Rev. Dr. Sarah Hinlicky Wilson joins us to elucidate her extensive work in fostering greater Church Unity across diverse global contexts. Through her profound insights, we explore the critical necessity of speaking truthfully to one another, a practice she asserts is vital for the vitality of the Church in our contemporary, tumultuous culture. Dr. Wilson reflects on her experiences as a pastor in Japan, highlighting the unique challenges faced by Christians in a predominantly non-Christian society, and emphasizes the importance of local ecumenical relationships over abstract theological dialogues. As she articulates the imperative of grounding our ecclesiastical identities in shared beliefs, particularly through the historical creeds, we are reminded that unity is not merely an ideal but a tangible commitment lived out in community. This episode serves as a clarion call for Christians everywhere to engage in meaningful conversations and collaborative actions that transcend denominational boundaries in pursuit of a more unified Church.

The conversation between Joshua Noel, TJ Blackwell, and Pastor Sarah Hinlicky Wilson unfolds in a profound exploration of church unity, drawing upon her extensive experience as a pastor and theologian. Pastor Sarah reflects on her tenure at a Lutheran church in Tokyo, a context characterized by a small Christian demographic in a predominantly non-Christian nation. She articulates the complexities of fostering community and dialogue among disparate Christian traditions, emphasizing the necessity of understanding and respecting each denomination's unique contributions to the larger body of Christ. Through her narratives, she challenges the notion of ecumenism as a luxury, suggesting instead that true unity emerges from local, meaningful interactions rather than abstract theological debates. The discussion is enriched by Pastor Sarah's insights into the importance of theological education and the role of creeds in unifying believers across generations and cultural contexts. Her emphasis on the creeds as foundational expressions of faith underscores a critical pathway for achieving greater understanding and collaboration among different Christian communities.

Takeaways:

1. Pastor Sarah Hinlicky Wilson emphasized the significance of renewing our minds for church unity, as articulated in Ephesians 4, which calls for spiritual transformation and truthfulness among believers.
2. The complexity of understanding truth in a noisy culture was highlighted, where individual perceptions of truth do not necessarily align with objective truth as defined by Christian doctrine.
3. Ecumenism, while often viewed as a luxury, becomes essential when congregations feel secure in their identity and are more willing to engage with one another.
4. Pastor Sarah shared her experiences in Japan, noting that the ecumenical landscape is challenged by a small Christian population, which affects the willingness to collaborate among different denominations.
5. A call to action was made for local church leaders to connect personally, suggesting that practical collaboration can foster unity beyond theological differences.
6. Pastor Sarah remarked that understanding and using the historic creeds can guide congregations towards greater unity, as they encapsulate core Christian beliefs shared across denominations.

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Be sure to listen to these episodes of Sarah's podcast, "The Queen of the Sciences":

Hey Jude

Unbaptized God

Pastoral Preaching

They are darkened in their understanding, excluded from the life of God because of the ignorance that is in them, and because of the hardness of their hearts, they became callous and gave themselves over to promiscuity for the practice of every kind of impurity, with a desire for more and more.

But that is not how you came to know Christ, assuming you heard about him and were taught by him, as the truth is in Jesus, to take off your former way of life, the old self that is corrupted by deceitful desires, to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to put the new self, the one created according to God's likeness, in righteousness and purity of the truth. Therefore, putting away lying, speak the truth, each one to his neighbor, because we are members of one another.

So in the book of Ephesians, St. Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus about what it means to be the church. And in this pericope, particularly, St. Paul emphasizes the importance of the renewal of our minds and teaching one another in truth.

Pastor Sarah Henlicke Wilson Reverend Dr. Sarah Henlicke Wilson why might this practice of speaking truth to one another be important for the vitality of the whole church today?

Well, we are certainly a noisy culture these days, and a noisy church culture, and we like to say lots of things. I think most people like to think that they're speaking the truth when they say it.

But one of the disturbing things that the Apostle Paul wants to push us to understand is that just because in our own eyes we're pursuing what's good or what's truthful doesn't mean it's actually good, doesn't mean it's actually truthful.

And that's why the church has always committed itself to the discipline of theology, always shrouded carefully in prayer and worship and fellowship with others and making use of every tool available. And even that is no guarantee. Being a theologian is no guarantee that you're going to be good or truthful either.

But as part of our worship of what Jesus calls loving God with all of our minds, we really try to understand what is true, even when truth seems scary.

But we always make ourselves vulnerable in the face of the truth, rather than using it as a club to make others vulnerable in the presence of ourselves.

Yeah, good stuff. Good stuff. Hey, guys, welcome to the Whole Church podcast, possibly your favorite church Unity podcast.

But it's completely cool if it's not because we're not in competition to see who's more united with the church than the other podcast. Like that's. It's just nonsensical.

But what's very sensible is acknowledging the presence of the greatest co host of all time, the one only, Pod almighty, TJ Tabiers one Blackwell. Welcome to your show.

Thank you.

