, okay, I'm Noah. And so it's prescriptive. And this is what I now need to do in the day and age that I'm in. We're trying to avoid that. Right. Not that you can't learn lessons from ancient literature and all the wisdom that it provides. I'm gonna do some of that. Compare and contrast a little bit of how we live today to what Daniel does. Daniel and Lyons Dennis next week. But that was one of the things that you highlighted was we got to be careful to not Just try to make ourselves the hero in these stories, but look to something bigger. [00:11:38] Speaker B: Yeah, they're not really about us. We can learn from, you know, the narrative. But to always say, like, well, the reason that David and Goliath is in the Bible is because I need to see myself as David and, you know, running late to my kid's soccer game is my Goliath, or whatever we like to do. Maybe that's fine. And you can have some good morals learned from these stories. The better way is to say, what do we learn about the nature of God in this story? And what did Jesus come to fulfill that was maybe represented? And this is how Peter does it in First Peter 3, talking about Noah, he just looks at it and says, where is Jesus in the story? And in Noah's story, baptism is now the floods that were judgment. The ark is now Christ in which we're found and carried safely into the new creation. So Peter just does it, you know, unapologetically. And so when we get to the other stories, and I'll be anxious to hear how you do it with Daniel this weekend, but with David, it's like, Christ is our champion. And when we were hopeless to. In the face of these giants of sin and death and the grave, Christ stands up for, you know, and I don't know if we'll go that direction for that week, but we've got to look for Jesus in these stories. [00:12:56] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, exactly. And it's a relief to me to not have to find myself in the story and then make it work for my life. To be honest with you. The thing that does work, and this will happen in Daniel, we'll talk a lot about prayer and discipline and practices and try to glean an understanding of. All right, if that faith looks a bit like Daniel's faith, here are some of the markers of that. But the bigger story, right, is that Jesus is king. And over all these different kings and empires that come through the life of Daniel, the hope that he has for the future of a real, genuine savior that is beyond him, and the angel that visits him in the lion's den and all those things, there's a hope for something bigger. And how that comes into the story is the most important thing, because you can insert yourself and find inspiration in any story, right? That's not what makes it holy. That's not what makes it eternal. You can look at the story of an athlete and go, I had a dad like that. And that resonates with me. You can watch a movie, a kid's movie, A book, any story, you can find that inspiration. So doing that with scripture doesn't make it spiritual necessarily. It works that way in a lot of different contexts. But what makes the scripture different is that it's specifically indirecting, pointing to toward how short we fall to salvation and how great of an overcomer Jesus is and the grace that we receive from that. That's what makes this whole thing different and that's what makes the Old Testament story special. [00:14:26] Speaker B: On the flip side, the worst reading I think is when we look at the Old Testament stories as a method to hopefully prove the truth of the Bible in like the factual supports. Right? So, and I referenced this, and maybe it was controversial to some about how in the last hundred years they've had expeditions that go to Mount Ararat and they look for remnants of the ark and nobody's found anything. And they talked about how if you actually do the math, the amount of water that would have to fall in 40 days and 40 nights to cover the earth as it speaks of it in Genesis 6, is 30ft per hour, 40 days straight across the entire planet. Now, I'm no meteorologist, it's not a possible thing. Thing. And the reason I brought that up was not to like poke at people who are saying, no, I believe that every, every fact that was written in Genesis 6 happened as written. That's okay, you can believe that, that's fine. But I know there's skeptics who are sitting in the seats doing maybe not the exact math, but they're looking at the story and they're saying that's a tall tale, that's far fetched. And I want to invite them into looking for Jesus in the story and not getting hung up on the fact that the amount of water that would have had to fall is outlandish. And so that was more of an invitation to those skeptics who. That becomes a roadblock to even considering what this is all about, which is our faith in Jesus. [00:15:51] Speaker A: And I think it's really pastoral to do that. Our job as pastors and preachers is not to bring that group to the point where we say you have to believe that this didn't happen, or you have to believe that it did happen. It is to lead people to the point where we can say, either way, it doesn't matter, we've got the greater answer to the entire story. And that's Jesus, of course. And I think that's, I hope, the takeaway. I haven't heard any complaints or anything like that. And it's fine if People have