Travis Michael Fleming sits down with Michael O. Emerson for an honest and engaging conversation about Divided by Faith and the ongoing reality of racial division in the American church. Together, they unpack some of the assumptions many of us carry about the gospel and God’s kingdom, gently challenging listeners to see how a bigger, more holistic understanding might open the door to real change.

Emerson shares why these conversations can be especially tough for long-time Christians—people who care deeply about their faith but may have settled into familiar ways of thinking. They also talk about how living in a racialized society shapes not just our personal views, but the very systems and structures around us.

More than anything, this episode feels like an invitation—an encouragement to pause, reflect, and take meaningful steps forward. It’s a call for the church to grow into a more honest, inclusive, and beautifully diverse community that better reflects the heart of God’s kingdom.

Takeaways:

1. The conversation emphasizes the necessity of expanding one's understanding of the gospel and the kingdom of God, particularly in a racially divided society.
2. Divided by Faith highlights the importance of recognizing structural racism as an integral part of American society, which often goes unaddressed by well-intentioned individuals.
3. The need for churches to reflect the diversity of their neighborhoods is crucial for fostering a more inclusive community that embodies the kingdom of God.
4. The podcast discusses how individualistic perspectives can limit the understanding of collective issues, urging listeners to consider communal faith experiences in a diverse context.

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

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The challenge is that people are coming in already with an assumption and a determination of what the gospel is.

And your job is to broaden them to really understand the gospel and the kingdom of God.

And sometimes the biggest challenge is the people that have been Christian the longest because they have been the most socialized, into a limited perspective.

Welcome back to Ministry Deep Dive, where we go beneath the surface to help pastors, ministry leaders and everyday disciples navigate the complexities of our cultural moment with biblical clarity and wisdom.

Today we're diving into one of the most consequential books for understanding race, evangelicalism and the American church.

The book is the second edition of Divided by Faith with my guest today, Michael O. Emerson, as well as Christian Smith, been expanded and updated for a new era.

If you've ever wondered why the American church continues.

Continues to struggle with racial division and why well intentioned Christians can't seem to agree on the causes or the solution or how our cultural systems actually shape our discipleship without us even noticing, then this episode is essential for you today.

Our guest, as I said before, is Dr. Michael O. Emerson, and he's one of the most influential sociologists of religion in the world.

His work has shaped how scholars, pastors and church networks understand race, culture and Christian identity.

And in this new edition of Divided by Faith, the date is deeper, the cultural reality is even more sharp, and the implications even more urgent.

So whether you're a pastor wrestling with how to shepherd your church through polarized conversations, or a leader longing for a deeper biblical understanding of unity, or simply a follower of Jesus who wants to see the church reflect the new creation community, this conversation is for you.

Let's dive deep.

Michael Emerson, welcome to Ministry Deep Dive.

Hey, Travis.

I am honored to be here and I'm looking forward to this conversation.

Oh, awesome.

That is what I want to hear.

But let's get started with the fast five.

Are you ready?

As ready as I can be.

Okay.

This is going to be an easy one.

Okay, maybe, maybe it won't be.

I don't know.

What's one book outside of your own that has shaped the way you think about faith or society?

Well, of course, the Bible.

Everybody says that, right?

Yeah, yeah, I read amazing book by Reinhold Niebuhr.

Roughly, Moral Man, Immoral Society.

I thought it was just a brilliant book about the.

Well, we'll talk about this later.

But yeah, that book really impacted me.

Okay, I. I Have not read that one, but I, I, I remember you referencing that in the book.

So I, I was like, oh, that's one I gotta check out.

Number two, what's a place in the world that has most shaped your understanding of culture?

Lived in Denmark and Sweden for a time, and that opened my eyes to how different we do life in the United States.

All right, number three, are you a morning person, night owl, or neither?

I am definitely a morning person.

We will get along just fine.

Number four, what's one hobby or interest people might be surprised to learn about you?

I love to mow lawn.

How fun is that?

So tell me why you want to mow, like why you like to mow yards.

I appreciate that, but I want to know why.

I love how you make something that is disorderly orderly through the process.

Well, that's a sociological answer right there.

I mean, that's the whole calling of your life, to take all these things and make them orderly for people to understand.

All right, here we go.

Number five, if you could sit down for coffee with any historical figure, who would it be and why?

Outside of the biblical characters, let's say outside of them.

Yeah, that's a great question.

I would like to sit down with St. Augustine and pick his brain.

He would be a very interesting one to have a conversation with, that's for sure.

Sometimes I think we would have a lot of fun.

Other times I think it could come to blows.

Yeah, exactly One of the two.

Well, let's get into your book divided by faith, 25 years in.

And why did you feel the need to put out a second edition and expand upon what you learned in the first book?

You know, times really have changed in the last 25 years.

So the question was, is the book still pertinent?

Does it need to be updated?

And as we looked at it, it did.

The main argument stands holistically, but things have gotten more intense even than when we first wrote it.

So that's why.

All right, then what has changed then in this past 25 years since you've written the book?

Is it 25 or 20?

25 years, yeah.

25 years.

I thought so.

Okay, so what, what's changed in that time?

So the, you know, the argument in the book is that you have really well intentioned people.

And we're looking at white evangelicals in, in the book.

And they're actually at that time the most energetic group trying to address racial issues.

And so the book, and we'll get into this.

I'm sure.

But is showing why the way they go about it is actually harmful or doesn't work.

But what has changed is, as we can see, you might say we've the rise, what we call mega evangelicals, that people are kind of a significant group are just moving away from even caring in that way and just saying we're done with it or we need to get rid of people that we don't think should be in this country.

And so that's.

That is something we didn't foresee happening.

Actually, I don't think anybody foresaw that happening, at least not that I know of or I'm aware of.

But it is a topic that is an uncomfortable topic.

It's been an uncomfortable talking for many white evangelicals.

I'll say it that way.

I don't think it's an uncomfortable topic for everyone.

But for white evangelicals, especially in the last few years, it's become even more uncomfortable in a lot of ways.

They just want to dismiss it out of hand and say we're not going to talk about that.

Or you get the proverbial label woke.

And that becomes kind of a catch all and a shibboleth of I don't need to listen to you if you're woke or not.

And people have asked, I've had people ask me, are you woke?

And I want to say always define the word before I ever say yes or no.

