Travis Michael Fleming, Mike Goheen, and Mark Sayers dig into some of the biggest thought barriers shaping our culture right now—especially around secularization and what it means for the future of the Christian faith. They explore the deeper stories that quietly shape how people see the world and make decisions, often without even realizing it.

Together, they wrestle with whether we’re actually seeing the end of secularization as we’ve known it, and what that could mean for the church moving forward. If the cultural ground is shifting, how should faith communities respond?

The conversation leans into that question—inviting Christians to pay closer attention to both the spiritual hunger and the institutional challenges around us. It’s not just about reacting, but about understanding the moment we’re in and engaging it thoughtfully.

At the end of the day, this episode is an invitation to step back and consider how attitudes toward faith and spirituality are changing—and how we, as a community, can navigate that with wisdom, clarity, and hope.

Takeaways:

1. The discussion emphasizes the shifting narratives that influence contemporary thought, particularly those that often go unnoticed yet significantly affect people's beliefs and behaviors.
2. Secularism is not merely declining; it is morphing, leading to new forms of spiritual exploration that challenge traditional paradigms.
3. The hosts advocate for a compassionate approach in church leadership, emphasizing the need for understanding the burdens faced by congregants in a rapidly changing world.
4. There is a burgeoning curiosity towards spirituality among younger generations, which could present a unique opportunity for churches to engage with these individuals meaningfully.
5. The podcast highlights the importance of embodying the gospel through communal living and relational connections that extend beyond mere Sunday gatherings.
6. As modern challenges intensify, the need for churches to adapt and nurture a deeper understanding of faith and community becomes increasingly essential.

Keep up with updates from Apollos Watered: The Center for Discipleship & Cultural Apologetics.

Get Travis's book Blueprint: Kingdom Living in the Modern World.

Join Travis's Substack, Deep Roots Society.

Help support the ministry of Apollos Watered and transform your world today!

Today's episode is brought to you by the Melis family.

May the Lord give you California sun in a Midwest spring.

The explosion of modernity is the flame of humanism being lit in the oxygen of the gospel.

But there's coming a time when that oxygen is going to be burned away.

And when that's burned, burned away, what's going to happen?

Well, the flame itself is going to go out.

The flame itself will have no oxygen to burn.

And I think that's what we're seeing.

I think we're seeing a burning away of more and more of the Christian oxygen.

I don't think we've ever had a Christian society, but we've had a society that's been salted by the Christian faith for many years.

Today on ministry Deep Dive, we're joined by two familiar voices who have helped shape how many of us think about culture, mission, and the church.

In this moment, two of my favorite guests that I am honored to welcome back to the show.

Except this time they are together, one coming from Australia, the other coming from Canada.

We have Mark Sayers and Mike Goheen.

It is a delight, gentlemen, to have you back.

And in this episode today, we're digging into some of the deeper narratives shaping our world.

Right now, we're looking at the underlying stories that are forming.

How people think, what they believe and how they live our lives, often without ever realizing it.

And as those narratives shift, it raises important questions for the church.

How do we understand the moment we're in and how do we faithfully respond?

Mark, Michael, it's great to have you back.

Gentlemen, welcome back to ministry Deep Dive.

Good to be here.

Okay.

You know how I like to start this off with the Fast 5, but I'm going to give just the fast one today.

Since we've got just the two of you, I want you to tell me this.

If you were a store, what store would you be and why?

Mark, you go first.

It's a great question.

And yeah, off the top of my head, I think I have to be a bookstore.

Yeah, I'd like to be a bookstore to introduce people to great books, great thinkers, and I just love being in bookstores.

Well, obviously.

Look.

What?

Behind you.

I mean,.

That's an easy one.

How about you, Mike?

I. I'd be a sporting goods store.

I.

That's always been my great love.

One time I was in a.

On a tour in Australia of all places, and I was speaking on a number of different things.

I was traveling with Al Walters, and one of the talks was God's good creational gift of sports and competition because I was an athlete, loved athletics.

And Al said, of all the things you talk about, he says where you come alive is when you talk about sports.

So I think I'd be a sporting goods store.

Do you have a big hockey jersey with your name on the back?

No, but I have just about every imaginable sports jersey you could.

You know, I betcha if I pulled about about 10 of them, Mark would recognize them from Australia.

You know, various rugby shirts, NRL shirts.

When I was traveling there quite a bit, they'd always give them to me.

Now it's soccer jerseys from South America that I'm getting as I'm traveling there.

So I got a bunch of them.

People are always telling me I got to cheer for their team.

That's awesome.

That's awesome.

Well, let's jump right into our subject.

We're talking about secularization.

I know that we have heard that we're coming to the end of secularization.

What's next?

So, Mark, I know you've been thinking about this a lot.

What are your thoughts on the subject?

Yeah, I guess I've been reflecting of late of how some of what I was expecting to happen has changed.

I wrote a book about 10 years ago called Disappearing Church.

And the genesis of that book was being in Copenhagen and sort of walking around Copenhagen, which is such a beautiful city.

You know, in many ways it's sort of like the, you know, final boss of secularism.

It's this city which is, you know, beautiful and egalitarian and, you know, has good businesses and people had this sense you could live in a place like that without God.

And, you know, the original title I was gonna call Disappearing Church was a beautiful apocalypse in the sense of, like, this is the end of history.

But it just looks beautiful.

And on the plane flying back to Australia, which is a long journey, so you get to watch a lot of movies.

I watched Spike Jones's movie Her, which is about a man who falls in love with the operating system of his phone.

And it was about AI it was.

You know, we hadn't heard as much about AI you knew it was coming, but you hadn't seen it sort of represented in a.

In a film.

And the Los Angeles in the city, it's said, I think.

And.

And what's really interesting is Los Angeles is very quiet, very beautiful.

They actually shot parts of it in Shanghai.

So I thought that was interesting that the future Los Angeles was Shanghai.

And it was just sort of these quiet, nice people, but they were going through this apocalypse of sort of falling apart from each other and you know, this AI taking over.

And it's really interesting, you know, my sort of prediction was that's going to be more and more of the reality.

You know, I would travel to places like the United States and people say, you know, is that what the future is?

I felt that about my city.

Melbourne would often vie with Vancouver as the world's most livable city.

And you know, that's what I pastorally faced, preaching to people who you felt like, do they really care?

You know, And I remember walking through Melbourne actually, you know, coming out of a football game and just looking around the city and restaurants, concerts, just beautiful.

And I just felt like my heart dropped, like, God, how do we compete with this?

But it's really interesting, I think particularly around if you go earlier, you could market at different points.

Obviously you have Brexit Trump, popularism rises, you know, in that period.

But Covid, you know, the return of inflation, war in Ukraine.

And so what I began to notice, and I had this, this moment where when we were in a two year long lockdown in Melbourne, couldn't go more than three miles, there was curfews and when it finally lifted, I went into the city downtown with my daughter and I noticed this very long line and I followed it.

It was all Gen Z and I got to the end and it was this occultic store.

And that's always been in the background.

So there's always been a subculture of the neo pagan, the occult.

But I just began to notice that something had changed.

And in a sense the story that secularism was telling was increasingly doubted by many.

You know, you could place multiple markers, you know, for example, that the essential argument I began to realize and actually Joseph Minich has written an interesting book called, I think it's called the Bulwarks of Unbelief.

And in some ways I began to ask the question, was secularism structural?

So in other words, why was secularism seemingly the highest in countries like Scandinavia or, you know, in my own, My own Australia, where there was a very high standard of living, there was a market economy, but also a lot of the effects of the market were ameliorated by a welfare economy.

It was a mix of the two.

And there was sort of a civil discourse that was shaped by particularly gatekeepers.

And when some of that stuff started to fall over, how did that change secularism?

And, you know, I think where we are now, I'm finding the conversations are fundamentally changing that I have with people.

There is much more openness to the spiritual, to the supernatural.

There's tremendous cynicism and suspicion of institutions.

So are the bulwarks of secularism falling even just in the last couple of weeks with the revelations from the Epstein files?