And we're here with a wonderful guest, one of the other greatest co hosts of a different podcast. We're here.

Someone I'm excited to speak with who was pastor in Tokyo, has her own podcast, the Queen of the Sciences, the one and only Pastor Sarah Henlicke Wilson. Welcome to the whole Church podcast.

Thank you. I'm so delighted that you invited me to be on here with you two today.

Yeah. Thank you for joining us. Little context for the listeners.

I know about pastors here from a school project I had to do a while back about seeing people doing ministry in a different context. And I was looking into doing a Tokyo trip and saw she was a pastor at church there. Yeah, let me talk to you. And we had a great conversation then.

And I've been waiting for her to be back in the States to, to do this episode. We've been waiting for this.

Yeah. So big stuff.

And if you're not familiar, Reverend Dr. Sarah Henlicke Wilson has written, edited and contributed to numerous books on both theology and fiction, and has published hundreds of articles.

She hosts the podcast Queen of Sciences, like we mentioned, writes the E newsletter Theology and A Recipe and the substack Sarah Henlick Wilson Stories. Also the founder of Thornbush Press. So, any other titles you want to throw in there before we keep it moving? Pastor Sarah.

My two most recent are seven ways of looking at the transfiguration and 40 facets of the Ascension, which were composed thinking especially of pastors who have to preach on those every single year, even if they have long since run out of things to say. You might guess that I myself had run out of things to say.

So I did a deep dive into both and discovered more than could be preached on in a lifetime of Transfiguration Sundays or Ascension Thursdays. Or if you push Ascension forward, you could call it an Ascension Sunday too.

But they are also very accessible for people who are just really passionate about scripture and theology. You do not need to be a pastor to appreciate these books.

All right, so if you're listening and you enjoy the show, go to the website, buy one of the T shirts. It helps promote us, raises money for podcasting needs.

And it is an easy way to let others know about the importance of our mission to educate and unite the church. My personal favorite, as always, is the TJ quote on the back. It is the most plain shirt. There's nothing on the back. It's just the logo on the front.

It's nice and clean and simple. Check out the Onazzle Podcast Network website.

The link is below for shows that are like ours or shows that aren't like ours and shows that we like to like.

Yeah, yeah. Good place to go to, you know, see other stuff. I started talking about the Book of Daniel this week on Be Living Water.

So if you want to see more Daniel content from me, check that out. But we are going to start this episode off with a holy sacrament of silliness, actually what we always like to do over here.

So you can't be anything other than united. You have to be united. When you're being as silly as I like to be. Maybe. Probably not. But today's silly question.

Tj and I'll answer first, give you time to think about it.

If you could have any animated character from outside of Alice in Wonderland make you a very merry unbirthday cake, who would you choose to bake your cake? I'll go first. What's this? We had some outline mix up, so TJ might also need some time to think. Oh, no. Did you want to go first?

Yeah, sure.

I already know my answer.

Chowder. Chowder from Chowder Fair.

Okay. Yeah, that's good answer. Yep.

Yep. If you haven't seen Chowder and you're listening. Sorry, A little younger than most of our audience.

I forgot about Chowder. Honestly, pretty good show. Yeah. I hadn't seen it all the way through.

I've seen some episodes, but I did get in that you shouldn't watch where I was like, no, you know, not as much. My answer, though, Genie from Aladdin. Cuz apricots largely growing in that region. And I feel like.

So for me personally, my favorite tea was a very merry unbirthday tea that Disney World made a very apricoty. So when I'm thinking about my unbirthday cake, I feel like I want apricot present. Like a good chance of having genie making it.

Also, he got into cooking in the later movies and stuff. He still got a little bit of magic. So it's got to be a pretty good cake, I think. Yeah. But Pastor Sarah, what about you?

Which animated character outside of Alice in Wonderland who's making your very merry unbirthday cake.

My mind is exploding here with this reference to the animated film, which I have not seen in forever. But I suppose I would call upon Tintin.

Ooh, good choice. Yeah, Tintin would get it done.

I just feel like he'd be very competent and whatever it was, it would taste good.

Yeah, yeah. I thought about a vivi from one piece also. Honorable mention.

Yeah, no, I would trust Hinton to do pretty much anything.

Yeah, that's a good one.

Pretty much anything. So to move on to the.

The non sacramental part of the show, one thing that we found really helps in gender unity and the whole church is to listen to one another's stories. So could you share some about your history with the faith and how you got into all the various ministries and content production that you do now?

Yeah, gosh, when I started, there wasn't such a phrase as content production.

Yeah, it's weird to think of writing as content production. Like, it just feels wrong to use that term.

But yeah, actually, I am one of those people that my.

My life splits neatly into an entire childhood and adolescence with zero Internet and an adulthood entirely with, and then gradually social media and then smartphones. I'm very grateful for a childhood without the Internet. I think that was great.

And I'm sorry for children probably like you, who grew up with it looming over our lives.

I was super poor, so.

Okay.

Didn't have Internet until I was like, in college.