Because the word becomes so ubiquitous to me that it is a catch all for whatever I don't like and how you go about it.

Because there's always good and there's bad in everything.

So it's trying to understand it.

One of the things that you talk about in the book, just to revisit a little bit of the thesis that you had 25 years ago, for those that are unfamiliar, you talk about really a central concept in the book is the concept of and again an uncomfortable topic for many people, the idea of a racialized society.

For listeners who are new to the term, can you explain what that means and why you believe it's essential for Christians to grasp in our context.

So, you know, we spend so much time in our society either trying to say and figure out are you a racist or not?

Or defending I am not a racist.

And what we're trying to say is that's really a waste of time and that's missing the point.

The point is that society itself is racialized, meaning that race is woven in to basically everything in this society in a way that only South Africa would rival.

And it's because of the time in which we were founded.

It was because it was woven into the very constitution that we still use.

Laws, policies, segregation, slavery, Jim Crow, segregation.

It just goes on and on.

That's the issue.

But we don't even address those issues because we're too busy trying to figure out at the individual level, are you a racist?

I'm not a racist.

And we're really asking people, stop doing that.

I was surprised, not surprised, but when you, When I was reading your book, because people, when you say, I'm a racist, I'm not a racist, that's the conversation I see play out all the time.

But I've never had someone go, oh, I am a racist.

I've never heard anybody actually say that.

But, you know, it's like, oh, I'm not a racist.

I'm not a racist.

I'm not a racist.

Okay, we all agree racism is bad.

Okay, we all.

I don't.

I don't know too many people.

I mean, there aren't some, I'm sure, that are out there saying, no, racism is a good thing.

So we all agree racism is bad.

The problem that we find is the solutions then to what it is.

Because it's not just about an individual and their perspective, because a lot of those things have been within people.

They create systems, and it.

And that is embodied or baked into this system itself, is it not?

That's what you're talking about.

Absolutely right.

So if you're somebody from another country and you come here, you're going to quickly recognize things that we don't seem to recognize, even though they affect everything we do.

So you're going to notice that in every major metropolitan area of the United States, there are neighborhoods that have mostly white people in it.

Neighbors have mostly Hispanic people and mostly black people and mostly Asian people, and schools like that, and then where people go to church.

But all of that stuff we just ignore.

Like that has nothing to do with anything.

And again, going back to.

We just talk about individual relationships, but that's the stuff doing the work.

So it really.

What we're arguing, of course, and this very basic sociology, right, we as individuals, yes, maybe it was our racism or whatever in the beginning that produced all this, but now the this, the structures, if we don't address them, it doesn't matter what we're doing at the individual level, because those things are shaping us all the time.

I mean, literally, I cannot.

I'll give you one example.

So we did a paper, the least Prejudiced People by measures among white Folks are highly educated white people.

They are more supportive of integration.

They are more supportive of immigration, any way we measure it.

But we asked, well, what do they actually do?

The most segregated people among whites in the United States are the highly educated.

The people who have their children in the whitest schools are the highly educated white people.

So they're not prejudiced by traditional measures, but they're so able to buy into the system that they do.

They're living in the nicest neighborhoods, and they got their kids in the best schools.

And those just so happen to be the whitest places.

That's what we've got to address now

that obviously some people now are.

Their ears have peaked.

They're on the defensive because of what you've just articulated.

Because it seems that then.

Wait a minute.

Are you calling me a racist?

That's what I'm saying.

Stop thinking that way.

That's not the point.

Yeah.

This is where we have to understand how the system is set up.

Now, I want to go back for a moment.

You talk about being in our society even since its inception.

I'm reading a book right now.

I don't know if you've read it.

It's a new book that came out by Joseph Ellis called the Great Contradiction.

And in it, it's a fascinating look at how they were dealing with the issue of slavery before even becoming a country and how some founding fathers didn't want it.

Of course, those who were more reliant upon it for their economic.

I mean, success in the Southeast were for it.

There were battle even in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence, which is fascinating to me that Thomas Jefferson, in his initial draft, had actually included an entire paragraph against it.

And even though he himself had slaves.

That's the contradiction, right?

That's the inherent contradiction.

But he recognized that it was an evil.

And when they went to edit the draft, they just ripped it out entirely because they knew that any type of declaration would not have the Southern states if they were to do that.

And it's fascinating because Abraham Lincoln, later, reflecting on the fact that he chose the life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness rather than the pursuit of property that John Locket had in his address.

He goes, he had changed it to happiness.

And he said in.

Lincoln said this, of course, almost half a century later, said he did it intentionally for posterity because he knew that African Americans would be considered slaves.

And he didn't want that to be considered an inalienable right.

It's just a fascinating look.

I haven't examined it.

I just Read this earlier today.

But the fact is, it's been an issue.

It's always been an issue.

It's America's original sin since the beginning.

And I don't think people realize that the systems that have been created were, in some respect, inherently racist to keep certain people down.

I mean, even in the three fifths compromise, right?

Not even people.

Not even people.

Three fifths.

Three fifths.

And as time, of course, has gone on, that's been the issue.

And again, I know some of you are out there listening right now.

You're saying, I'm so tired of this.

Please stop talking about this.

I feel like it's being shoved down my throat all the time.

We're not trying to shove it down your throat.

Please.

Nope.

We're trying to live out kingdom living.

Right.

We're trying to be Christian.

Exactly.

Exactly.

Because even if you look at the scripture, you know, you've got different ethnicities that are brought out in scripture.

And Jesus contrasts this.

Do you love them?

I mean, Jonah going to Nineveh, the Ninevites, you've got Jesus using the example of the Samaritan woman, which was inherently a race issue in that cultural moment.

So it's not just.

Let's just put this to bed right now.

This is not just an American thing, by the way.

This is all over the world.

There's racism everywhere.

But this is in our backyard, the system that has been developed in our context that we're going to critique and that we're a part of.

Okay?

So we're not coming at this as people that are.

I've been a beneficiary of this.

I have.

I'm not above it.

I'm in it.

I am.

And so.

So I don't want us to be like, we're bad and all white evangelicals are bad.

That's not what we're trying to say.

I know that we get beat up all the time, but it is the group that we're a part of and we want to praise because there's been a lot of great things that have come out, but we also need to challenge where those idolatries are in order for us to be.