It's fascinating hearing people who were, I would have attributed as completely Normie, you know, believe the consensus.

People have been rocked, you know, and, you know, you have the U.S. government, you had the Secretary of State, third most powerful person in the United States, saying that he believes aliens are real.

Obama sort of dropped aliens are real.

And then, you know, Trump's going to declassify the documents.

I got my own theory on that.

But I think what we're seeing is that some of those bulwarks which held up secularism are really shaking.

And so I returned to Copenhagen six months ago, and the head of the Sunday morning newspaper headline was the return of Christianity and young people in.

You know, I was in Norway as well and, you know, was interviewed by the newspaper there about this return of faith.

And so I don't think secularism has gone.

I think there's a morphing.

We can get more into that.

But what I realized is the secularism that I was dealing with 10 years ago has shifted.

And so there's something shifting.

I don't think we're.

I'm increasingly hesitant to say we're in a post secular stage, because I think it's still there.

It's just shaping and shifting in form.

So, yeah, that's, that's something I've been thinking because I think how the church responds to that.

And just one final thing, I think in the midst of the church, particularly I think in the U.S. adapting to secularism, coming to the U.S. there could be an assumption that, well, you know, now that there's this return of interest in faith, that's an unalloyed good.

But I think that one thing that no one would have predicted 10 years ago is, and I think we're seeing it, is One of the next trends.

And I think I said this somewhere in a forum about eight years ago and people freaked out.

I said the next trend could be a massive return of cultural Christianity, you know, and you're seeing that in different forms as well.

So that's something as well we've got to reckon with.

You know, the future may be one where you're dealing with secularism, different forms of cultural Christianity, resurgent, neo paganism.

Yeah.

So really interesting environment that's worth watching.

It's interesting as you think about that.

I mean, especially with the anti institutional piece.

It's almost as if it's like every man, we're going back to judges again.

Every man done what is right in his own eyes.

It's the same way from a faith perspective, because if we don't have institutions that are acting as those umbrellas that we're going to go in all different directions.

Mike, you want to weigh in on this?

Oh, there's a lot of things, boy.

Mark has raised a ton of things.

First thing that comes to my mind is an image that I've often used from Michael Polani and that is that he says that the explosion of modernity, and I want to speak of modern secularism.

I think that's what is being referred to here, probably Mark, modern secularism.

He says the explosion of modernity is.

And I'm going, I'm switching the image slightly, is the flame of humanism being lit in the oxygen of the gospel.

But I don't know how much he said about this or how much I have implied from this.

But there's coming a time when then oxygen is going to be burned away.

And when that's burned away, what's going to happen?

Well, the flame itself is going to go out.

The flame itself will have no oxygen to burn.

And so that's the first thing that comes to mind.

And I think that's what we're seeing.

I think we're seeing a burning away of more and more of the Christian oxygen.

I don't think we've ever had a Christian society, but we've had a society that's been salted by the Christian faith for many years.

And I think that that's one of the things I'd want to say immediately and I think a second thing that I'd want to say right at this point is that over the last 10 years, I think that as I've been trying to analyze the meta narratives or the civil religious narratives shaping our culture, we've seen the right and the left, and both of those take on a certain form of a modern humanism, postmodern, modern humanism narrative, the left and the right.

But what I've started to see is that you can't do that anymore.

That really you've got to plot the narratives on a.

More, not simply in a horizontal right and left, but on a.

On a modern, postmodern kind of vertical line.

And I think that what we're seeing is in the United States, for example, two meta narratives that are often called left and right, but they're really both thoroughly postmodern and they're thoroughly changing the landscape.

And so AOC in the United States is not the same as Clinton and Trump is not the same as Bush.

There's some fundamental changes taking place.

And I would connect that in many ways to what I just said about Michael Planney, that what you're seeing is both of those, the left and the right, the degree to which there is an infusion of Christian oxygen into those that's being burned away.

And we're seeing more and more, you know, what came from the Christian faith to salt it, leaving.

But it's an attack then on modernity.

It's an attack on the, on the modern story.

And so I remember I've taught postmodernity for probably 20 years in the, in the university, and, and I had down about number six, a skepticism of modern institutions.

That was about number six.

You know, I had the typical other ones up there, number one, two and three, maybe.

Now I look at, I think that's not number six, that's number one or two, this, this utter skepticism towards, you know, all the various institutions that modernity formed.

And some of them had a Christian salting and others.

It was thoroughly based on reason and confidence that science could give us better politics, better education, better society, better law, better economics and so on.

And so that's my initial thought, that putting this in a bigger picture, I think we're seeing, I think, a burning away more and more of the Christian oxygen and that is, is.

Has been, has been infused into Christian religion, into Western culture, and that we're seeing all these various things that Mark is talking about, everything from a neo paganism that I think has been underlying from the time of Europe and has never fully been put down.

We're seeing that, that neo paganism, but we're seeing other various kinds of movements that all seem to show a burning away of the Christian faith.

So that's my.

I said that in that during COVID the period of COVID I've never had this before.

I had a pastor every week over that year and a half period break down in tears, basically saying, I don't think I can do this anymore.

I think my congregation is more committed to ideologies and they're committed to Jesus Christ and what they were do.

There was three crises that hit.

There was Covid that was challenging the freedoms of people.

And so people were dividing with, well, common good or exercising my freedom.

There was a lot of racist incidents.

Well that, that was dividing the churches.

And then Trump was pushing his political ideology, which I think those political ideologies were turning into big meaning metanarratives, bigger than political ideologies.

And so they were bringing division in the churches and the pastors were facing these divisions.

And one of the things, and this is why I'm appreciating what you're doing today, Travis, and why I appreciate your ministry, Mark, so much, is that they were realizing we have not been forming our people to exegete our culture.

We, we've left them at.

We've left them totally helpless and vulnerable.

And it's not just to intellectual, it's the powerful spiritual forces that are forming and shaping them.

And so the power of the gospel doesn't seem to be shaping them.

It seems to be the power of idolatry and demonic powers that stand behind that idolatry that is shaping this.

These three things are bringing to clear evidence the fact that the church has not been doing this and it's just was waiting for these kind of things before the church seemed imploded.

Mark, do you think that as you said, and both of you have kind of talked about this like rise of neo paganism, but what I'm also seeing is just an openness because people don't want to talk about these spiritual forces and these structures underneath.

I think of you may be familiar with him or not.

Michael Heiser in the Naked Bible podcast.

I mean, he passed away pancreatic cancer a few years ago, but he was on the show.

His show just went like that because he said, I'm talking about these spiritual forces underneath.

And he's actually speaking, by the way, at alien conferences because he said they'll talk to me about this stuff because my inbox is filled with denominational leaders and people asking me about all These spiritual questions that they've never had before.

So is this an opportunity for us to recover some of this lost language that the scripture talks about?

What do you think, Mark?

Yeah, so I think Mike's 100% right, that in a sense that there's almost an attack now on the modern world.

And I think we sort of saw postmodernity as a stage after in way it was communicated sometimes the modern.

But really the left and the right, those two meta narratives are attacking the modern world.

And one of the definitions I think defines the modern world, Max Faber, I think it was at the end of World War I.

He gave a speech and he talked about the disenchantment of the world.

And in a sense, the modern person had to live with this sense of meaninglessness in the world.

That's just part of the connection to the rise of science and some of this conversation that you're seeing now.

And I think Heiser's legacy is to sort of speak into this is that increased sense of disenchantment that.

That it feels more like a vacuum.

For many people, that vacuum was filled by the stories of modernity, you know, and even, like, I mean, just literally just before I got on here.

So, you know, the head of the World Economic Forum has just stood down a Norwegian gentleman because of the Epstein files, that all these institutions that were built that filled the world.

We're heading towards a utopian future falling over.

So people are looking for the stronger medicine, if.

If that makes sense.

And I think what I've been really interested in, a lot of this conversation around then, re enchantment and there's a whole conversation around that.

But it's interesting, Marx's, you know, the German's actually more about less like a dereligization of the world as it's a demagicalization of the world.

And so it's interesting.