questions, curiosities, because that's pretty earth shaking to people in a certain point in their faith. But that is the pastoral aim that we have throughout this entire series is not to pull you into belief that every single Old Testament story is exactly true as written, but it's that this is an ancient people that are searching so desperately for the real Savior of the world. And everything that they're doing in these stories is pointing to that fact. [00:16:40] Speaker B: Right. And it's our faith in Jesus that everything hangs on. And as it's been said in the earliest form of Christianity, the early church acts on. They weren't going around asking the question, you know, is are Hebrew scriptures factual? That was not the question. They were consumed with the question did Jesus raise from the dead? Right. It was all about that. It was about the resurrection of Christ and if so the implications of that resurrection for the whole world, Jew and gentile. That was the whole point. And I think we do a good job today getting off track and making it about like, well let's, you know, let's debate the historic nature of a six day creation or Noah's Ark or the Tower of Babel. And as, as I read one pastor say it's an exercise in missing the point that we're supposed to be looking for Jesus in the scripture. [00:17:34] Speaker A: I imagine somebody coming up to Peter after the resurrection of Jesus and tapping him on the shoulder and going this whole thing you're preaching is garbage because that Noah story, ridiculous. [00:17:42] Speaker B: No way. [00:17:43] Speaker A: So throw and Peter would have been like what are you talking. I don't care. You could believe that or not. This is about someone that we walked with that taught us that we spent these last several years with that died and then came back from the grave. That's the whole thing. So fine, I can take or leave that stuff. But yeah, this is the greater thing. When do you think we started reading it that way? Was it always that way? Is this a product of pre Protestant Reformation not having access to scripture? Was it kind of taught in this specific. How did we get to this place where we read the Old Testament and the New Testament in these ways that are not necessarily helpful? [00:18:25] Speaker B: Yeah, I think we need Dr. Brandt in here to answer our church history questions. I don't know. In my research, just for the Noah's Ark message, it does seem like there's some turning points before the Reformation, Protestant Reformation and Luther and Calvin. There's more of an acceptance of reading the stories as sometimes stories, especially the Genesis 1 through 11, they're in a category of stories that would have been passed down for thousands of years before anyone wrote them. And so they can't be weighed in the same way that we put stock in the historic telling of the gospel stories. Just because there's thousands of years and generations of people in between that are passing these stories along orally around campfires and in caves and on the move and, you know, so to put the same weight of the historic telling, I think we're looking at different forms of literature, history, poetry, novels, all these things. And we're just so far removed from those ancient peoples, we may not catch the differences in the format. Yeah. [00:19:39] Speaker A: And some of what we don't know to me, actually creates more intrigue and speaks again to me of the existence of God and the importance of Jesus. We talked about putting Esther inside of this series, and we're not doing it. I don't think we're not doing it. But one of the things about Esther is that many Bible scholars seems like most biblical scholars say Esther didn't happen. And it's not in any historical record. Right. That we can find. So there's this idea that this is a myth that the people made up in order to, you know, to use. [00:20:10] Speaker B: As they tell stories and explain Purim. Right. The Feast of Purim. Wrote a novel about the origins of it to tell a beautiful story. Yeah. [00:20:19] Speaker A: And so for me, I get put into this place. Zester is one of my favorite stories. I get put in this place where you could tell me it's exactly historical fact or it's myth. And either way, I'm kind of elated by the entire idea. The fact that somebody in that day and age would make a myth up, that they would have a blank slate where they could write anything they want, and they pick the hero to be a woman in that context that then leads in the way that she does, that speaks something even of the people who are writing it and who are looking for God, that they would use that imagery in order to define what is going to give them salvation. Like, that's amazing. So getting caught up in all these specific historical details and nailing them down, it's just not. Maybe it's not bad. I just don't know if it's worth the time. [00:21:06] Speaker B: Yeah. And, you know, interesting. In the book of Esther, God is never mentioned. And so, you know, and I guess I bring that up to say the Bible is so varied in its writing that you would never sit down and a single author write it in the way that it's written. Some are like the Gospel of John, purely purely theological telling of the life of Jesus and the ministry of Jesus, but it's just through a theological lens, wildly different from the Gospel of Luke, crazy