I'm going to borrow, of course, the more perfect union language, but for the church to have a more perfect union of the kingdom of God.

A greater representation of the kingdom of God.

Yes.

Now, one of the things that you talked about, and I'm talking a lot right now, so you're gonna.

You're gonna be talking more because you're more the expert on this evangelicals have a tendency to look at this individually rather than structurally.

And there is, I've.

I found, even as I was reading your book, I can think of authors today in evangelicalism who happen to be white, who have all rejected structural evil.

John MacArthur, I think Charlie Kirk was in that.

I'm not trying to throw his name under the bus or anything like that.

I'm just saying I found some stuff where he was against that.

But even the African American, Voty Bakkem, didn't see anything on structural sin.

And some others, like Owen Strachan, people might be familiar with him.

Why, though, do evangelicals have such a hard time seeing structural sin?

And why do they reject it so out of hand as something that they just don't see in the Bible?

Fundamental to our theology, and I am an evangelical myself, is that the basis of everything is a singular decision that we make to follow Christ or not.

Each of us is offered that, and we must individually make that decision.

We take that and we apply it to everything so that that individualism, that individual decision, becomes the basis of how we understand the world.

And then the second part, right, and we call these the cultural tools that we're given as evangelicals in the United States, particularly if we're white.

The second one is that relationship that.

So we make that decision individually, but then we establish the relationship.

So when we're talking to people about how to make change at any level, evangelicals way more than anybody else, give solutions that have to do with making relationships one on one, individual relationships, just like we think about our relationship with Christ.

When you put those two together, the antithesis to that, the thing competing against that, is saying, you know what the problem is?

Structures, policies, laws.

When we interviewed evangelicals, white evangelicals, they would constantly refer to those things as facades or taking you down the wrong path because they're taking away from what is central.

It's very interesting for evangelicals.

They're the best.

And if you want to say positive, in the positive light at focusing on church and family and what we call the life world, the small, intimate worlds in that we spend most of our time in.

And if you look at what we're doing in our churches and the books that get published, it's about how to build better families and have better marriages, all of that flows from our understanding theologically.

The problem is that somehow we make this jump to say that therefore structures are false, they're bad, they're evil, they don't exist, and so on.

It doesn't follow logically.

But that's what we have done.

I mean, even if we go through scriptures, there's this idea where idolatry was present within the nation.

It wasn't just individual.

I mean, it's individuals.

But individuals make up a structure, and they help create a structure and how we do things and what we're valued.

So when we're talking about structure, well, let's get some more definitions to help our audience out a little bit to kind of color in the lines.

Give us a working definition of structures.

Structures are.

I'm going to try to avoid the term sociology.

Okay, that's fine.

Structures are group guides, group policies, group norms and ways of life.

So all of us are born into a society that already is there and it already has a language.

Then we have to learn it, and it already has a structure.

Like, do you have to go to get education?

How are you going to do that?

What do you have to get a driver's license?

How long do you have to go to school?

All of that is just structures.

We all have to exist in it.

They actually.

It's actually there.

So that's structure, and it's.

It's.

I'm going to try to illustrate for our people.

So you grew up.

Did you grow up in Chicago?

I was born there, yes.

Okay.

Northside or Southsider?

Northside.

So you're a Cub fan?

Well, I become a White Sox fan.

Sorry.

Because I lived on.

Okay.

But let me just illustrate this for a minute.

I try to help people understand because whenever we get into the subject of racism and structures, racing rhetoric and tempers quickly become inflamed, and then people go into enemy mode, and the problem becomes bigger than the relationship rather than vice versa, and they stop hearing.

And I. I want people to understand I'm not trying again.

I'm.

I'm not attacking.

Please do not say that.

I'm here trying to tell you you're bad.

What I'm trying to get you to feel is what a person who has not been a beneficiary of the structure deals.

And I'm going to illustrate this by being a Cub fan for a minute, because the White Sox.

My.

My White Sox friend, like, is across the screen right now.

I don't know if you're like some of my other White Sox friends, but before the.

The Cubs won in 17, they would have parties every year at the beginning of Major League Baseball season celebrating Cubs futility.

And it became to the point where, as a Cubs fan, when it came to the postseason, you're like, we're Going to lose again.

It just became, you know, they became known as the lovable losers.

That story of failure and error and problem becomes part of your identity where you just can't find a way out of that narrative.

And when the structure doesn't benefit you and there's no one that looks like you or sounds like you, it's hard for you to break through that.

Now people do.

I'm not saying you don't.

We are in some respect a merit based society on, on some level.

Not all the way, because it is a lot about who you know.

It's just the way that it is who you know, like.

And so when you have that psychology of losing all the time, it's really hard to become a winner.

And.

But some, eventually some comes along and hopefully changes that culture, that period, that structure, if you will.

And then you can be like, oh, we can do this, we can win.

That's how I felt this year watching the Chicago Bears.

We can win.

What?

We can't win because our quarterback's always bad.

It's always bad.

Always bad.

So that's kind of what, in a way to illustrate it in a smaller way of what that is.

Right.

Am I right?

Absolutely, you're right.

Yeah.

Now I want to, I want to go back to one of the things that you said before.

Evangelicals are not known to be.

I mean, we've had some amazing intellectual thinkers, but as a whole, as a unit in our structure, we're not known for intellectual engagement because we are.

And you talk about this in the book.

We are activist.

We are.

What was the other terms that you used?

So activist.

Yeah.

Orthopraxy.

Utilitarian.

Yeah.

Immediacy.

Yes.

Right.

And that hasn't led to dealing with problems at a systemic level.

Correct.

Because we're always hurrying.

Why is it so important then to address these issues?

And what is the hope of addressing them?

Yeah, I'm going to use poverty here.

So every Thanksgiving, especially every Christmas, definitely Christmas.

Churches across the country are very interested in poor children for a season and the horror that they don't have as many toys as others.

So we do toy drives.

Very good.

I'm not trying to be facetious here.

We don't ever ask, stop and ask the question, why are there poor children?

We just accept that that's the structure.

Some people are poor.

If we really press it, we might say, well, their parents didn't work hard or parents on drugs or something happened.

But we're not trying to change that.

We're just trying to ameliorate the impact

of that for Christmas time, as Jesus said.

Because I hear evangelicals saying, well, Jesus said, the poor you will always have among you.

That's correct.

Right.

Yeah.