Part of the re enchantment conversation, I think there's a caution as we enter into it, is that what people are looking for is almost an engagement with a re enchantment.

Now, an enchantment is not necessarily a good thing.

If someone's enchanted, in a way, they're deceived by a magical spell.

You know, in the beginning of the Narnia series, Narnia is enchanted by the spell of the witch.

You know, it's a.

It's a sort of, you know, in a perpetual winter.

And so I think there is a sort of encouragement.

Interesting question here where how much do we celebrate this desire for re enchantment?

Because it's an openness 100%.

It's easier in some sense to talk to people who all of a sudden are questioning the ideology of modernity, who are open to the spiritual.

You know, you've moved along the Engel scale in some ways.

But there's also a danger that for people who are used to and shaped by dealing with materialist secularism, that all of a sudden there's a bunch of other off ramps that we could go into strange things.

So it's interesting, you know, you see the rise of a Christian discussion around cryptozoology.

You know, you've got people who've taken the Heiza sort of argument around the divine council and the, and the watchers in Enoch, you know, all this sort of stuff.

And now we're talking about reintroducing to an enchanted universe, you know, and this stuff seems, this stuff seems like this is a fringe thing.

But what I've noticed is how mainstream this is becoming.

You know, JOE ROGAN AUDIENCE is an order of magnitude bigger than CNN's.

You know, and, you know, we just did a podcast yesterday on, you know, also a couple of days ago on, well, if the US government declassifies aliens, what does that mean?

You know, and already you've got Christians online sort of having an existential breakdown.

So I think that there is a really interesting missiological narrow path to be walked here where we operate and share the gospel and see the opportunity in the midst of the collapse of the ideologies of modernity, yet also have to be very aware of some of the direction that this stuff could go.

So there's a massive opening, but there's also tremendous caution needed, you know, and so I think a biblical analysis of the culture is absolutely essential at this time.

So that makes me think of the biblical story.

What do you think, Mike?

I think Mark is really, is saying something really important here.

One of my favorite quotes from Leslie Newbegin is he says when we see cultural shifts taking place, it's not the job of the Christian to become optimistic or pessimistic, in other words, to say, boy, here's a wide open new chance, nor, oh man, look at everything we've lost.

But rather, he says to try to understand it and to recognize, number one, we're moving into a new missionary situation, number two, to try to understand it in light of the kingdom of God.

And, and number three, to ask how do we bear witness to Christ in this situation?

There's 20 people or 20 somethings.

I think it was 80s, maybe it was early 90s.

And they were asked what is your top life goal?

And.

And I would have expected number one to be.

Make a lot of money in the 80s or the early 90s.

But the number one goal is to recover a spiritual sense of.

Of of purpose for my life.

To me that was shocking at the time.

I think it was the early 90s.

To me that was shocking at the time.

But now I think that's more common.

And so I think spirituality is not a good thing or a bad thing.

Spirituality is a part understanding this creation and understanding God's relationship to it.

And it can be totally distorted like anything else.

And even the word supernatural, which is much more of a Thomistic word than it is a biblical word.

Recovering the supernatural can be recovering an older kind of understanding of the world that's unhelpful.

So in many ways I've found more than Heiser Tom writes stuff on the powers to be far more helpful for me and understanding that, that.

That Paul, especially in Ephesians and Colossians, his view the powers is.

Is a structural kind of idolatrous idolatry.

And standing behind that are demonic powers that then hold us and entrap us, but because of our own connection, because that same thing is in our heart.

So we have an idolatrous consumer society.

But standing behind is the pie is demonic powers that hold us in their grip because of our own greed that sits in our sinful nature.

Sort of a combination of three areas overlapping.

I found that much more helpful in understanding this spiritual dimension of reality.

But I think Mark is onto something really important.

Let's not jump on this optimistically.

Let's not be pessimistic.

Let's say here's our cultural situation.

Let's try to understand it.

And how can we, after understanding it, find a way to embody the good news in our lives and in our words in such a way that we can speak to this culture.

Can I just add something on that embodiments?

Because I think that's such a key.

I haven't read all of it, but I'm halfway through Anton Yeager's book Hyper Politics, which I think is one of the most fascinating reads of what's happened.

And basically what he argues is that, you know, if you look at people Would say we're more political than ever.

And that's true.

Politics infuses absolutely everything.

But he calls it a form of hyper politics.

And what he means by that is it's easier now to get a rage online about something.

It's easier to get a bunch of people downtown and have a protest that lasts two days.

There's an issue which grabs the world's attention, but then six months later everyone's moved on.

And he contrasts this with, say, mid century, 20th century, where you had people on the left were going to Labor Party meetings midweek and volunteering and going and working on picket lines.

It was an important, embodied institutional reality.

You know, the British Conservative Party, apparently the Beatles first gig was at a British Conservative Party club somewhere in the north of England.

You know, the Conservative Party actually in every local community had an actual bricks and mortar place where people met.

So it was an institutionalised reality.

And what that meant is that political change could be enacted over time, whether you're left, right, centre, whatever.

And he talks about the fact that, you know, very much in the sort of 80s that was, you know, that disappeared.

And it's not just the church decline, but Masonic lodges and labor unions and migrant groups.

And so what he says we are now is because of the Internet, we're able to generate this tremendous, like, flash of political energy.

And it's just continual, but none of it ever really lasts because it's de institutionalized.

And I think that, you know, there's this constant flash, there's constant stuff online, there's constant outrage, there's constant energy.

So it feels like you constantly.

You're in a blender, you know, but reading his book and he's more arguing for a positive political vision.

He's not.

I don't know what his situation is regarding faith, but it gave me optimism in the sense that I do think as we become more deinstitutionalized and another word that people are using is de socialization.

You know, we're spending more time alone.

The, you know, young people, they aren't even, you know, like sex and alcohol is dropping because you have to be around other people often to do those things.

And, you know, for me, the church then, you know, and again, to new begin the sort of the congregation as, you know, the witness, I think that's hugely optimistic.

And just from a pastoral perspective, you know, what we're seeing, we just started a new location and we're just doing community, you know, we're doing church and stuff, which would have seen passe 10 years ago.

You know, we've got a thing after our 5pm service, we've got a 7 o' clock meeting for university students and just seeing people who don't know anyone rock up.

They have Bible study, they eat too together.

It's just going crazy, you know, and it's not cool.

It's relational.

But that's so countercultural now.

So I think that in the midst of this, you know, fire and fury, that, you know, we don't need to panic because I think what we've always been good at, the church, is being an embodied people.

Often, you know, we do that naturally.

So I think that's, that's such an important key and I think there's a tiredness.

I have a suspicion that I don't know how much longer we can do this.

You know, using Joe, Joe Rogan again, you know, yesterday or the day before talked about how exhausted he was by the news cycle.

You know, like it's, you know, is it Iran next?

You know, like there was just an incident with Cuba.

It's just people are getting exhausted.

So I think there's a huge gospel community opportunity, opportunity before us.

One of the things that's good, Mark, you know, one of the things that I've looked at often in this regard is Paul's letters.

In Paul's letters, the prayers he has for the churches at the beginning.

And I've noticed three things in every one of those letters.

And it's very clear, for example, in Colossians 1.

But in other letters, very clear, number one, he prays for wisdom or discernment, understanding, knowledge.

And the way I think Paul's thinking of wisdom there is understanding what it means to live out the gospel in your particular political context.

And that's going to be understanding the biblical story, but it's also going to be understanding the culture in which you're part wisdom.

The second thing is always a so that you might embody this, so that you might please the Lord, so that you might love one another, so that you might live this way.

That wisdom leads to an embodiment.

And then thirdly, almost inevitably, he then prays for power.

It's one thing to do, understand the story.

It's another thing to know that is how you need to embody it.

It's another thing to have the power of the resurrection, to resist the powers, cultural powers that are shaping you.

And it seems that the embodiment of that community is going to require a growing wisdom of the biblical story, a growing wisdom of the cultural story.

It's going to be asking the questions, what does this look like in community?

But also what kind of spiritual practices and rhythms are going to enable us to draw on the life of Christ, the resurrection power of Christ, to be able to live out this life in the midst of a culture that is exhausted by the shifting powers.