You are privileged in that respect. Yeah.

That's pretty nice.

That poverty is privilege for sure.

I loved having it. I didn't use that much, but I loved having it there.

Okay.

But that's because I didn't know how to use it. I still went and bought the books that told me how to play games because I don't know how to use Google.

All right. All right. Well, yeah, good luck guys. When you get to child rearing. Anyway, so anyway, back to my story.

I am a pastor's kid and actually pastor's grandkid as well. And my other grandfather was a Lutheran school teacher. All Lutherans on every which way in the family.

And I was in church every Sunday And I had a good experience.

Somehow it seems like you don't get to have a compelling faith story unless, you know, you converted from nothing or you had, like, a very tortured relationship with as young, or you committed some really horrible sin. And once I was blind. Now I was seeing you're singing Amazing Grace. Sorry. I got a story basically of continuity.

Had some struggles and griefs over the years, but I was blessed from my family onward. I was baptized as an infant. I was raised in the faith, and it was good, and it made life rich and interesting.

And I didn't think when I was young that I would go into it for a living. In fact, like, probably like most young folks, I was like, I'm going to do something different from mom and dad.

But I think my second theology class, my first semester of my freshman year of college, I realized with the sinking feeling, oh, no, this is it. This is what I love. I'm going to go into the family business. Still didn't want to be a pastor. Resisted that pretty long.

So I didn't end up getting ordained until I was 29 or 30, by which point I was already doing a doctoral program in theology. So it was kind of inevitable in the end.

But, yeah, I served as a pastor for a little under two years in Trenton, New Jersey, while I was finishing up my doctorate.

Then I went to live in France, in Strasbourg, which is on the eastern side, just across the Rhine from Germany, to work in ecumenism for almost eight years. I was invited there to work on Lutheran Orthodox dialogue because I'd written my on an Orthodox Theologian.

And when I got there, my colleague said, well, Sarah, Pentecostalism is the youngest Christian movement, and you are the youngest member of the staff, therefore you will start doing this, too. So I had to quickly read a lot of books and kind of sort of make myself into an expert on Pentecostalism.

And if you're a Lutheran, it doesn't take very much to be more of an expert than absolutely everyone else in the Lutheran family, because Lutherans have tended to be a little nervous around Pentecostals. But that was great. Very enjoyable. I've done a little bit with Lutheran Catholic and Lutheran Mennonite dialogue as well.

And it also gave me a chance during the eight years we were there to just see a lot of the world, see the church in a lot of parts of the world, to get a much bigger vision, especially for what Lutheran churches look like around the world, in addition to the ecumenical work. And then we came back to the US For a Little bit thinking we would stay.

My husband became professor of church history at Japan Lutheran College and Seminary, and I became a congregational pastor again, serving the English ministry of Tokyo Lutheran Church. And we were there until last year.

And now we are back and after an extended sabbatical, are working on the next thing, which at the time of recording, is not official enough for me to share with you, unfortunately. But stuff is in process.

And meanwhile, I keep on writing books and recording podcasts and reading books and thinking and talking and praying and having theologian friends and pastor friends and Christian friends to talk to about all the things nice.

Praise God.

Yeah, it's a good time. So you wrote a memoir about your time in the Republic of Slovakia when you were younger.

How do you think that experience may have influenced your path going forward from there?

So I just think everyone needs to catch up with that by now.

Also, even when I was growing up, I was like, czechoslovakia, that's a. That's a country that exists. Not for one second in my entire lifetime has that been true.

Right, right. And also, I just want to say, on my dad's side of the family, we're ethnically Slovak, real Slovaks and Slovak Americans. The adjective is Slovak.

It's only ignorant fools like those who, unfortunately are the proofreaders at the New York Times say horrible, non exist words like Slovakian. So, please, if there's nothing else people take from that, this podcast, from now on, never say Slovakian again or I will find you.

Okay, so that aside, yeah, we.

The reason we moved to Slovakia is because after the end of communism, which was a mere four years before we arrived, there was an absolute flood of students into the seminary because there are many faithful who kept their head down. But you really suffered a lot. Not in the overt kind of killing or imprisoning persecution.

In Czechoslovakia, as in East Germany, there was much more of a soft. They were more interested in breaking people's spirit through forcing them into collaborations than actually killing them.

Because they figured out if you kill them, you make martyrs. If you compromise them, that's how you more successfully rot the church from the inside out.

And you know, there would be lost opportunities or limits in travel or not being able to do advanced study or things like that. So when those disappeared, suddenly the population of the seminary quintupled basically. But most of the professors were quite elderly.

Very few young people had been allowed to take doctorates. So there weren't enough professors. They were old, they were tired, they'd spent their whole lives, 40 years under communism.

And there was a real generation gap between them and these young folks who were suddenly experiencing freedom and McDonald's and seminary without blowback. It was hard. So anyway, because of my dad's, you know, deep family connections.