different from first and Second Kings, you know. And so to approach every part of the Bible in the exact same way, you're going to run into major, major issues. And so I don't think what we're saying here is, you know, heresy. Like we're thrown out the Bible and now it doesn't matter and it's not true. No. We're saying to appreciate it for its trueness, I think you have to understand how it was written and why it was written and the differences between portions of it. Right. [00:22:05] Speaker A: And then to me, it gets better. I've never loved Scripture more than when I started understanding a lot of these conclusions about its makeup and its authors and its real effort. I struggled probably most in faith when I was trying to dovetail or pretzel my way into making everything and every piece of Scripture work for whatever theology I was excited about on that particular day. It's such an exhausting and difficult exercise. But to embrace this everything points to Jesus way of viewing Scripture, it just kind of opens the doors to actually a greater depth, which is surprising because I feel like a lot of times the argument is that it creates a shallowness, but that's not been my experience. [00:22:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And we should fall in love with Jesus in the reading of the Old Testament. And if you are only always looking at the surface level of the stories, some people go the opposite direction and they just fully embrace, like, okay, I'm going to try to obey the law of Moses and I'm going to. And that misses the point. Right. We should come to the end of the Old Testament, like I said last week, and just fall on our faces and say, we need Jesus. And then we get into the Gospels and God gave us exactly what was needed when we couldn't do it on our own. Yeah. And that is the beauty of Scripture's Genesis all the way through Revelation. Right. That it points us to. And another moment for me that really, you're speaking of, like, falling in love with the Bible again. When I discovered in seminary how much of the early, you know, the Pentateuch and the early written Job and others, those aren't written down and captured, really, until exile in Babylon and you have the Jewish nation and all the brightest and most educated young Jewish men are taken into Babylon and it's there that they sit down in this college of scribes and they begin to write down the history of their people as has been told. And when you see it through the lens of these people in a foreign place, in exile, captive to the Babylonians, and they are writing down the story of God, to me, that makes it so much more beautiful than if Moses were trying to figure out how Moses can be writing about his own death before it happens. Because, well, that's the book of Moses. Well, how do you write about that? And instead of getting hung up on that, we can say, wow, isn't it beautiful that these guys felt the weight of telling the story for future generations about what God had done in Moses day, All that. I think it's beautiful. [00:24:40] Speaker A: Almost in desperation, right? Who knows what's going to happen to us as a people. People right now we're in exile, but they could choose to destroy us at any single moment. And so we have to figure out a way to capture this, that maybe the story of our people can survive the story of God. That is incredibly beautiful. And it's. Yeah, it's way better than being like, well, this is what Moses was really doing and this is when he did it. And I just, it's. Maybe it's just like the old school Christian kid in me where I'm like, I'm so tired of trying to make all that stuff work. And even these historical truths don't ruin it for me. They just don't ruin it. They actually make it better. And hopefully that's everyone's experience as we go through all this stuff. [00:25:21] Speaker B: And maybe somebody's listening, they're getting angrier and angrier, what we're saying. I get that. Luckily we don't have a very big listenership, so, you know, we can't see you right now. So there's probably, you know, two to three maybe people that really hate what we just said, and that's most of our listenership. But come at us, come at us, you know, if you don't agree. I love talking about this stuff too. And I have no, me too, no qualms about disagreeing over interpretation of Scripture. I think it's actually what we're supposed to do is wrestle our theology together and we don't make it up. We believe in the creeds and we're following Jesus and we believe in the Bible, we preach from the Bible and we love talking about how we should interpret that and read that. [00:26:04] Speaker A: The creeds is a great example. Those creeds came out of groups of people that gathered not very long after Jesus died and rose again. There were people that had Walked with him. And immediately things are kind of tough. They're already arguing and debating and bickering over exactly how this faith should be walked out. We went to Turkey last year and went to this old church at Laodicea, and they have this list of, like, 60 rules that were immediately brought into the church with regard to behavior inside and outside of the church, and baptism and all these things that you don't find in scripture, you don't find in the teachings of Jesus. But already people are trying to make sense