You know, Mike, it's interesting you mentioned that because what I'm finding and where I am is, and I'm seeing a lot of younger people that are electing, going back to Catholicism, to Coptic Christianity.

I've even had my 16 year old son is looking for a Greek Orthodox monastery, so he won't have his phone.

And I mean, if you know anything about my son, that's like a crazy statement from him.

I'm like, what is going on?

He's like, I just get tired because many of the kids are like, oh, you know, put down your phone.

They all, they don't, many of them don't want.

But the social pressure, that cost of being on and that cost of being off is so great.

So.

But what I, what I am finding is that I've had so many younger people tell me I'm just done with the McDonaldization of Christianity.

I'm done with Christianity light.

Like, I want depth, I want real.

That's why they want catechism, they want creeds, they want confessions, they want like high liturgy, which is I find fascinating.

Fascinating.

It just as a cult.

And again, I know that there are people coming out of liturgy and they're going into the other part and it's.

But, but the fact that a lot of these people that I know were a part of this, you know, kind of populist evangelicalism and they're saying no.

And I, I've interviewed a lot of people on this show and many of them have come from the pca and almost every one of them that I've interviewed that are in the PCA came from the sbc.

And it's like, what does that say?

And I keep laughing.

I'm just like, the SBC, I want to know.

Not to try to start a denominational war or anything, but it's the liturgy.

And the PCA is one of the few denominations.

There are only two denominations in the United States that have grown really in the last 20 years, and the PCA is one of them and Assemblies of God is the other.

But I just find that interesting that we're talking about what are these things that form us?

What are These rhythms, I mean, Sabbath is again like putting it down.

These rhythms, understanding our own humanity.

I think of Kelly Cap work with that.

But it's all coming together, it seems, and it's congealing.

It's just.

There's so much of it.

It's really hard to know how to order it and put it all together.

I mean, what, what are you.

What do you think, Mark?

Yeah, it's interesting in the, in the sense that, you know, I thought a lot about this and it's interesting to.

I'm sort of trying to pass out or get my head around sort of what you see online and interest and then what's actually happening, you know, so talking to Catholic leaders and you know, their, their lament is the decline, you know, the lack of young people and, you know, so I think we're seeing something online, which is my question, is that more a hunger.

And I do know some people made that journey who've then found it difficult to connect into, into community.

What I'm noticing, you know, the question so, you know, like having encountered here, you know, seen in Melbourne, seen in Europe, in other places, in these secular environments, it's.

Some are Catholic communities, but it's not all Catholic communities.

The ones that I'm seeing people go to are ones that are really alive.

And there's a sense.

So there was some, basically some research done here in Australia and it said what people are looking for.

There is a cohort which are starting to look at Christianity.

But what they're looking for is an encounter with the presence of God.

Now they might encounter that in their sense in the Eucharist at an alive Catholic parish.

But also they're getting in Pentecostal churches which have a sense of the spirit, but also community.

And we're finding, you know, we're sort of a non denominational sort of church, but, you know, we're finding people coming from both sides, which is really interesting.

People coming from, you know, liturgical churches which, you know, they feel like struggling to continue.

You know, that's the.

I think because the secular decline is real in the numbers, you know.

And Ryan Burge, I think it is, has put out some numbers around, you know, actually what's happening, which is really interesting.

And then we're also getting people from sort of highly polished megachurch Pentecostal churches, which is sort of in Australia, the Pentecostal churches are very sort of church growth, highly polished.

But I think the thing that they're looking for is God alive.

Are you making the scripture, you know, help me understand Scriptures relate to my life, how do I find connection?

And I think there is this deep.

And I think this is where again, I have this little caution I'm just playing with.

I think this, I think, is falsely attributed to Tertullian.

But you know, the gospel is always, you know, like Jesus was stuck between two thieves.

The gospel is always between religion and religiosity.

And I feel like we've come from a time of irreligiosity and there is a tremendous hunger for order, structure.

But I also think there's an attendant danger, you know, and I think this is where the cultural Christianity thing, you know, young people, the statistics tell us even in a country like Australia, are increasingly disillusioned with democracy.

Many are drawn to a kind of dictator and they might not see it as a dictator like we would think of Stalin or Hitler.

It could be more a Putin or even a sovereign democracy like a Singapore.

So, you know, my question as well is I think again, this is an invitation to order.

But there is a danger here as well that a new form of religiosity and moralism comes in as well.

You know, I think that, you know, in some of the forms of cultural Christianity that there is this draw to sort of a moralistic view.

So.

Yeah, so again too, this is one again where, you know, we sort of walk that missiological narrow road.

Mike?

Yeah, I, I, when I'm thinking of what's happening in terms of the Christian nationalist movement and that, that return, that desire to bring religion back into things, I, you know, I, I'm looking at it in terms of the going back to where we began, that in many ways the Christian faith, that oxygen being burned away and very self evident ways in which creation is being attacked, that I see that I see a response, I see, whoa, we've gone far enough here on these gender issues.

I see a response that we're, that, you know, whether they understand this or not, creation is being destroyed and brought down.

So I'm seeing that as sort of a recovery, but I'm not sure that it's taking institutional form.

Much of it is not taking institutional form.

And I think that that's an American issue.

It's not a Canadian issue.

It's probably, it's not an Australian issue, I would imagine.

But I don't think that it's like here in Canada.

What I'm seeing is the few churches that are growing are ones where there's community and ones where there is the word of God is at play.

I don't see as much the liturgy.

Personally, I wish there was more.

I lament a loss of liturgy which forms us.

Not high liturgy, but a liturgy that forms us.

Because I think there is a liturgy at work, always in worship.

So I lament that.

But where I'm seeing the churches, at least in Vancouver, which is highly, highly unchurched, less than 10% ever enter a church.

The churches that are growing is where they're warmly welcomed, they're loved, where there's community, and second, where they hear something of the word of God, that is that they said there's some truth here over against the wishy washy kind of postmodern worldview of Vancouver.

There's truth here and here's what it says to your life.

And Those are the two things that least my sense is, you know, I'm in a church where my son in law is pastoring, that is, that has quintupled in Vancouver area over the last four or five years.

And there's a lot of reasons for it.

So there's a lot of people coming in that know nothing about the Bible, nothing about the Christian faith.

And the thing that seems to be drawing them is this love, this community love.

They're.

They're loved or warmly welcomed.

They're.

They haven't had this.

And two, they hear this is, there's something that's true here about the world.

There's truth and there's, there's a certain kind of stability.

So those are some offhand comments on what we're talking about here.

I wonder whether like the Anton Yeager's hyperpolitics thesis could be brought to bear here.

So in a sense there is this desire in the world of imagery and onlineness for order, but it doesn't translate fully into the real world.

And you do see, I mean, I was to supposed I had some friends from the US out and I was taking them around Melbourne.

We walked past St Patrick's Cathedral, which is our Catholic cathedral in downtown Melbourne.

And you know, I see this person bent over the steps and I'm thinking, is it a homeless person?

Or get closer.

And it's a very well dressed young guy, maybe 18, 19, 20, and he had his like little prayer book and rosary and he's on his knees praying, you know, so you see it.

But it also hit me that he wasn't inside with the rest of the community, you know, there.

So there is, you know, I think that sort of sound and fury is a world of imagery and trying to find identities in place through the management of imagery, which doesn't always translate into embodied, institutional, communal forms.

So I wonder if that's can throw us off a little bit in our read, because you go online and you hear conversations and people want it.

But will they be in those places in 20 years?

There will be some, but we're seeing the same thing.

You know, we're seeing churches that are offering, like, here's what the scriptures say.

This is God is real community.

They're the ones that seem to be growing here in Melbourne, which is in a place of welcome.

You know, we have a hugely mobile population, massive migration.

And, you know, the new location we've got is like the United nations of, you know, people finding somewhere is where what they're, you know, in an atomized age is.

I think what people are looking for.

There's a big front door, but there's also a big back door in our church as well.

And it's very hard to disciple because of a lack of commitment.