So we were like, oh, it's an ex.

We just accept it as it is.

Right.

In fact, it's almost wrong then to try to address it because Jesus said, they're going to be here, so we can't try to make it go away.

He was telling us that it's going to be here.

Yeah.

And we could have a whole nother discussion on that.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, we've had Brian Fickert on When Helping Hurts and the Chalmers center and a lot of his work dealing with poverty and helping people to understand that, having a holistic missio.

Holistic view of how to go about that.

But we're still talking about the structures and within American evangelicalism as a whole, because we have been beneficiaries of the structure.

Now we say white evangelicalism and people, again, some people might get offended.

I mean, there is a black evangelicalism, there is a Hispanic evangelicalism, there is all kinds of evangelicalism.

But we're talking to the people in our own tribe right now that we're a part of because we want to see the church really be the representation of the new community.

Why, though, do we have such a hard time as evangelicals?

Yes, we are hyper individualistic, which you've already established, but we see a reconciliation with God, but we.

We don't necessarily see a reconciliation with other people.

As a matter of fact, I've seen evangelicals say, no, that's not part of the gospel.

How did we get to this viewer?

It's just us and God, and we've dropped off the part where it's us and other people.

Yeah.

In a different book, we actually test this.

The way we've done that is highly selective reading of the Bible.

We literally just simply ignore verses, chapters, books that don't talk that way because we're just zoned into a way to think.

And so we're only going to see that.

We literally did an experiment where we had people online, we would give them Bible verses that had to do with other groups such as welcome the Foreigner, the Stranger, the Immigrant, things like that, and ask them, do you agree that's what the Bible is saying?

And white evangelicals, different from every other group, 2/3 would say in all those questions, that's not what the Bible says.

They didn't agree, even though the only way they got the question.

I should preface this is we first Asked them, do you believe that the Bible should always be used to determine right and wrong?

So only if they said yes, always did we then ask them these questions.

And that's what we found.

So we went and then did focus groups in churches where we sit in a circle, five, 10 people.

And when they didn't agree, we'd ask them why.

And it was very interesting.

One time.

Often they would say things like, well, you've got to know what comes before, what comes after.

Fine, you got to know context, but.

And I'll get to that in a moment.

But what also they would say is like on that about welcoming the foreigner, they say it doesn't say that you're supposed to welcome the illegal immigrant.

Well, that's not what the.

How did you get to illegal immigrant?

I mean, they, they would read into things and get angry about the interpretation of why they wouldn't have to support it.

The other thing I want to make clear on this is there were black folks, Asian folks, bank folks that didn't agree either with it much.

You know, just a minority.

But when they didn't and they said, well, you'd have to know what comes before and what comes after in these groups, because our groups were race specific, they would pull out their Bibles or the Bible apps and they would start discussing and looking.

We filmed these so we didn't notice this when we were doing the interviews, but when we went back and watched the video, when the white group said that they did not pull out their Bibles or their Bible apps, they just were saying, well, you have to know what comes before and after.

And that was enough explanation for why they didn't have to agree with it.

They weren't actually interested in what the holistic Bible had to say.

So highly selective use of the Bible.

I'm going to go out on a limb on this one because we had Mark Null on a couple times on the show and we're talking about how certain theological systems really shape your view and what you see in the Bible.

Yeah.

And there have been certain theological systems that have become premillennial dispensationalism.

Specifically one that I've been in my entire life, only until last five years.

Really, if I not I still hold some of those pieces.

But the framework I see a lot differently now because that framework determines what scriptures you see.

Like the Sermon on the Mount doesn't play within that framework very well.

Now some might, you might write to me and say, oh no, we agree.

Well, historically though, premillennial dispensationalist interpreters have had a very difficult time understanding where the Sermon on the Mount applies, because it looked to the millennium, and then the rest of the Old Testament is basically rendered as flyover, unless you're reading the Psalms or Genesis.

And so the prophets are just moved to the side.

But this is where interacting with other Christians from different ethnic and sometimes theological backgrounds.

Yeah.

Faith traditions, because they help expand, they challenge our blind spots to be able to see the fullness of the whole counsel of God.

Because if we start with a. I think back to the quest for the historical Jesus, you remember that.

And where they had the deck stacked before they even got to the text, where they said, we know that this didn't happen.

Miracles don't happen.

Well, when you start off with that premise, then your conclusion is going to be flawed.

So it's the same with this.

If you say, well, that's no longer relevant at all to speak to us, well, you're not gonna.

You're gonna get a flawed conclusion, and your gospel expression will be malformed.

Yeah.

So this is what we're trying to call people back to.

Let's look at the whole counsel of God's Word.

And that's what your.

Your text does.

And I.

What struck me, though, and this is where I felt like I had a guy in my church years ago, an older man, he would talk about how God.

He felt that God took him back behind the tool shed for discipline like he got as a kid.

And I was reading some of your stuff, and I was like, oh, no, that's what I did.

I did that same thing.

Because they looked at reconciliation as individuals and not as a collective unit.

And you talk about these two letters that were done to Christianity today.

You cite this.

Can you explain to us what these two letters said and what the differences were between them?

Because I find this fascinating.

Okay, sure.

So the letters between, you know, one being African American, one being white, and the way that they're interpreting.

So the.

The white person writing is saying that they've come to see that race is a real issue and it matters.

And.

But they.

Because of the.

The lenses that they have been given in their faith tradition, everything then gets zeroed down to individual.

I've got this relationship.

I've.

I read this book.

I followed this person.

I'm attempting to make a friend across race and giving those individual solutions, whereas the African American is talking about that race is real, and we've got this issue and we've got to address it.

And I'll give an example.

I Don't remember if this was in the letter, but you know, just the way our neighborhoods are set up, it's, I call it a Ponzi scheme.

We're all told you're gonna, you buy a home, you, it will rise in value and you'll make money when you sell it.

Very true.

If you live in a white neighborhood.

Very untrue.

On average, if you live in a black neighborhood or Hispanic neighborhood, my family has lived in black neighborhoods and Hispanic neighborhoods.

And I can tell you personally, we have lost money by doing what we were supposed to do.

Buy a home, take care of it, make it nice.

Because the appraiser said, well, the neighborhood you live in, you don't get money.

So talking about the real structures impacting, impacting people's lives.

So when we're talking about these structures, how do you go about changing structures?