of how do we behave and how do we behave together and how in our particular culture and context. And there are people meeting over these creeds, saying, what do we do? And that should tell all of us that if they can have a hard time and they can argue and try to understand how to make sense of all the stories and the old narratives and the new narratives, then it's okay for us to struggle through a bit of this. [00:27:05] Speaker B: Yeah, struggle. And also at times, just return to the oldest, you know, kind of that primal Christianity. Sometimes we get so hung up on very new, very modern debates about how church should be, how we should preach, how politics influence. And sometimes it. It's a good reminder, like, we're kind of new to this thing in 2025. And there is a long history of people that have written and sweat, blood and tear. Blood, sweat, blood and tears, poured themselves into this brilliant tradition that we have in the church. [00:27:50] Speaker A: And I imagine them being in those councils and somebody to make the creeds goes, all right, everybody shut up just for one second. [00:27:57] Speaker B: All right? [00:27:58] Speaker A: We believe in God the Father. Objections. All right, I'm gonna leave that one up on the board. Christ the Son. Can we agree on just some of these? Can we return, just like you said, to this really simple, basic. And can we agree on those things? And then, of course, we can continue to exist together, even with disagreeing on some of the basic things. We can continue to exist together. [00:28:20] Speaker B: Yeah, but we love to disagree inside and outside the church. We love it. [00:28:23] Speaker A: Well, I really do, though. I like debate and arguing and even over the dumbest things. [00:28:28] Speaker B: Well, maybe that's actually really healthy. I mean, we should talk about that a little bit. Like, we don't want to excise or get rid of debate or disagreement in the church. And I think there's been a movement towards that of, like, I want to find out everyone who agrees with me, and then we're going to close the doors to anybody else, and maybe there's other churches that have a different viewpoint, but we all have our own little camps of thought where there's just no room for disagreement like fall in line or get out. And I think we're going for something different here. [00:29:00] Speaker A: The argument against us is usually that we have a weak theology. Right. That's what we would hear. Or not courageous, I would suppose. What do you say to that? [00:29:11] Speaker B: Yeah, maybe the accusation that it's not courageous unless you're picking a side and then doubling down on that side. I would push back and say, actually, the easiest thing to do is just be real loud and proud about a single viewpoint and then gather the people that agree with you and kick everybody else out. That doesn't sound like courage to me. That sounds like maybe belligerence that grows a large group of people with the same. The same feelings. So I really have a hard time, I guess, when not accommodating, instead discipling people with diverse viewpoints. We get accused of maybe being less than courageous because we were not saying the hard truth. Well, what are those hard truths? And how do we lead people that disagree with a wide range of. Whether it be politics or theology or. I don't know. What do you think? [00:30:16] Speaker A: Yeah, it's just the more and more. I don't know that I laugh it off, but knowing our experience and the amount of times over the last four or five years that I feel like you and I have sat in an office together, the leadership team has sat in a room together. I've been thinking myself like, I know the easy way forward that would potentially bring me more notoriety or fame or comfort for that day. I know what to say. And always the harder, more courageous, braver way is the slower way and more thoughtful way. And it. I'm really confident that it ends up being way more like Jesus. So many of the responses that we have had in the middle of difficult times have been something like the people bringing a coin to Jesus and saying, all right, well, what should we do? Should we pay the taxes? Should we do. [00:31:07] Speaker B: Do. [00:31:07] Speaker A: What side are you on? And Jesus every time, bums the crowd out a little bit. [00:31:12] Speaker B: Sidesteps. Yeah. [00:31:14] Speaker A: Every time they bring out the woman caught in adultery and he bends down slowly and he begins to draw in the dirt and gives everyone in the group a really unsatisfactory answer. That isn't so cut and dry all the time. And I feel like that's the work of pastoring that we're trying to do. Lead a church, care for our families, care for people in our lives. I definitely don't want that to get stuck on this is what pastors do. This is what Christians do. I think we go the slow and prayerful way, and then that shapes us. And our answers then are actually the most courageous. And to many, I think they don't look like that. [00:31:47] Speaker B: Yeah. And I would say even in the last six or seven years. I'm less concerned now of not hurting people's feelings or offending. I do feel like there's a freedom that both of us feel to say what we think about any given thing without this, like, oh, but that person, they might leave or this person, you know, they're a big