And they love the community.

They love a degree of structure for a while and.

But continue to like that.

But others just kind of say, okay, that was a passing phase, and out the back door.

I find it very interesting that both of you guys are in highly secular areas and I'm in a highly religious with a highly cultural Christian basis.

But what I'm finding even there, it's the same kind of question.

In some respect, it's harder because there are many things to choose from.

And many of the churches that I've encountered offer a form of cultural Christianity.

Many of them are still operating off of the attractional kind of church growth best practices of the 80s.

You know, it's the boomer church in some respect.

But I'm finding that the younger generation and the younger people.

I've had people come to me and they've gone to several different churches and they come back.

I'm like, well, what are you really looking for?

And they said very simply, a place simply to belong.

But many of the churches that I see here aren't set up for it.

They're set up for you to come in, get the sermon with a charismatic personality and then go.

And then they don't really try to make the church sticky and close the back door.

But I talked to a pastor, actually the pastor of the church that I'm helping right now, and he said, you know, I've actually pastored three different churches in my six years, my entire church.

I've had so many people come through the front door that have gone out the back door, and it's almost like Just totally, totally different.

So I find that the people want to belong.

But I go back to Michael Graham and Jim Davis's book the Great Detourching and why people haven't gone, you know, why they don't go to a church, it's because they moved.

It's that simple.

So there are people that are out there.

But it's almost as if our churches are set up in some respects to fail because they're living off of an ecclesiology that was made for, as Brad Davis said in his book the Reason for Church.

It was made for another era.

And it's not answering the questions that today's people have.

What do you think?

I think again too, you see this structure of, you know, again, if we go back to, you know, the modern era, it goes through phases.

Post war, you get to, you know, in economics, the neoliberal order, which was providing consumer goods, but it was deeply de socialized and you went from community to an individual unit, an individual consumer, and from the local strip mall and the local hardware store to the Walmart or Home Depot.

And I think we have seen and they've done well.

There is a thing where that model can do well.

But I think you're seeing that economic model begin to form over number one, it's going online.

So it's even becoming more in the economic sphere, the marketplace is becoming more depersonalized.

But I think the hypermobility that the modern economic world and I think the economy is such a huge part of modernity that we don't talk about enough.

It creates this hyper mobility, this workforce which moves around and you can do a sort of kind of church which attracts that kind of people.

Well, I mean, the process you spoke about, Mike, you don't have to deal with if you've got people coming to your city for two years and then they move to the next job, you know, they love it for a bit and then sad to leave and then they're gone.

And so I think that that process of discipling people, forming people over time becomes much more difficult, you know, so I think those churches are there.

But I always think about coming from an Australian church perspective.

It's like you've got this giant input in the United States of cultural Christians who do move around, you know, even in the most secular cities.

I'll often preach in a very secular American city and people will tell me how secular it is.

But every year into that city, there's people moving from the Midwest or the south for jobs or for college or whatever.

It's like you've got this constant input of consumer Christians, whereas I would hazard the guess that, you know, in Vancouver or Melbourne, that input is much smaller.

And so you have to, I think, do a different form of church.

Mike I think that's true.

I think that's really true.

I think there's a lot of factors.

I think mobilization or mobility is not just the one factor.

I was just last week in Chile and I was working with nine pastors there, and I was basically saying here some of the things we got to do to be forming our people, forming our churches and so on.

And there, there was just a level of frustration that just was building.

And they're saying, we'd love to do those things, but we can't.

We can't hear the economic reasons.

We got families that are.

That where the husband and the wife are working these long hours and they're not going to be forming their kids.

And, and, you know, we've got.

And they just went into so many different dimensions.

And I, I felt the helplessness that they felt.

And I think of Vancouver, I just think of people if they're.

They feel like if they're not making young couples getting married, if they're not bringing $250,000 a year into their household, they're not going to be able to make it.

And you think, you know, this is crazy.

And then you start to realize that there is just a there.

There are so economic dimensions, there are social dimensions, there's so many worldview dimensions, if you will, that they have absorbed into their being.

And part of it is a lack of commitment.

And there's just so many of those things that to build a long formation process, it feels overwhelming.

It just feels overwhelming to pastors who really want to do a good job.

And so it's not just the leader's faults.

Matter of fact, I constantly find myself telling, don't be so hard on yourself.

You can only do what you can do.

What God is.

He's given you a certain amount of ability and certain amount of space.

And I mean, you can only do what God is going to give you the ability and, and space to do.

You cannot solve.

You cannot do.

God's mission for himself.

He's got to do.

But what you've got to do is just.

And so I, I sometimes, I sometimes.

I'm always struggling, what does this look like?

What does this look like?

And sometimes feel very despairing about it, even though I'm often answering the questions of people that are saying, what should we do?

I Say this.

And then I.

But then when I just say, boy, this is tough.

This is getting tougher and tougher in a globalized world.

I agree.

How do we then?

I mean, I'm doing this right now with the church where they had some of the same stuff.

They were really set up with that.

Rick Warren Attractional church growth kind of a C suite MANAGER of ecclesiology and formation really wasn't a priority.

It was high evangelization in the service.

And I had a conversation with the pastor and I said, you know, you've really done 80% evangelization in your services and maybe, maybe even 90% and 10% formation formally.

And I said, we need to switch that.

And do you think if we can kind of go back to the full council, this full story of God's word and preaching it that way, that helps at least over time really do that?

I mean, or do we not even have that option anymore?

I mean, you said it just with neoliberal capitalism, it's really flattened our formation because it's compressed it and not just compressed it from the church ecclesiology standpoint.

But our people are moving.

We get them for a time.

And we don't get to like we were talking about what's discipleship look like from cradle to grave.

And when I encounter churches like this and I have, it's always odd to me because I come from in a high mobility area and I go into a church where not a lot of the people have left and it's the same founders that have been there.

I just don't see that very much anymore.

I mean, how do we counteract that?

Do we just accept that reality?

Do we compress it or do we still try to say, hey, let's aim for the long game anyway.

And if people come along that stick to us over time, they at least get it for a time.

And then we just keep going.

I mean, what do you guys think?

It's a good question.

I mean, just some thoughts off the top of my head which probably aren't as formed as I'd like them to be.

But I think what we're seeing is the economic model of modernity.

And I know New Begin near the end of his life was really looking at this and there's an extractive element.

So for example, we take oil out of that country, which is powers industry over here, but what's the effect in this country?

Chile has been a country currently with different resources and foreign influence and stuff like that.

But I think you know that and that's Extraction, you know, South America, they took that of this, this idea of extraction of they've had foreign powers come and extract the wealth.

And I realized recently, thinking about, like, I think about, you know, our morning congregation at our other location, 10am service, it's young families and exactly that both have got to work.

Cost of living, mortgage prices, working, trying to deal with kids, trying to deal with kids on technology, you know, just pressure.

It just run.

They're just under so much pressure.

And I think we've reached a new stage where we're still extracting resources from the world, but we're now companies are extracting stuff from people.

Attention, energy, focus.

And you know, I think of Jesus looking at the crowd and he has compassion on them because they're sort of harried.

And you know, increasingly I'm seeing, because, you know, again, our churches are in sort of middle class or ones in a sort of upper middle class, wealthier area.

So you don't normally think of them as exploited, but I'm just seeing this sense of they are exploited, like modernity and where it is at the stage of just, I think, you know, increasingly AI and all this just rapacious extraction, which has, you know, effects on creation, but also in God's created creatures, in human.

So, you know, I think tracking it back to, I think what you're saying before Mike too, that idea of there's powers and principalities behind this stuff, you know, it's almost like a.

What does deliverance look like in this dynamic?

You know, and, you know, I think of.

I think of another example that would be, you know, City of God, Augustine.

You know, he's almost right at the end of the imperial age.

And, you know, he's asking the question, you know, he's taking things apart.

But also he's saying, you know, some of these things people are worshipping, behind them is demons and principalities and powers.

And, you know, I feel that for our people.

So, you know, I think part of, part of what I realized is the danger is we've tried to look at practices and formation and we still do that, but I realized that as I do it, I have to have more compassion.