Although he didn't, he didn't grow up speaking Slovak, though his father spoke Slovak and conducted worship services in slovak through the 80s, I think. Yeah. So my dad was invited to become a professor at the seminary there. So we moved there.

I spent one year there before starting college back in the States. My parents and brother were there another five years. And two really big things for me out of that one in terms of my faith journey.

One is that I grew up in a very small rural church and only my best friend and I were the full, the sum total of these group. So I got there and for the first time experienced a very big and vibrant group of teenagers who were passionate about Jesus.

And they were pretty much self administered, like the kind of go getter initiative. And also just responsibility and maturity. Just partly the result of the kind of culture they'd been forced to grow up in.

They organized retreats and they had youth group every, you know, every Friday or Saturday night.

And they learned to play the guitar so they could sing songs together and they read scripture and they, they didn't need anyone to tell them what to do. And it was just I'd grown up in such a kind of, you know, settled Christendom environment without that level of energy or newness.

So seeing it through other people's eyes, yeah, had a real impact on me. And the other was, of course, my parents were doing their doing mission work.

It's an additional different from what I think most people think of mission work because there was already a church there. They were there to work with an existing but very much suffering church.

We did meet missionaries who acted as though not only was there no church, there had never been any church or it didn't count.

And definitely engaged a much more sheep stealing Model, you know, rich Americans coming in with flashy concerts and yanking people out of historic churches that had, that had survived and then were rewarded by having their young people stolen out of them. That was, that was a very negative example of intra Christian competition.

But I did see the value, the importance of mission work and just how incredibly interesting this big wide world of gods is. And I was always curious to see the world. But after that I was crazy curious.

And my itinerant life around the world very much a product of being bitten by that bug at a very impressionable young age.

So what was your favorite country to live in so far?

I think Slovakia will always have the special place in my heart because it was the first one I went. And it was such a distinctive time that will never be regained.

That Eastern Europe right after the end of communism where everything was new and fresh and possible, but still there was so much left over from the time before.

You know, I don't have any objections to people being concerned about our capitalist system, but when anyone thinks by contrast that communism is the solution, I immediately lose patience. I saw what it did to everyone and everything and the land itself. Not good, folks. Not good.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you also mentioned last year you got back from time spent as pastor Lutheran Church in Tokyo.

We kind of just want to know what lessons you think maybe that you learned in that experience that could help other pastors who want to pursue a greater church unity locally. Yeah, because I know Tokyo is a diverse, interesting area. I don't know too much about it. I haven't been.

But I'm sure you've learned stuff that I don't know.

It's possible. The ecumenical situation in Japan is not great.

I think it is such a tiny number of Christians, only 1% of the entire Japanese population is Christian.

And that is after 150 years since Japan reopened of nonstop streams of Christian personnel, money, creativity, interest, concern, prayer, you name it. Everything has been done and tried and still it is one of the hardest places to shift.

I mean places that do suffer overt persecution in Islamic republics or under still existing totalitarian regimes, their churches are growing faster than in Japan. It is the great, great mystery and the great sorrow of the mission world. Why Japan is such a tough nut to crack.

And it's not because people are even hostile to Christianity. That said, I think one of the things I really realized there is that in some respects you guys aren't gonna like this.

Ecumenism is a luxury good people can afford to engage in conversation, discussion and opening up borderlines.

When they feel that they have surplus and they're confident in who they are, when those things start to dissipate or get shaky, the retrenchment happens really fast.

The self protectiveness, there's the fear that if we hang out with this other church, what if some of our people like that church better and they leave us? We can't afford to lose anybody.

I was even told by a pastoral colleague in another denomination that the congregations denominations will not do young adult activities together for fear that a boy from one church and a girl from another might fall in love and then start going to only one of those churches and the other loses out. I mean, this is just, this is insane, but it is, it is.

I think it does exemplify this protectiveness from being so tiny that is really works at odds with ecumenism.

On the other hand, I would say as a pastor in my own congregation, Tokyo Lutheran Church, I mean, you know, the senior Japanese senior pastor and I were trained and ordained Lutheran pastors. We have vows to a set of confessions. It's very integral to our sense of vocation.

But by, in a sense, by being very clear on who we were and what we were about and making that no secret, we ended up attracting people from quite a broad range of Christian traditions that felt if they were just attracted to the teaching and the worship style and the lovely, lovely community that I enjoyed pastoring there, then it became okay when we had people who were from a Catholic background or a foursquare gospel background, or people who had been out of church for a really long time and were trying to get reconnected. And I think in a way there was actually an ecumenical benefit to being very clear about who we were and what we were about.

I think the only thing that really made it impossible for certain people to stay with us is if they could not, could not abide infant baptism. And that is a non negotiable for Lutherans. So if they really felt strongly baptism has to be an adult's conscious decision.

And baptism is primarily an act of witness to one's considered faith and discipleship. And not as so much as Lutherans and others who baptize infants would understand it as that it's primarily an act of God meant to call first faith.

Then we had some parting of the ways. You might think. I have some issue with, because I'm a woman pastor. Maybe they just never came in the first place.