giver. They're a big donor. So we don't want to. I don't know that that plays as much as it used to for me. I'm sure I've got a distance to go, but I know. I just. I just know I used to think about that a lot more of, like, how do I not rustle any feathers? Ruffle. Rustle. Rustling is like gathering ruffle Feathers. Yeah. If you rustle feathers, you're like getting a bag of feathers. [00:32:33] Speaker A: Sweat, blood and te. I feel like blood is something nasty. [00:32:40] Speaker B: It sounds terrible, right? [00:32:41] Speaker A: It's. I don't think it's anything right, but I do not like saying it. I won't say it again. [00:32:46] Speaker B: Lindsay, what do you say to that critique that it's not courageous to not come down hard on one side of an issue? [00:32:53] Speaker C: I feel like it's more courageous not to. I really do. I agree with what you're saying. Just being there through Covid, and a lot of people really wanted us to. To come out swinging and pick a side and double down. Exactly what you guys are saying. And we didn't in the way people wanted us to. That was not fun, nor was it easy. And I think it would have been much easier to be like, okay, okay, whatever. We'll do what you guys want. It was harder for us to say no. Like, these are our convictions. This is what we believe Jesus is calling us to do in the face of criticism. That feels courageous to me. But even more so than that, like, I don't really care about courage so much that. Whatever. That feels like the loving thing to do to me, and that feels like pastoring well to me. Like, whether courage ever comes into play, I feel like that's a moot point. It's. We are going to love well, and we're going to love the way Jesus is calling us to. And it might not look the way some people want it to, and I think that's okay. Yeah, that has to be okay. [00:33:57] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:33:57] Speaker C: Yeah. [00:33:58] Speaker B: And going back to those Covid years, proof is in the fact that our church shrunk by, I don't know, at least half, if not more. 60, 70%. [00:34:11] Speaker A: We've been saying half, and then we talk about the numbers. Sometimes I'm like, you guys, this is like 62%. [00:34:16] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we definitely paid a price for not coming out swinging or whatnot. And, you know, we made a lot of mistakes along the way. I'm not trying to say that we were perfect by any means, but I do want to come out against this idea that it's a lack of courage that would lead us to try to pastor a wide group of people that have different viewpoints. I think that's just not true. Yeah. [00:34:46] Speaker A: And scary for the future of the church if it is true. If that's the only way to go. Right. Like, who wants that mono church a decade from now? I'm not particularly interested. [00:34:58] Speaker B: And when you start to believe that the issues of the day are so tied into faith. So it's not the creeds anymore, it's not orthodox Christianity anymore, like what has been practiced for generations. It's whatever the most compelling case that I've heard on social media or my favorite outlet or my favorite political group, when I start to believe that that is Christianity, we have lost the game. And maybe for a time, you know, like, the Green Party is fully in line with the way of Jesus. I don't think they are. I don't know anything about the Green Party, but if they were, maybe they would be for a season of time. But as soon as you go all in on that, what happens to these alignments is the one with the power starts to drift. And you've become so enmeshed with that political party or that movement that is not core to Jesus, that a generation later, you are not anywhere close to Jesus of the Gospels and understanding God in the way that Jesus taught. And so even if it looks good on paper Today, let's watch 30 years from now and see where that takes us. It's going to take us so far away from. From Jesus. And it has to, because it's going to lead us to power and wealth and influence and all those things that ring in the ears of Jesus when the people are like, we're going to make you king right now. It just can't be. [00:36:29] Speaker A: It makes me want an older building with stained glass and pews that have been in there forever. So funny. Spent so much of my younger days pushing against all those Things. I want everything to reflect this ancient journey that we're all on together, you know, and of course you can. You can do that and change the lights and whatever and we will continue to do some of those things. But I just want everything to point in this direction of. No, this has been going on for a long, long, long, long time. It's bigger than your singular moment. It's bigger than this week. We are going to keep going together because we're trying to be tied to this ancient thing. [00:37:05] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:37:05] Speaker A: You know, and there's this temptation to be like, no, we've got a new amazing church or gospel or message or whatever. And like, we try to freshen things up. Right. To keep people listening and to frame things so that different people with different experiences can hear it. But if the temptation goes into that, we're actually going to hitch our wagon to some new and different way. It is