And here's why I ask, because I feel like we're talking out of two sides of our mouths, if you will, especially as evangelicals, because I'm going to take it into the realm of abortion for a moment.

We don't want just an individual conversation to convince people.

We also need the laws in place in order to do that.

Now if we over rely on the laws, then we don't have the individual, but we need the individual and the law.

So you need the two together.

So we're saying the same in terms of the race issues because I've heard some say, well, I can do anything that anyone else can do.

Is there anything that that person who's a different ethnicity could do that I can't do?

So, so what's the problem here?

So what are we talking about when we're talking about challenging these structures?

Are we talking laws, are we talking about policies?

There's so many that are in place that in some respect people are like they're getting in the way.

Now how do you respond to that?

And I mean, how do we need to view that?

First of all, thank you for bringing up the abortion issue because one of the critiques that non evangelicals will make of our work there and divided by faith is how can you say the evangelicals are anti structural and don't care.

They're, they're busy out there in politics changing abortion laws and all of that.

My answer there is when things impinge on our life world, on our families, on our churches, on our neighborhoods, we are able to see, oh my gosh, there is a law there that is hurting my family that's so that, so we can do it.

And thank you for bringing that up.

And like you said, we're saying the same for race.

So since we don't see it for race, it's because we don't really understand what's going on for our fellow brothers and sisters because it's not impacting us, we're benefiting from it or we're not able to see the comparison.

That's part of the problem.

All right, so we actually have another book called Kingdom Racial Change.

And in it we say the way you go about changing structures is you, your group, your church, whatever, your parachurch organization.

You select one and only one issue that is making life unfair for a group of people, only one, and you spend your lifetime trying to change it.

The beauty is that all structures were created by us.

So all structures can be changed by us.

But because you have synergy and you have history flowing, it's hard to change things when they've been going for a couple hundred years.

But we've got evidence around the world of major upheaval and change.

So if you're committed to it, you can do.

Takes time.

It takes time.

You just have to know that.

And again, in evangelicalism, we don't want that.

I don't want to hear that.

It's got to do it now.

You know what blew my mind when we lived in Denmark is that whenever they made a policy like we're going to make this change trying to make life better, it was always a 30 year time period by which they measure it.

That would just not work in the us.

We're going to measure every quarter and we're going to give you 3, 4/4 to prove it's doing something.

They don't think that way.

Well, even now I get.

People send me articles all the time, oh, God's doing a work.

This Gen Z is our hope.

Gen Z is our hope.

Gen Z is our hope.

There's this massive revival happening and I'm just like, slow your roll, you know, I'm not trying to say that I don't want God be doing a work.

And I'm not trying to just poo poo anything that I see that's out there.

I want to get behind a genuine work of God.

But I also know that sometimes media takes, I mean, throws gas on a flame and makes it bigger than it really is.

I want to know the staying power.

Is it real?

Is it generating a difference?

And whether it does or whether it doesn't, I'm trying to live in my front row.

Like I'm trying to make a difference.

In the world in which I live in.

And if that's great, hey, praise God for that.

There are certain things that are happening, but societally I can't just trumpet that media and become comfortable and not do anything where I'm at.

I've got to live out locally where I am and ensure that fairness.

One of the things that I find as I'm talking to a lot of evangelicals today is just the sense of being overwhelmed to know what to care about and what not to and what's being forced to coerced or voluntary.

And I remember talking with a friend of yours, he's been on the show George Yancey about this and they were talking about dei and I know that now has become a buzzword for anything else, but he said when DEIs are done at work and if they're, they're forced to participate in it, the racial dynamic doesn't change.

But if it's voluntary, it does.

Yeah.

And then that's the part where I go, okay, so if we enact some laws, is that compelling or is that, is it just restricting?

Because it is to restrain the evil and enable the good.

We know that it can restrain evil, but it can't enable virtue.

How do we then help people to want to have this conversation without them being forced and being villainized for them even processing the conversation because people are trying to process, it's like they stop on a verbal landmine and it blows up because now they're evil or bigoted or whatever.

And so they just like, I'm done.

And they step out of the conversation and surround themselves with their friends and say, I don't need to have this conversation anymore.

Yeah, how do we help people then to have that conversation?

Okay, so the number one Christian value that has to be at the forefront and isn't as you just described, but it must be, is grace.

We have to understand we are human, we will make mistakes.

I'll say things you find offensive.

Grace, it's okay.

It's a process.

We're learning together.

So if we could have grace filled communities and emphasize that.

I also think, you know, in terms of the bigger picture there, as you're saying, if we teach the whole Bible and not just some of the Bible, then we are going to impact people, we're going to impact our communities and we're going to see a different result.

There's a book called Rediscipling the White Church.

David Swanson, the pastor in Chicago, and what blew my mind there is what he was talking about.

It's Got a chapter on how we do Sunday school for little kids.

Even the stuff we there, we're already teaching them there how to have this individualistic, narrow kind of perspective of the Bible.

And they're looking at just what Bible verses do they learn and which ones do they never learn.

And so we can make a major change just, you know, in our Sunday school.

Let me.

I want to.

I want to play on that for a second because.

And again, those are out there.

When we talk about individualism, some of you are saying, I don't get it.

What do you mean?

I'm an individual, of course.

Ask me.

And my relationship with God.

We're not saying that's bad.

We're saying it's incomplete.

Incomplete?

Yeah.

You need to expand it and to give you an idea.

And this is going to really illustrate it, I think.

Well, for some of my white brothers and sisters that are out there, I was in India and I was with a friend of mine who was also a white man who had worked with a ministry that I was there visiting and learning about the ministry.

And I wanted to do some kind of sociology.

I'm not a sociologist, but I wanted to ask questions and interviews and form opinions and to learn about how people had come to faith that were at this school where I was.

And so they brought this young couple in.

They were married just a couple of years and they had a small child.

And I wanted to know how they came to faith.

So I asked the man how he came to faith, and he told me.

And then I asked the young woman how she came to faith.

And then her husband answered for her.

And my friend stopped and goes, no, no, he doesn't want to hear from you.

He wants to hear from her.

And again, there's a cultural issue.

And so she.

She was, okay, like, wait a minute, I have this opportunity now to speak.

And she was a little bit nervous.

Either she was fearful over what her husband was going to say or what he was going to think, but she answered it.