That's possible too, but I didn't have any particular problem with that.

Yeah, no one walked in and saw you at the podium and just like, oh, never mind.

Well, you know, with websites now, they can vet you ahead of time. So there might have been some of that. I would know.

Yeah, yeah. Because, I mean, I've read that they're less progressive when it comes to, like, gender norms and that kind of stuff, but I haven't been.

So I don't know.

Yeah, I asked some of my ladies there and they said that they, they would second that. That. But that it doesn't, It's. It doesn't stack up the way it would in a Western country. That's a much deeper question of Japanese culture.

So just measuring it against what you would expect in a Christendom or post Christendom country, it's. This shouldn't be so. I mean, it's not good, but it's not for the reasons that people might necessarily assume.

Yeah, okay, interesting.

So when some people think of, like, mission work or missionary trips, like, I think they have like, a really specific thing in mind of, like, these, like, giant revival sessions for like a week or two and then coming back. But you served as a congregational pastor in Tokyo.

How does that differ from some of the, you know, maybe the typical missionary model that some people are thinking of.

Right. Well, so I ended up doing the exact same thing my parents did, which was to go serve a pastor in an already existing church that needed help.

And my goodness, the church in Japan really needs help and doesn't need competition. Also, revivals, honestly, are just never going to work in Japan.

They're just going to be a spectacle like any of the other 10 million spectacles you can go to see in Tokyo. And probably those are going to be more entertaining. And because the culture is so not Christian, even a revival conversion is not going to stick.

It's not going to stay the course.

So that model, you know, interestingly, revivals only work when you have such a bedrock of Christian culture that people even understand what they're headed toward. Otherwise, it just doesn't compute in some very fundamental way. I mean, I alluded to the fact of how difficult it is to bring people into church.

As far as I know, I would guess every Japanese congregation has at least one and probably more than one person who is there every Sunday, attends every activity, donates money, and will not for anything, get baptized or call themselves a Christian. It just is a very different way of relating to it. And on the flip side, we. I don't know if it's really the flip side.

We've known people who are very attracted to Christianity and would like to be Christians, but for example, they're the oldest son in the family and they have to maintain the altar of the ancestors and they know that that's not something Christians do, so they just abstain. We even knew an organist.

I think he was even maybe the, the head of the organs, the church organ society, but not a Christian because he was an oldest son and couldn't do that. So the barriers are very different.

And again, you might, you know, an American might scoff at that and say, well, Jesus says, you know, if you will not leave your mother or brother, you know, you're not worthy to be my follower. I mean, maybe, you know, Jesus can pass that judgment, but there is some very deep kind of difficulty that's not so easily argued over.

So anyway, which is to say that the short term mission trip I would say is all but valueless on the Japan side. I don't know, maybe the Westerners who engage in it can benefit from it.

But I'm a little skeptical of things that are done for Westerners benefit more than for the receiving side of it. That's, you know, and then, but here, I'll finish with this. I, like any other pastor slash missionary in Tokyo, really puzzled over what to do.

And I talked to other missionaries who were struggling greatly.

And in the maybe second half of my time there, what started happening is people showed up at church and said, hi, Pastor, Jesus told me to come to church, or maybe Jesus told me to read the Bible. So here I am, what do I do now? And you know, I was like, okay, sure, well come on up to worship and let's talk afterwards.

And you know, sometimes it was someone who again had grown up Christian and then left the church and was coming back after a long time. Sometimes it was people who had never been baptized and, and wanted to get baptized. And you know, either case, I don't know what to do.

We're going to spend some time with Luther's small catechism and get you reacquainted with the faith and with the scripture and you know, then we'll get you in whichever way is appropriate. But then it started being all Chinese nationals. And like, I went to be a missionary in Japan.

I thought I was going to be serving primarily Japanese people and Westerners who were living there. I was just not looking for Chinese people.

And they were all, and there's no reason why they should have found our church except for the fact that we spoke English and you know, they had some English. But one after another said, yeah, Pastor, I'm A believer. I wanted to get baptized. I moved to Japan last week. Will you baptize me?

And so I ended up baptizing more Chinese than Japanese during my stay there. So I started joking to people that Jesus concluded that missionary work in Japan just isn't working. So from now on, he has to do it himself.

And you can't. You can't programmatize that. You can pray for it, though. So I think that's what I would. I would urge people praying for more. One last thought.

I talked to someone else at another church who said their congregation's prayer is, Jesus, please send us the people we would never know how to find ourselves. And I think that's quite profound because it's really placing your trust in the agency and activity of God.

And it takes away from you all of your internal statistics or politics or demographics or ideals you cultivate of what you want your church to look like. You have to let Jesus choose that for you.

Good stuff.

It's really interesting topic that I wish, well, somebody would delve deeper on. I don't know, it feels like it could be like a really good Apple TV documentary series, Missionary Work in Japan, which means I would never watch it.

But I bet it would be really.

Good that I have because for some reason I just keep holding out on it.