Because the danger if I'm sort of like challenging them of like, get your stuff in order and then you sit down.

I remember when Covid began, you know, we were talking to people about Sabbath.

We'd just done a thing on Sabbath.

And then there was a group working through some material on Sabbath.

And I bumped into this guy walking and he's a refugee on a visa he's married to an Australian.

He's running his business.

He had several guys working for him on visas which were dependent on them working.

Covid's just hit, you know, and we just had this conversation in the street.

He's like, mark, can I run my business?

How do I be a father, you know, and do Sabbath?

He's like, I'm having to work on Sundays.

And I just, I literally stood in the street and felt I don't want to be a heavy yoke.

Like, I don't want to be putting this on you.

So I think I'm sort of trying to work out that balance.

You know, we're seeing our other congregation where it's a lot of university students and some empty nesters.

They've got more time, you know, and, you know, like, I know a church which is very renowned for their formation.

And I was chatting to the guy who runs all their formation.

He said, to be honest, very few people between sort of, you know, 30 and 45 are able to do this at our church because it's just, it's the young adults and older people because they had just run ragged.

So I think that's one question.

How do you do sort of a grace filled formation?

It's like, really?

I have no answer.

I'm asking, asking that question.

I think the second thing, someone said something really interesting, not to me, but one of my staff.

And I wonder if there's something in this too.

Again, we have people coming and going.

Someone made the comment.

Another person made this comment recently, like, oh, when we started this new clay, is Mark the only person who's from Melbourne his whole life here?

Because everyone's come from somewhere else and moving around.

I've been in the same neighborhood my whole life.

But this other person said to one of her staff, like, one of the reasons I've come to this church is I've watched Mark and Trudy follow Jesus over a long time in their lives through seasons of suffering.

And I began to think, oh, maybe as well.

I think I always think about my sermons and what I want to communicate and our programs.

But maybe, Lord, you're writing a sermon through my life and maybe someone here's for three years and they'd love to be here, but because of whatever, they've got to move on.

But it's also, maybe we're modeling formation, modeling resilience, modeling perseverance.

And so there's almost an embodied witness of your own life in that.

And I think, you know, I think, Mike, your comments before about Pastors you know, during COVID and I think it continues many just hanging on.

I literally had an email this morning from a pastor who's just had to pull back.

They're just weary and yeah, maybe we're modeling something too.

So, yeah, they're just some thoughts off the top of my head.

I want to just comment on both those things, Mark, because I think they're very.

So wise.

I find myself the same thing.

I not wanting as a to pile on pastors and leaders and people, both people within the congregation more than they can handle, sort of burdens that beyond what they can't handle.

And yet sometimes you recognize there's got to be a challenge.

The reason they're.

They haven't got a Sabbath is because they're trying to live a lifestyle that perhaps they shouldn't be.

They should, you know, they're, they're there.

They've been caught up in the consumer worldview.

And so my own.

One of the things I found myself using as an illustration is that is the idea of stretching.

You know, if I start stretching, if I try to touch my elbows in the ground, I'm going to snap the back of my hamstrings and.

But if I barely lean over, I'm not going to stretch at all.

And that what pastors and leaders need to be doing in their own lives and with others is helping people stretch to the degree they can, but not, you know, if you too far, they just, they can't take it anymore.

But they've got, there's got to be a stretching.

So I really appreciate that, that air, that area of that being compassionate and at the same time wanting to stretch a bit further.

And then this, that moves into.

For me, I've been, I'm right now studying Second Corinthians and I'm really diving into that.

One of the reasons I haven't been able to do this for 25 years.

But new Begin says, if you want to understand good leadership, look at Second Corinthians.

That's the best place to understand missional leadership.

Because there.

And there's a number of reasons.

One of them is because there, Paul is modeling for them the death and resurrection of Jesus.

He's saying, you want to see what the gospel is?

Look at my life, then follow me as I follow Christ, as I am modeling the death in my own apostleship and then experiencing, therefore, the power of the resurrection of my apostleship.

This is what I want you to begin to understand.

But the second side of 2 Corinthians goes back to that first point is that one of the reasons Paul is so suffering is because he's challenging the idolatry of the people in Corinth.

And the people don't like it.

They don't like it.

They have their own idolatrous views of what leaders should look like.

And as he challenges their idolatry, they're pushing back hard.

And so being able to challenge idolatry in a gentle, loving way, the way Paul did, stretching him just a bit, but at the same time modeling what this looks like.

And I've seen this in theological education.

I don't know how many times people have said, because we have people into our home, and Marnie, my wife, makes a meal for them, and as they have a meal together with us, and then we do theological education together over four years, often they're walking away saying, appreciated what we learned theologically, but we've learned far more from watching a sort of a stability in your marriage, a stability in the way you think, think about things and wrestle with things and so on.

And I do think that that's going to be important for leaders in the future.

Just modeling in ways love, but are willing to push, stretch people, but model that in their lives.

So I think that's very wise.

Mark, what you said, do you think.

Like Mark Alan Kreider in his work the Ferment of the Early Church?

You know, I think back to the four things and why the early church grew, and it seems that's what we're talking about right now.

I mean, you have, of course, patience.

They said Jesus was never in a hurry, and we aren't going to be either, which is a countercultural piece.

But that leads a whole different question that Harmut Rosa talks about with just how fast we're going and we can't kind of get off of the roller coaster.

But then worship in catechesis, the habitus piece, and then the ferment.

And that, to me, is the community piece.

It's not just community at church, it's who do I make, who runs to Home Depot with me?

That, to me, is community.

That's how I define it.

It's like, who can I call to jump in the car to make a Home Depot run with me?

And I spend time with.

Because that, to me, is where that's modeled and it's seen.

And it goes beyond Sunday morning that I think we're simply going back to the first two centuries of the church to find examples in the mission field in some respects, where we see people trying to embody the new Humanity and showing what it means to be part of the new creation.

I mean, in some respect, it's extremely complex, but other respects, it's also somewhat easy.

I don't want to say it's not rocket science.

There is a lot of complexity to our culture and so many different layers that are to it.

But at the end of the day, we have to be able to offer people a new way to live, and we have to exhibit that ourselves and not be so caught up in our own status on what this means.

Or as I remember one guy saying, you know, I work seven days a week because the devil never takes a day off.

And someone said, well, since when has he been our example?

So it's like, I think we.

We have this idea that we can do everything and be everything.

And I go back to Kelly Kappick, where he's like, you're only human.

Go into your shower.

And here's an exercise he tells his students.

Look at your belly button.

Just remind yourself that you come from someplace that you are.

You can't do everything.

You can't be anything.

We.

And that, to me, is the narrative underneath it that's drawing people that we have to do.

We have to go about it.

And yet so many people still haven't been able.

And I mean, people.

I mean, pastors aren't challenging that narrative themselves.

And again, I don't want to guilt them.

I work with pastors all the time.

I am one.

But they're so caught up in it that they can't see it.

And it's like we have to start to see these narratives that are influencing and that we're living by.

And we don't do that unless we read interact from history and from the global church to find that out.

I mean, am I off there?

No.

I mean, I think.

And I think the question for me is why?

Why are we missing it when it's so evident?

You know, Daniel was on our pastoral team, great pastor.

You know, he grew up in the country, in South Australia, and really, when he was a young guy at a small Lutheran church in a small town, and the pastor took him under, you know, when you said Home Depot, that's what I was thinking.

You know, if you had to drive somewhere, he'd take him with him, you know, discipled him, you know.

Yeah, but you don't see those stories now because again, going back to the extraction piece, and I think about this, right?

Just say you're a young person, Pastor.

You're 28 or 29.

You're just starting how are you viewing what a pastor is?

Yeah, you may encounter some stuff in person, but it's the platforms which you're sitting.

Sounds crude.

You're on the toilet looking at this.

You're sitting there in all your micro moments looking at images and images and images of the extraction of other people's experiences.

It's going to be successful past.

Is it that, you know, that killer point in a sermon or the high point of the incredibly professional worship service or the cool pastors hanging out together and you're getting this image that a successful pastor is the highlight reel.