And I said, how did you come to faith in Jesus?

And it wasn't this radical Jesus moment for her that, you know, not a Damascus Road moment.

It was actually quite benign and almost an insult to a Westerner.

And here's what she said.

She goes, my father became a believer in Jesus, so we all did.

But it was a collective.

And an American who's an individualist does not understand that.

Like, wait, no, you have to do it individually.

You have to do it individually.

Now, you've already shown your cultural viewpoint has over overshadowed Hers, I didn't doubt the fact that she was a believer in Jesus.

And let me throw it out there to some of my other friends again, you know, in Acts, it says that he and his whole household believed.

Yes, that's what was going on.

So it was a collective.

It was communal.

And you still see this in other cultures today.

I've worked with them in Asian cultures.

The nail.

That's the phrase is the nail that sticks out gets the hammer.

So it's.

They don't value individualism.

We do now.

That's not always a bad thing.

Okay, it's a good thing, but it's a bad thing when it overruns the community piece.

And not only are we individualistic today.

Hyper individualistic.

Yeah.

Right.

So.

So this is what we're talking about.

We need to have both.

Correct.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And the problem, of course, is what you illustrated is we don't know that we're not having both.

Like in that example, we would assume, of course, we're right and she's wrong.

You've got to accept Jesus individually and we're.

We just.

It doesn't even dawn on us that there could be another way or that.

As you just illustrated, the Bible actually gives us examples of that.

Yeah.

And.

But it's an affront to our theology.

And that's how.

How much that individualization has got into our hearts.

And even now there.

There are pastors out now that are.

That are wrestling with this.

And I get it.

I've been there.

I'm one of those guys.

I.

It took me a long time to wrestle with those texts because when I was confronted by it, and this is why, by the way, I'm just going to put this out there because you said this at the beginning.

One of the things that really changed your perspective is living in Denmark, when you have to live in a different culture or interact with a different culture for any period of time, that changes your perspective.

It does, because you start to realize, wait a minute, there's a different way of doing things than I realized.

And that's what we're trying to do right now.

Let's look around the world.

Let's look in different countries, different cultures, look at the scripture itself, and we'll find that there is a different way.

But ours has been so conformed to assert or shaped by the values that our culture holds so dear that we've syncretized it or emphasized it to the degree, overemphasized it to an underemphasis on this side.

You know, I think about a Person who, like my son right now, is really into weightlifting.

And he's like showing off his muscles all the time in the mirror and taking pictures.

And people would look at him and go, you're really in shape.

But he couldn't run that far.

He's emphasized one part or even one part of his body.

His arms are big and his legs are little.

It's like you can overemphasize one thing and under emphasize another, and you're not really healthy.

And the same is true here.

So when we're talking about these issues and seeing it, how do we then help people navigate these waters, to have these conversations of understanding?

And what is the end goal?

Like, what's.

What's the result?

What are we hoping for by drawing attention to this?

We're not trying to villainize.

We're trying to help give hope and expand your view of the kingdom of God and other people.

Because your, your view will grow if you do this.

Your listeners know are way more theologically adept than I am.

But we know that Jesus spent a whole, a lot of time, in fact, much more time talking about the kingdom of God here on earth than individual salvation.

So if the Lord, who we follow, thought it's so important to talk about this thing, the kingdom of God, we really got to pay attention.

And that's got to be part of our theology.

That's the end goal to realize Jesus saying, if you love me, obey my commands, build the kingdom of God here on earth.

That's what we're trying to do.

A kingdom of God on earth is not segregated by race.

It is not divided by class.

That's what the world does.

We're supposed to be doing the opposite.

So we are trying to figure out how to do the opposite.

And it's hard.

It's so hard.

But that doesn't mean we stop.

We trust that Christ will empower us.

And it's.

And you're going to make mistakes, by the way.

You're going to say stupid stuff.

You're going to say stupid stuff.

It's okay.

As long as you come in with a humble attitude.

People.

If people know you're genuine and you actually want to learn, then they'll talk to you and you're going to learn from them.

By the way, I've learned so much from doing a lot of these different things by interacting.

You know, I go back, I often talk about Eugene Peterson's book.

I can't remember which one.

I think it was on the Rumor, on the Angles or something like that.

But he talks about the four angels in the book of Revelation, throwing, surrounding the throne of God, saying, holy, holy, holy is the Lord God Almighty.

The whole earth is filled with his glory.

And he said, I liken it to the four corners of the earth, saying to one another, this is what I see about God.

What do you see?

This is what I see about God.

What do you see?

And it's like every culture brings out a different facet of God's person and being that one culture doesn't have.

And when you interact with that, your view of God actually grows bigger.

Yeah.

And I understand it can be very uncomfortable, especially if you're interacting with someone from a different culture.

It makes you feel uncomfortable.

And you talk about this in the book.

We don't like being uncomfortable.

It's a high value that we have in our culture.

But let's put this out there for people, because we do talk to ministry leaders, but we also talk to people in the pew.

How do we help churches navigate this?

Because in some respect, many of them that are listening are beneficiaries of.

And you talk about this in the book, the Homogeneous Unit Principle.

We talked about this often on the show, but for those who are new, tell us what the homogeneous unit principle is and how it is affecting church bodies today.

Great.

So the whole this is a funny name, right?

Homogeneous unit principle actually was proposed by a theologian.

I'm not going to say who, but the idea was.

And.

And it was actually tested and found to be true.

And I believe it is true.

You can grow the church fastest by appealing to one specific group.

And I'll give an example.

So I was part of a multiracial church in Minneapolis when we lived there, and the pastor was starting the church and it was in a denomination, and when he's filling out the paperwork, the denomination, one of the questions on the survey was, which people group will you be targeting?

And he wrote everybody, and they got it rejected.

And they said, no, which people group?

Because this whole denomination used the homogenous units principle.

He said, no, I want to reach across all races, economics.

And again, they said, that's not how it works.

Your church will not survive.

So that's what the homogeneous units principle is, and it's used by many, many people.

The idea then is that churches grow fastest when they attract people that look and sound just like them.

Yep.

Because that makes them the most comfortable with each other.

It's one culture.

It's all.

You don't have to worry about conflict that way.

Which even when we were talking to Brian Miller, another man that you know and guest on the show where he was mentioning that even our, even where we locally live in some respect is because we're surrounded with other people that have a view like us.