For some reason, it'd give it the. They would give it the beans. It'd be really good. But you also contributed to a work which felt rather poignant to us.

It was called A Guide to the Pentecostal Movement for Lutherans. Joshua and I both grew up in the same denomination, Pentecostal tradition. Joshua is now Lutheran. So it's very interesting to us.

So why do you think it might be important for people from the Lutheran tradition to understand the Pentecostal movement?

Wonderful question. So one is, there are a lot of you guys.

So if we're serious about the church being all of Jesus, people who have been baptized, then we got to pay attention and get to know you better. Also, maybe this is starting to change a little bit. But there.

There is a Lutheran tendency to equate Pentecost with what we still like to call by the German name Schwermer, which means swarmers. That's exactly what, you know, cognate. It's a cognate of the word swarm in English.

That is how Luther dismissed a couple of fellas who claimed to have such direct lines of communication with God they didn't need the Scriptures anymore. And I think Lutherans for a long time assumed that Pentecostals were claiming to have a direct pipeline to God such that they did not need scripture.

Once I started hanging out with Pentecostals, I discovered they're really into scripture. And of course, there are some. Yeah, yeah, of course there will be some who are a little overly enchanted with their own visions and so forth.

That happens everywhere. It maybe takes a different form, but people misusing religious authority to soothe their own egos and ambitions, that's everywhere.

It's not unique to Pentecostals. It certainly happens among Lutherans too. So that's one good reason.

Another reason closer to home for us Lutherans is that where our churches are growing, they are charismatic in practice and style. So the biggest Lutheran church in the world, so far as I know right now, is the church in Ethiopia. They have. I don't know.

I have a good friend who is an Ethiopian pastor and theologian. Every time I ask him, the number has jumped up by a million. So I'm guessing it's around 11 million right now.

And if you talk in terms of faithfulness and attendance at church, it is definitely, beyond any question of a doubt, the biggest Lutheran church in the world. The one in Tanzania, is very close, if not greater.

And there's also a pretty significant one in Madagascar, which is a smaller country all around, but maybe 3 to 4 million Lutherans there and others in Sub Saharan Africa. But they are deeply, deeply charismatic.

It doesn't take quite the same shape as North American Pentecostalism has, but definitely an expectation of the palpable presence of the spirit, of special gifts.

They seem to be more oriented toward healing in Ethiopia and Tanzania than towards tongues, which was sort of the defining spiritual experience for at least early American Pentecostalism and Madagascar. The focus is definitely on deliverance, ministry and exorcism of evil spirits.

So what I found fascinating, spending time in, I was in Ethiopia and Madagascar. I've never been to Tanzania.

But talking to scholars from all those areas, pastors, theologians, for them, there's no choice between being charismatic and a confessional Lutheran. They are perfectly integrated. I mean, in the sense of their own lives. It would not occur to them to be one or the other. They're both.

So Pentecostalism, just because the nature of what it is, the boundary lines are much more fluid. Pentecostals much more define themselves by a certain orientation to experiences and expectations of Christ's presence.

Whereas this is one of the interesting things about ecumenism is the self definition really varies from church to church. So Lutherans are very much doctrinally defined. We have a liturgical tradition, we have some kind of ordained structure.

But it differs from place to place. The particular way of doing church structure has never been integral to Lutheran identity.

Whereas for instance, for Anglicans, or as they call themselves in the us Episcopalians, you can hear it right in the word. Their structure with bishops is integral to who they are.

Obviously the same for Catholics, obviously the same for Orthodox reforms maybe are a little bit more oriented towards the doctrinal self definition.

But what that means for Lutherans anyway is that as long as a set of experiences are not made mandatory, that's the other thing Lutherans tend to get allergic about.

There's no reason in principle to reject openness or actuality of a distinct set of spiritual experiences or charismatic gifts, as long as it doesn't interfere with the teaching.

And then because we Lutherans love our teaching so much, we would be more than happy to share it with anyone who's teaching or whose way of being church does not by definition exclude it. So for one interesting example, when I was working on the Lutheran Pentecostal dialogue, we were talking about the Lord's Supper.

And finally one of our Lutherans said to the Pentecostal team, you know, to hear you guys talk, Jesus is bodily present absolutely everywhere except the bread and wine. Don't you think that's strange? And the guys on our team said, huh, you're right, that doesn't really make sense. Why are we Zwinglians?

That doesn't really fit with how we think about the presence of Christ in the world. We'll work on that.

So anyway, it's because cannibalism's gross.

Yeah. So you need to spend some more time with John six and start yourself out on that one.

Yeah, that's where I feel like I became a kind of like a theological mutt growing up Pentecostal. And I'm like, yeah, I hold on to like all the spiritual experiences, stuff and charismatic gifts, and I love all that.

And then went to a Baptist college and I'm like, I really like how they study the Bible. And probably nothing else, but the emphasis on like caring about context and exegesis and stuff went a long way for me.