You know, it's like the local football team, you know, who has to, you know, pack up the field afterwards and raise money and do whatever.

You know, that reality of what it does to keep a team together.

You don't see that if you're just looking at highlight reels of professional athletes, you know, their best moments of life.

So I think, again, this is another way, in a sense, even pastors are being exploited by this stuff because it blinds us to the, you know, iron sharpens iron.

That reality.

And what I'm saying this to you because I say this to younger pastors.

And this stuff, what you just said, which to me, I think I was in an overlap of that era where I still experience that and discipleship and life on life.

And I was under some great leaders.

And, you know, I learned, I worked for Alan Hirsch.

You know, I was around my frost, this missiology I learned just hanging around these guys, traveling with them, doing ordinary ministry.

But I think that is so missing to other people because their experience of the world is a YouTube or it's, it's a real.

And so, yeah, I think we need to.

I don't know how we do it, but we need to reintroduce people to the real world world of what actual ministry is.

And again, the simplicity, there's a, there's a, there's a freedom in that simplicity of.

This is not, it's not rocket science.

You know, some of this stuff, you know.

You know, one of the things I, I wrote when I'm doing Missio Holism is I talk about a cultural connection.

And you have to have some.

You have to have cultural contact of some sort.

Because in neoliberal capitalism, what I'm finding is the higher, the higher that.

That living wages or excuse me, the higher income bracket they are, the more isolated they are in some respect and independent because they don't need other people.

Where I meet the people that are the poorest, they're the ones that are most interdependent upon one another and they're familiar with it.

So it's like, how do you help people to see the interdependent nature of it when they're like, oh, I'm blessed, I don't need anything?

Well, that's part of the reason you're so miserable is you've got everything you need, but what you're missing is people.

And to know that God didn't design you that way.

So we need that interdependence of one another, the one anothers that the scripture already talks about.

I mean, yeah, anyway, what do you think, Mike?

But what in particular,.

Whatever we have said that has jarred your thought and made you go, man, they're way off.

Well, you're introducing new areas that are, they're problematic in building churches of the new humanity.

And you just introduce individualism.

And I mean, boy, is that strong in the United States.

As a, as a Canadian, I don't know about you, Mark.

As an Australian coming to the U.S. i thought Canada was individualistic till I got to the States and I thought, oh my goodness, individualism is powerful here.

And one of the, one of the things, one of the, I think one of the biggest powers to overcome and in, in the United States, I think it's powerful throughout western culture in general.

It's certainly at the basis of Canadian culture.

But in the United States, I, I met an individualism that to me was who that was much stronger.

So trying to form people, it just, you know, again, you realize that not only do you need wisdom and not only do you need to know what this looks like embodiment, you need, need power.

You need the power resurrection, the spiritual power of the resurrection and to form people.

How in the world can we be forming people with that resurrection power?

It's not going to happen one hour on Sunday morning.

And so what is the next step in asking, in moving towards formation and how do you do that patiently as leaders?

How do you do that kindly, with compassion?

Mark was talking about earlier, how do you do it with wisdom?

How do you do it with a degree of firmness, with conviction?

These are, these are the big questions that are, you know, running through my head with this whole conversation.

I, I realize I'm in a different world than I was in, you know, I think was what back 15, 20 minutes ago, Mark, you mentioned, you know, kids and their cell phones and, and I realized that we really, when I was dealing with technology in my home, the two things that came into my home that were powerful were Internet and email.

And so I was dealing with those two very powerful things.

And we, you know, I would say we had success in one and failure in the other.

And so I got things to offer on that to think it through.

But then I hear stories of kids and, and cell phones and I realize, boy, that brings a whole new dimension to this question of what it means to form your own children.

And it seems to me the church can be, can be doing every, the local congregation can be doing everything right, but if family, parents are not forming their children, then just not a chance that we're going to be able to form the next generation into the new humanity.

And so I see those huge barriers out there and becoming not just intentional like Kreider.

I love Kreider and I love what he's helping us.

But how, but he lived in a very different world.

And how in the world do you, do you begin that kind of formation process that the early church is doing, which I draw on, on again and again, by the way.

How do you do that when you're, when you're in a very different world with the nuclear family that has been formed by individualism, that in a very powerful economistic mobile world.

How do you begin to form parents to take seriously their task of forming their children?

That to me has to be one of the biggest, biggest my biggest concerns and burdens for the church going into the next, the next what decade or two?

Well, even then, it's supposing that that family is together, you know, that there's a husband and a wife.

And I think back to again degree to churching where they said that most of our churches are geared to what they call the success track, where you graduate high school, you go to college, you, you know, you graduate, you get married, you have, you get a job, you child.

Like there's this order, but most broken people didn't follow that order.

And so churches are unintentionally, it's set up for the ideal, which we should, but we still have to make entry points for other people to be able to come on and then help them in that discipling because so many of them feel overwhelmed.

And not just overwhelmed.

Like I tell this to my wife all the time because she watches like diarrhea of a CEO and she loves the stuff that she hears on there.

And, and I'm like, she's telling us all this stuff about the brain and what we do and these habits.

And I'm like, honey, I, I've information I like.

I'm not disagreeing with anything.

I don't have the willpower right now.

Like I'm tired.

It's just there's so many different things.

Like how many things am I supposed to prioritize and do it all?

It's just I don't have the energy that's the hard part at respect, you know, it's not that I disagree, it's just I don't have the energy.

So we're coming back to these parents and Mark, like what you said earlier is being not so heavy handed with them but being, you know, you're weary, you're broken.

We need to be able to help you do this in a very.

In a world that's so busy and so heavy and so exhausting.

Like I go back to Larry Crabb when he wrote that book, the church should be the safest place on earth and it's usually not.

It's a high performance culture and even our pastors feel that rather than being a place to come and really lay out your brokenness.

I mean, I don't know.

Those are my thoughts.

What do you think, Mark?

Yeah, it's interesting too.

Like even I think we're reaching the stage of that never formed family.

You know, if you look at the demographic trend lines, you know, a lot of cities now, no one's talking about the cost, sorry, the housing crisis.

One of the reasons we're also having a housing crisis.

My grandfather grew up in, you know, working class out of the inner city of Melbourne in a workers college with 11 kids, you know, 11 brothers and sisters.

Those same buildings now will have one person in them.

You know, we started in this new location, started at 5pm service.

It's young adults, university students booming.

The morning service is going a little bit slower because it's for families.

And I looked at the demographics.

There's hardly any families in that area.

You know, like you look at South Korea.

South Korea now has a minister for loneliness.

So we're about 10 years away from the dominant household in most developed western countries or developed countries.

Western countries, Japan, Europe, Australia, the us, Canada.

Being a single person, you know, and it's not, it's not a thing of like, you know, and we have lots of people like that in my church.

You know, it's not that they don't want to get married, they want to find someone.

The system now seems to go against them, you know, and it's not just an inside church thing, it's an outside church thing as well.

It's a culture wide thing.

So I think that's That's a really interesting challenge.

I do wonder just.

Just to sort of bring it back, I guess, to a more macro level.

And I think even what you're saying, Mike, about Corinthians, I wonder also what's happening.

You know, part of the big story here that we're dealing with is the US has had success at its core, individualism success.

And I think that is shaping its larger churches.

You know, we are very possibly on a track now where the US has to integrate into its identity not being a success.

If you look at GDP figures, depends which ones you look at.

Probably China has overtaken the US in gdp.

People haven't clocked onto what that means.

The Chinese navy in US war gaming beats the US Navy in Australia.

Taiwan conflict.

If we see de dollarization, which we look like we're heading towards, and Donald Trump may be moving the world towards de dollarization, which he thinks will benefit U.S. exports but will significantly weaken the power of the U.S. the international soft power of the U.S. has significantly declined.

And if the U.S. is heading towards some significant internal political crises, this will happen.

So I wonder too, if there's an inevitable trajectory which what happens when success is not happening, if the economy tanks?

The US economy is completely geared towards the magnificent seven, the AI companies.