And if you're from the suburbs, he's like, the suburbs are designed to minimize conflict in many respect because we don't like conflict, we don't like to struggle.

We want it to be easy.

We don't want to have to work.

We just want to.

We already are isolated enough, so we're going to come out to actually interact with people and it's going to be hard.

I don't want that.

And yet that is what the kingdom of God, what the church is supposed to be, is showing the world the reality of the new creation worked out in us to show what living under the rule of God looks like so that the world can see and know who Jesus is and then want to be attracted.

John 17.

Absolutely.

I pray they may be one as we are one, so the world may know that.

You, you sent me.

Now this has worked.

Now, one of the things you talk about in the book is how difficult this is.

And honestly, I told you in the kind of the pre show, it depressed me.

Like I got angry at your book.

I did.

I didn't know you, but I was like, this sucks.

Not that I'm a get like I want to do this, I've done this.

But when you presented it, I don't know if I was overwhelmed by the data or the fact that I felt called out by how I had approached it individually.

I had not looked at the law piece.

I was trying to live that relationship.

I was one of those people that you state in the book, you know, I have this friend and that friend and that culture and that culture.

And I felt I was mad.

I just, I was mad, Michael.

I was mad.

Yeah.

And you're saying, no, that's incomplete.

So.

So I, I went away a little hopeless until you started talking about the church.

The church has the potential of being the greatest reconciling and piece of this thing, does it not?

100%.

Absolutely, yes.

How so how do we get them people to want to do something like that again?

That's already uncomfortable and they're struggling as it is.

Yeah.

You know, if we're at that, we're obviously.

And I'm thinking again now, pastors, as you're teaching.

One of the things that's so interesting to me is that I've hardly ever met a pastor who hasn't told me that if they try to preach about structures or policies or issues like racial inequality, that it's almost for certain one or more parishioners going to come up after and say, stick to the gospel.

You're getting political, even though they might be.

Even though they're typically preaching directly out of Scripture.

So that's the challenge, right?

The challenge is that people are coming in already with an assumption and a determination of what the gospel is.

And your job is to broaden them to really understand the gospel in the kingdom of God.

And sometimes the biggest challenge is the people that have been Christian the longest because they have been the most socialized into a limited perspective.

So is there hope?

Of course there is.

We have to change how we teach.

We have to change our structures.

I'm going to give an example again.

Go back to Denmark.

We moved to Copenhagen, Denmark, and I got, we got a letter in the mail.

I was just going to live there for a time.

I wasn't going to become a citizen or anything.

We had a few children that were with us.

We got a letter in the mail.

It was in Danish.

So once we translated it, this is what it said.

In honor and support of raising your family, we will be depositing money monthly into your bank account.

And they did.

And when we moved back to the United States, they wouldn't stop depositing money into our bank account until our children turned 18.

That's one example among so many.

And we just like, what, what is going on?

And when we interviewed people and said, they said, this comes out of our, we were Christian.

They're very secular as people now.

Right.

But as a Christian nation, this was part of how we express Christian values.

We want to collectively help support raising families.

And it just, what blew my mind is like we, we just wouldn't even think of that as a Christian thing in the US we just say every family do it.

And we try to help each family individually figure out how to make it happen.

So I'm saying that if we can have that vision as a church, I'll give another example.

There was a denomination, Swedish denomination, here in the US all the church is white, starting to slow down and growth big time.

They read this original version of this book, some other books, and made the determination as a denomination that they are going to emphasize planting multi ethnic, multiracial churches.

And they did.

And they're like something like 30% of their churches now are.

And they're a very fast growing denomination now.

But I saw the president of this denomination make a presentation.

He said if we separate our multi Ethnic churches and all of our historical churches, our white churches, if it was just our white churches, we have declined substantially in the number of people in this denomination.

All our growth is because of making this structural move to emphasizing and supporting the growth of multi ethnic churches, which

is really the future.

It is.

It's the future whether people realize it or not.

It is because the browning of Christianity worldwide and it's happening in the United States.

You can cite all the reasons why and you can try to fight against it.

But I keep thinking about Paul when he's trying to figure out who's talking to him on the road to Damascus.

And it's like, why do you kick against the goads?

Why are you kicking against something that God is doing?

Because he's brought the nations.

You can look at that diaspora that's gone on with 56 million people being displaced.

I know your friend Christian Smith had written how part of the reason where we're at today is we're confronting multiracial education, which I don't think is a bad thing.

I actually think it's broadening us and it's removing us from a Christendom culture which I think relies upon earthly power for its expansion and coercion to a missionary mode of Christian expansion and Christian transmission where it's relying on heavenly power to really articulate and fine tune to get back to what the Gospel was and how it was understood and in the first few centuries before it became united with empire.

And this is where I think it's just so key to move forward.

But I also think that God is doing it.

I mean you think about what's going on with Islam.

I remember there was a stat in, in across the world.

And again you're talking about a very large swath of people, about 2 billion people if I, if I have my numbers correct, of, of Muslims in the world.

And that's a very diverse group within that.

And they, and they consider a movement thousand baptized believers in a certain place within a certain time frame.

So there's this movement of God's people.

Like you're seeing growth in Iran, growth in China, growth in other countries like Nepal, Africa, exploding with the gospel, Brazil, South America.

But yet Western nations seem to be on the decline and God's bringing in these different nations that I think for one of two reasons, to either be reached with the gospel and that they've not heard it and they didn't have access to it, or two, to revive the churches that are there, and many of them are Christian.

So to neglect this element, you're doing so at your peril Biblically.

I think you're kicking against the goads.

Yes.

And you need to embrace that element.

And it's not just black and white.

There's Hispanic, there's Asian, there's all cultures that are around there.

And it might mean that you're not in charge either, by the way, and you lose power and your theological boundaries might not fit theirs.

And you have to work through that.

That's a real thing you got to work through.

Yeah.

And you actually have to think, maybe God is sending people here because I need to learn something, not just that I need to convert them or whatever.

Right.

We talked before that.

We started the show officially.

You know, my father being Norwegian, he would say to me, son, Norway is for Norwegians, France is for French, Korea is for Koreans, but America is for everybody.

We have such an amazing opportunity to have the whole world and be able to learn the fullness of God without even having to go anywhere.

If we would only interact with everybody that God's sending in our neighborhoods.