And then Luther Church, the sacraments, and I'm like, yep, I'm settling here. And now I got like, those three are like, I don't probably pillars to how I exercise my spiritual spirituality.

Trying to think of a good way toward that. It's not like I do podcast. I don't know how to work things.

Yeah, speaking's Not Joshua's strong suit.

He's. Nor is writing or thinking.

Yeah, yeah, he really could just stand there and look good for the entire episode.

Except for. Can't look good either.

Wouldn't know who's there, probably.

I detect a long history of banter here, so I'm just gonna stay up.

Sorry, 19ish years. It's fine. So you also do a podcast with your dad called the Queen of Sciences. What inspired that? What should our audience know?

Why should we check it out? Give us the whole thing.

But we, of course, have always had great theological discussions together.

So when I moved to the other side of the planet, um, which, although, you know, with modern technology, it's not that hard to communicate, the time difference made it a little awkward, but we just thought, well, why not? I suggest that I was.

I was kind of new to the whole phenomenon of podcasts, and I just instantly loved them, and I wanted to do one, and I thought, well, who. Who would I enjoy talking to all the time? And I was like, oh, dad, of course.

And so I said, you know, dad, we have theological discussions all the time. Why not structure and record them and maybe other people will like them too? And lo and behold, many people have.

So, yeah, we're in our eighth year now. The first six years, we did two podcasts a month.

And since I was in the process of moving back to the US and getting settled, and because the way we did it was very demanding, I mean, much of our theological reading has been structured around preparing for the podcast. So we both agreed. Let's dial it back a bit. So for last year, season seven, and now in season eight, we're just doing one a month, which is great.

And, yeah, so. And we really cover a wide range, a lot of theology.

Podcasts are very much, you know, wrangling with whatever's in the news or whatever is the hot topic, or pursue a particular, I don't know, angle on everything. And, I mean, obviously we're both Lutheran, so we bring that, but we really span the range.

So we've done lots of episodes on specific books of the Bible. We've done episodes on church fathers. Not as many medievals as we should, but that's pretty Lutheran to ignore.

The Middle Ages, alas, plenty on Luther, and I think one on Melanchthon. Modern theologians. We've done classic Doctrinal topics. Very occasionally we weigh into things that are more contemporary.

We've done some on digital technology and what it to us and so forth. So just in the past couple of years, picking out episodes that might be representative, we did one last year called Pastoral Preaching.

So we talked about our understanding of what is the specific task of the preaching office, especially with a law gospel distinction. That's a very typical Lutheran distinctive, but also how that might play out in the narrative style of preaching.

So if you're curious about what doctrine brings specifically to preaching in a congregational setting, that would be one for you. We also do stuff on doctrine and philosophy, and I thought for this podcast I would mention one we did called Unbaptized God.

It's about a book by recently deceased Lutheran theologian Robert Jensen, and it's his main work on ecumenism.

And why is it that every time a dialogue resolve some doctrinal question and two or three more pop up in its place, and he's trying to trace it back to a root error in the doctrine of God, Hence unbaptized God.

And then third, if you want one that's straight up scriptural exegesis, we did one recently called hey Jude, because dad and I are both Beatles fans and I'm a fan of that weird little epistle of Jude. So we just work our way all the way through it. But we have both Old and New Testament. We've covered a lot of ground there, too.

Yeah, good song. Excellent book, actually. It's short, but good stuff.

Take a sad song and make it better.

Yeah, great song. So in a lot of your blogs and a lot of your podcast episodes, you bring up the creeds as very important to your theology.

And you think knowing the creeds better, just as you know a church, as everyone in the church, knowing the creeds better would help us better engender Christian unity.

It's something that has been shared by the church for so long.

And I think, I think, say, if you disagree with the content of either of those creeds, you're probably running a little far afield of the faith of the church, and so they can summon you back.

What I like about those two creeds paired together in particular is that the Apostles Creed, I'm Sorry, it wasn't written by the apostles, but it started out as a baptismal creed. So it was the profession of faith you would make as you were preparing for baptism.

And then the Nicene Creed is the product of church councils in the original language. It's not I believe, but we believe.

And it's really trying to sort out these kind of deeper doctrinal questions, especially about who and what Jesus really is. How is Jesus God? How is Jesus human? Is he really either one or both?

And then, of course, the work of the Holy Spirit, which was added at a later council as well.

So I think this gives the nice polarity between individual faith and the faith of the whole church and my personal engrafting into the body of Christ through my baptism and that into which I am engrafted the whole church and its belief in Jesus. But very significantly, both creeds are structured around the triune name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. They are in three parts.

You say, I believe God the Father Almighty. I believe in Jesus Christ, his only Son, our Lord.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the Giver of life, depending on which one you're talking from. And I think this is absolutely essential because as Luther once said, how am I to know what is the word of God when there are so many words of God?

And the most important thing that the creeds do is they are a basic key to unlocking the Scriptures. There are so many things you could get out of the Scriptures if you tried or went looking.

You can get timelines of history and give forth all sorts of dispensationalisms.