going to pull us so far. Of course, even it's just a couple degrees today. Right. It'll be far, far away tomorrow. [00:37:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Yeah. I'm going to Turkey, the similar trip to what you did last year. I'm looking forward to seeing those ancient places in Ephesus and Laodicea and the ones that are excavated because not all of them are right. Yeah. [00:37:46] Speaker A: Colossae is a big pile of dirt which is made. They have the sign, right, the historical sight sign, and there's like a shed next to it where somebody sits to watch the place. I guess there was literally like some half eaten takeout on a table outside. I was like, oh, here we are. [00:38:03] Speaker B: Colosseum. Yeah. [00:38:05] Speaker A: Hierapolis is really cool. Huge city on this like limestone mountain or hill. Yeah. Laodicea, Ephesus. The library at Ephesus. It is striking with that perspective too, of. I've been to Greece and been seeing a lot of those sites and it is. It really does take my breath away. But then you go to Ephesus and you consider some of these places that are dedicated to this message of the gospel. It's really not the whole city of Ephesus was. But it is pretty humbling. And you, in the best way possible, start to think a lot less of yourself as a senior pastor at west side Church. [00:38:45] Speaker B: It doesn't matter. Look at what's going on here. Yeah, no, it's. Yeah, looking forward to that. I think it is really kind of a funny thing if people come on Sunday and then they're like, I wonder what Ben and Evan really think. I wonder what Lindsay and I wonder. Well, here it is. Here's what we really think. Here's the long form conversation, the stuff we don't have time for. And so if you're listening to this, welcome to kind of the longer form of what we're teaching on Sunday. And I think that's the hope for this podcast, whether we do it well or not, is to kind of invite people into a longer conversation because we do get those questions of, like you said this did you actually mean well, here's where we have a little bit more time to unpack some of those things, right? Yeah. [00:39:33] Speaker A: And we have, like, do you think people wonder if we pay attention to the world around us sometimes? I mean, outside of the Netflix shows that I reference in my messages, do. [00:39:42] Speaker B: You guys even know that this is going on? [00:39:44] Speaker A: Because I'm referencing this a bit in my sermon this next Sunday. But, like, I've got opinions. I have so many. And I love to fight and argue and debate and do all those things. Our job is not to be take artists in our positions though, Right. Like, we don't come to the platform or even to this podcast just like hurling everything around that we think is right or good based on the flavor of the month kind of a thing. We have to be thoughtful and we're considering the broad audience in the group, which, again, I think is a very courageous move, not a fearful one. And that has to be something that we all take into account as Christians. I don't think Jesus is calling us into this hot take culture that we live in. You know, it's a thoughtful and a slower one, and it's so much braver and difficult than we're led to believe. [00:40:38] Speaker B: Yep. And Jesus really is the Jesus as told in the New Testament. Jesus is our guide in that it's not just a surface level reading of scripture applied blindly. It is really Jesus that we're asking through the Holy Spirit. Right. He brings to mind truth. He leads us into all truth. And so that really is how we have to navigate this. We're not just out on our own saying what makes everybody feel the nicest or what is the most pleasant outcome. That's how we're going to inform our theology. We're inviting the Holy Spirit to lead us towards Jesus. And I hope people hear that through, you know, this Old Testament series over the next several weeks. [00:41:20] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, that's the idea. We'll see how well we do it. [00:41:24] Speaker B: So this week you're doing Daniel and the Lion's Den. [00:41:27] Speaker A: Yeah. [00:41:27] Speaker B: And then what's after that? Is it David and Goliath? [00:41:30] Speaker A: I think I think it is. [00:41:31] Speaker B: Okay. [00:41:32] Speaker A: Yeah. Was there a veggietales David and Goliath? So I was. [00:41:34] Speaker B: Oh, I'm sure there was. [00:41:35] Speaker A: I got the Daniel and the lion's den song stuck in my head last night when I was studying. Oh, no. What we gonna do? The king likes Daniel Moore. [00:41:44] Speaker B: Are you gonna sing it on Sunday? [00:41:46] Speaker A: Thinking about it. [00:41:47] Speaker B: What do you think? Oh, people would love it. People love it when you sing the. [00:41:51] Speaker A: The funny part will be the. [00:41:53] Speaker B: We could throw him. Right. [00:41:56] Speaker A: Because they sing it in a round. I think it's a three part round. [00:42:00] Speaker B: Oh, God. Yeah. [00:42:01] Speaker A: Lindsay, should I do it? [00:42:02] Speaker C: Yeah. 100%. [00:42:03] Speaker B: Okay. Yeah. [00:42:03] Speaker A: I thought you were embarrassed for me already. [00:42:05] Speaker C: I will be on Sunday. [00:42:06] Speaker B: Yeah. You sang A whole new world while I was gone and it was legendary. People loved it. So keep the singing going.