In our neighborhoods, in our cities, in our towns.

That's where I wonder.

After talking with Brian Miller, my question was, is, can the gospel expressions.

Because he talks about how.

Of course, and you know this.

But for those that don't know, haven't listened to that episode where Chicago was predominantly white and of course, African Americans moved in, and you can actually see the white flight there.

It literally is just everybody moves out of the suburbs, and there were Christians left, and they took their denominational headquarters with them.

I mean, it's just documented.

You just see it.

And one of the things that has.

That I've really noticed in recent years is that our Gospel articulations were also not only what we saw theologically, but in some respect, they were a boundary writing, a boundary line to keep us as a unit.

But it often reinforced ethnic identity markers just as much as theological ones.

And even in the suburbs, it was to convey a certain way of life, how the suburb was articulated, how it was laid out.

And my question is, as suburbs become much more ethnically diverse, can the churches that are there that are predominantly Caucasian, and I know there's ethnic churches across the board, which is great, but can Each one of those become more diverse.

I have an African American church I'm working with right now in the suburbs of Raleigh, Durham, North Carolina.

They want to become more ethnically diverse, and I think that's awesome.

But can your gospel expression handle their questions and your articulations?

And this is where it's going to be uncomfortable because you got to work through why do we have that?

What does the scripture say?

How do we go about it?

Not then to deny our heritage, but to recognize that our heritage had been formed in certain cultural environments.

And we have to continually semper reformanda.

Yes, every church can of course, and should if their neighborhood is diversifying.

You reach the people in your neighborhood.

There are many books that you can look at.

One I want to recommend that may not know of is called the Color of Church by Rodney Woo Woo, where he actually talks about exactly his experience of going to an all white church, even though he's part Chinese.

And the neighborhood had changed and the church had decided.

They had a big decision.

They wanted to move to where all their people were moving to, further out in the suburbs.

This was in the city of Houston.

And ultimately one deacon argued so forcefully that our mission is to be here.

That's why we're here.

We just have to hire a new pastor that has a vision for this neighborhood.

And it just tells the story of how they went from being all white where they literally handed cards.

If you came and visited and you were not white, they would have cards.

If you were African American, it would say, welcome, we think you'd be more comfortable at.

And we give the name of a church.

They had a separate Chinese mission that they would give them a card and say, go to that to now.

44 different nations in the church.

And it's just a very easy read to see how it happened and what you might do.

Well, I lived that absolutely same thing in Chicago.

We were talking in the pre show that Michael comes from a Norwegian background.

And the church that I was at in Chicago on the Northwest side was all Norwegian when it was founded.

And now that's what the church reflects, which I think is awesome.

That's what the church should.

It should reflect the neighborhood and that it's in and all of its diversity, whether it's ethnically, educationally, socioeconomically.

You should, your church should, should represent the neighborhood that you're in and not Only the attendance, but your worship, your leadership.

And I'm not saying it's a one to one, like, okay, we have so many.

We need one for this or one for that.

But you should have the eyes to see, to be able to create that.

Isn't that right?

Absolutely, yeah.

So as you've, we've talked about all this and again, I don't want to bash people on the head.

That's not because I just feel like we want to be.

I mean, we got to call things out when they're bad and that people need to pay attention to it.

So that's what we're saying.

Pay attention, have eyes to see and see.

Just look at the history.

Don't try to color it, don't try to gloss over it because there's some negative out there, but there's also good.

So let's remove the rot and let's build upon the good that's there so that the vision in the kingdom of God can continue forth.

So as we kind of wrap up this conversation and there's so much more we could talk about.

I know, and we probably will after this is over.

I normally don't talk so much.

So forgive me for this because you're the expert, not me.

But this is an area that I've lived out.

So it's exciting to talk to someone who knows about it and has written about it.

What is your hope and what's a water bottle that we can give our audience that they can sip on?

What Christ gives us to do on earth?

We only, you know, we get a few decades to do.

It is so mind blowingly exciting.

That's what we want to focus on.

So like when you read a book like Divided by Faith, which is depressing because it's telling you what's actually happening, do not sit in that.

Simply say, as you're trying to emphasize here, as we've talked, that's just we need to know what is going on so that we can counter it as we're building the kingdom of God.

The water bottle is we are building the kingdom of God.

So we want to be aware of what is actually happening for us individually, but also for our larger group.

And we're going to overcome it through the power of Christ.

Amen and Amen.

That is our hope, that is our prayer.

That is, I think, the thing you take away from the book.

I would encourage all of those out there to get the book, read it.

It's going to make you uncomfortable.

So if you don't want to be uncomfortable don't read it, but I think we all need a little bit of uncomfortability sometimes we need to take a look in the mirror to see what's really there so that we can, we can address it and and find what the cause is and then do our best as God gives us the power by His Spirit to help to find a more perfect union.

And again using political language, but something that the scripture really does address so that the glory of God might shine forth and that other people who are far away might come to the saving knowledge of who Jesus is.

Michael Emerson thank you for being a guest on Ministry Deep Dive.

Again.

I've been honored.

Thanks for inviting me.

Thank you for joining us on today's episode of Ministry Deep Dive.

Today's conversation invited us to see the world through the lens of Missiolism's four pillars and to consider what faithfulness looks like in our divided culture moment.

We were reminded that the gospel isn't just about personal salvation or personal transformation.

It's the good news that God is reconciling all things, including the fractures we often overlook.

We were invited to remember that the kingdom is unfolding right now.

God's story is advancing even in the places marked by tension, inequity or misunderstanding.

Our role is to live as participants in that story, not just simply be bystanders standards.

And we're also challenged to consider the church as the new creation community, something that I just absolutely love, shaped by Christ, formed in love and called to embody a different way of being together than the world around us.

And we were pushed to engage the culture with honesty and courage, recognizing the ways that it shapes us, the systems it creates, and the opportunities it gives us to bear witness through truth, justice and compassion.

And I want to let you know that if this episode has helped you to think more deeply about your own leadership and the work that God is calling you to, please share it with someone who needs it right now.

They are dying on the vine and they need this water also.

Be sure to leave a review.

Stay connected with us@apolloswater.org and keep leaning into the hard but hopeful work of living out the mission of God in everything and every way.

Until next time, keep diving deep, grace in peace.

Travis Michael Fleming Signing out.