It's making the biggest bet in the world that AI is going to do everything that people promise.

I could go through numerous vectors here.

Most of them point to a point where the US is going to have a serious potential crisis around its power and success in the world.

How will that be integrated in people?

And how will the church in the US lead people through not having success and not being a national success?

I'm not hearing many people in the US think about that.

It's almost off their radar.

So I wonder whether these models of church missiologically are going to have to help people, you know, work through these challenges.

And again too, I think we're back at Augustine.

And I think Corinthians has got some beautiful things to say in that.

How do you discover in weakness God's power?

You know, so what if there's this incredible moment of leadership as that's walked through?

That's a very big picture idea.

A huge Statement.

Mike, any thoughts?

Yeah, I think that's.

I think what you're saying is really, as I look at the United States and Canada, I think we've always felt a lot weaker.

We have our own inferiority complex up here in Canada.

A lot of jokes about that.

And I think that we.

That I. I do see that kind of success dominating.

It dominates view of leadership, dominates view of the church.

I think that Second Corinthians has a lot to say about weakness, especially to celebrity leaders, celebrity liberty, churches.

I think it.

Yeah, it's good.

It.

It'll have a lot to say, but it's still.

Still has to be worked out that.

That is still gonna have to be worked out.

In terms of what does this look like structurally?

What is.

What is this?

How do you.

You know, I. I think of the.

You know, how I began my book Light to the nations with John.

John Lennon, you know, picturing this.

This world.

This better world of the future and then saying, you know, we're not.

We're not the only ones thinking like this.

Won't you come and join us?

And he recognized that if this world of the future is to be attractive, it's got to be embodied in the present, in an.

In with a group of people.

And he recognized that.

But of course, his.

He was just imagining.

But Christ has actually brought that world.

Now, how do.

How does that world.

Because that's what Corinthians, Second Corinthians is all about.

How can this world.

World of the res.

Of the resurrection, the new creation, how can that world be embodied in the leadership?

And how can it be embodied in the people?

And what that.

And since that new creation actually comes through death and resurrection, how can it come through suffering that leads to life, death that leads to life?

And I think that that pattern is simply.

Well, I'm.

I'm just.

I was going to say simply not in our imagination.

I'm just going to look at myself and learning over the last six months has been difficult for me because I've always been.

Maybe it's maybe a year.

I've always been someone who can plan something, execute it, and I've had enough gravitas to get it done.

That's just been the way I've lived for the last 30 years.

And over the last several years, there's been a reason that I've been losing some of that gravitas and just losing some, you know, this and having to say, you know, God is sovereign.

And there's something about the importance of weakness where you just come to the end of yourself and say, I can't do it.

And that's what Paul is doing, that he says, here's the paradox.

It's when you.

It's when you say, I can't do it that God says, my grace is sufficient for you in your weakness to be able to accomplish what you cannot do.

And so as a Canadian, that kind of shakes his head at the celebrity leader culture.

That really bothers me.

I got enough of this strength in me that needs to learn what it means for the power comes through weakness.

And I got that up here.

But, boy, I.

It's got to get into my imagination.

It's going to get down into my bones where I really believe it, like Paul.

And maybe it's going to take what Paul suffered.

The reason he came to that was because he was in the Ephesian prison and his wonderful Ephesian ministry had collapsed.

All the wonderful things of Acts 9 had collapsed.

And there he was, everything breaking down.

And now the Corinthians.

Corinthians.

His prized church was turning on him.

And he starts Second Corinthians by saying, boy, I was in depression.

I thought I was.

I'm ready to die.

I mean, severe depression.

And he's reached this low, low point.

And is it going to take that for the church and for leaders to come to the end of themselves where God says, now I got you where I want you.

Now you're ready to receive the resurrection life of Jesus Christ.

That's good.

It is really good.

That is really good.

Well, gentlemen, we've kind of come to the end of our time today.

How about some concluding thoughts?

Any.

Any thoughts of hope?

Mark?

Yeah, Weirdly, I find myself in a strange mixed set of emotions.

I think when I look at the, the.

The paper, the newspaper, there are so many trajectories which look concerning geopolitically, politically, technologically.

But I think, you know, even as you were talking there, Mike, you know, I also just find the scriptures coming alive, you know, even hearing that, you know, in this moment, it's coming alive, you know.

You know, I think there's powers and principalities in operation behind this quest for unbelievable technological power through AI.

And, you know, I find the script is more alive for me than perhaps when they were in a more stable period 10, 15 years ago.

And, you know, I'm just experiencing to go to Norway and Denmark and these places six months ago and see a sort of glint in London, a glint in the eye of people who were really discouraged, and they're like, it's not massive, but something's happening.

There is an openness and seeing people come to faith in Jesus and churches growing, you know, hearing the stories in Vancouver, it's not every church, but there are some churches.

I've got friends there.

Churches are growing.

It's exciting sensing that here.

So for me there's tremendous opportunity in this moment.

I think there's not an optimism, it's not a pessimism.

It's a sort of gospel hope, you know, that is in the resurrected power of Jesus, that he tends to turn up in moments like this.

And so, yeah, I find myself, you know, very hopeful in this moment and, you know, want to put my hand to the plow of, you know, been in ministry some time now and.

But I'm most positive about what I'm seeing on the ground at this point in time.

Not naive to the challenges, but really optimistic in what God's going to do.

How about you, Mike?

Leslie Newan was asked, are you pessimistic or optimistic about the future of the church in India?

And his answer was, I'm neither.

I believe in the resurrection.

And to me he just.

That was expressing what you just said, Mark.

And I used to think, is that a cop out?

Because you.

And, and I think he would say, I can offer you whether I'm optimistic and pessimistic, but really that doesn't matter.

What matters is since the resurrection took place, the new creation is broken into history.

It's being embodied by his people and it will come.

And so my only question is then, okay, what is my vocation and calling in this?

Because I can't bring this in.

This is God's work.

And what is my vocation and my calling?

And so I, I like that idea of gospel hope over against optimism and pessimism.

But what I, what I want to add to that is something that I find myself saying, I don't know, but every two months to somebody and speaking on it, and that is that my friend and colleague at mtc, Zach Eswine, his book the Imperfect Pastor, where he himself said, you know, when I look at the United States, he says, we want the kingdom.

We want the kingdom to come large, fast and famous.

And he says when I look in the New Testament, it comes small, slowly, and in mostly unrecognized ways.

And I think I would want to say I'm mainly involved in training leaders more than pastoring these days.

I'm mainly training leaders.

And I find myself saying to them that Your calling is to, in small ways and in slow ways and in mostly unnoticed ways, you are to be involved in nurturing the life of the new humanity, nurturing the life of the new creation in whoever, in whatever spaces God gives you, and that's your vocation, and leave this coming of the kingdom up to him.

Because if you try to bear that on your shoulders, you're trying to bear what only God can do, and it will crush you.

And so I think that that's what I wanted would want to think, you know, small, slow, and mostly unnoticed and be faithful.

And I was just studying this morning where Paul, at the end of chapter five, is aiming his life for that moment when he says, I'll stand before the living Christ and I'm going to give an account of my life.

And that's what we need to be doing rather than looking around and seeing what's actually happening.

And so that can come amidst seasons of pessimism, optimism and optimism.

And I confess I have both of those.

But coming through, that is the resurrection has taken place.

The new creation has come, and it will one day fill the earth.

And our.

Our small lives, well, they're going to be short and they're going to be small.

And so if God uses us even a little bit, it's probably because we're not very important.

Good words, good thoughts.

Gentlemen, thank you so much for coming on the show.

I would encourage anybody out there that's watching this or listening to the sound of my voice, Go check out, go onto Amazon, get Mike's book, get Mark's books.

Phenomenal stuff.

It will help you think, It'll help you grow and just spread the word.

Spread the word.

May God be with you as you continue to serve faithfully wherever he has you.

And that.

That kind of slow, formative way.

Be faithful and get ready to hear those words.

Well done.

Good and faithful servant.

Gentlemen, thank you again for coming on Ministry Deep Dive.

Pleasure.

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