You can come up with abstract principles that are so efficient, you wonder why God bothered with the whole Bible when he could have just given us these propositions. Instead, you could come up with miraculous proofs that you can force down people's throat and say, like, see, see, see.

If you were a rational person, you would become a Christian Christian like me. You can turn it into your personal oracle, open it up, point there and say, okay, this is the answer to my prayer.

Even if it, you know, is Job who let the wild ass roam, or something like that. You know, there's lots of things you can do with a text or a long book by the Bible. What the creeds do is tell you this is what this book is for.

This book is to direct you to know the God, Lord God of Israel, who is also Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, that you may love him and become part of his life. That's what creeds do.

And because of their ancientness, and because of their triune structure, they are the best way to give a fundamental template for coming into the Christian faith that nothing else can really, I don't think has been able to improve upon.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. I like those two examples.

One, because when we had my parents, pastor Pentecostal on, and we asked him about church unity, he said those two for like, hey, that's what's up. And it's. It's fun because, you know, usually I think Pentecostals, Baptist low liturgical churches is like, oh, we don't do the creed.

But they don't say them as part of the service. Doesn't mean they don't agree with them.

That was like seven years ago.

Yeah, six or seven.

Yeah.

Saying that. You remember that?

Six, seven. You know, but the.

That's really funny for none of our audience.

But I. Sorry, I.

But I do think too, I have friends who I think they know that I affectionately will also make fun of them sometimes and be like, oh, we're being theobros who maybe will be like, oh, I don't agree with the Nicene Creed. And then you hear why? And they're like, well, it uses the word Almighty. And what do we mean by that?

And it says, father, does that mean we're attributing a gender to God? And I'm like, a little bit. Sometimes we get too semantic, I think. And I like maybe chill.

And what I like about saying the creeds together is I also have that theobro brain. Sometimes I'm like, wait, do I mean Almighty? By almighty, what do I mean by that word?

And seeing it together allows you to say, wait a minute, we're agreeing on this thing. I am not the smartest person in this room. Most likely we're saying this together. We're saying we believe this.

And if we were to work out what the details mean later, that maybe that's a good theological discussion. But sometimes I think it's good to just have that rock and to be able to say something together allows you to be united locally.

I think that's probably important for, you know, our purposes anyway. I want to, though, though, your thoughts on this.

Pastor Sarah how do the creeds compare to some of these, like, church statements or colleges, the more modern statements you might see where, like, you'll be like, okay, we believe this about God, the Trinity, speaking in tongues, gender roles, and, you know, queer theology. You know, like, all this stuff typically is on the church website or the school's website.

If you go into, like, seminary, how do those Kind of statements compare to like in the way they're used, how the creeds were developed and used early church, whenever we started developing these.

Yeah, I have to admit I'm always greatly amused by non denominational churches that claim not to have creeds because they all have a statement of faith and they're all the same. Like if you spend enough time looking at enough church websites, you're like, you're just copying and pasting from somewhere.

So there clearly is some kind of creedal tradition that just by renaming itself Statement of Faith, somehow it's exempt from that. I don't get that. That's kind of silly.

And then the ones that try to, I mean, they can't improve on creeds or, you know, fine, you know, if you need to say something about hell, okay, go ahead, say something about hell. It's enough for me that Jesus descended there and then left it, but whatever.

But then the things that are trying to be relevant to now, they're just, they exist to exclude people. And look, I know how out of control the desire to be inclusive can get.

The irony is that inclusive statements are always exclusionary because what they're doing is marking out your territory. We are this kind of church, which always means we're not that kind of church.

So again, one of the reasons to stick with the historic creeds of the church is to say actually this church also is submitting itself willingly to the entire body across time and space. We are glad to give priority to the first confession of faith for people being baptized in the triune name in the earliest time of the church.

This should be the standard. And if we're gonna fight, let's fight inside of this creed.

But let's not fight on the outside about these things that are, you know, historically speaking, flash in the pan obsessions. Silly. What a waste of time.

Yeah, yeah, I'm with you.

So is there anything else that we should know or should discuss about church unity from your work, blogs, fiction, anything?

Yeah, I think that there's not nearly enough attention to it being done extremely locally. I mean, I worked in international level dialogue. It was cool, I had fun, I learned a lot.

But fundamentally what I realized when I would come back home is nobody reads this stuff, you know, just other, other theobros and ecumenism nerds. Right. And even then. And the statements are of. And ecumenical statements are of wildly varying quality.

And you know what, when churches make ecumenical decisions, it almost ends up without failing, without fail, irritating some member of the constituency also, you know, within any church family Some are more attracted to that other confessional family, but some are attracted here. You know, we're all these completely overlapping Venn diagrams. The idea that you can solve these things at a global level is basically preposterous.

But what you can do is call up the pastor in your town and say, hey, can I have coffee with you? I'd like to know what you're about and what you think is important, what you think is not important, and could we do something together?

And, you know, if you can't pray together and sometimes that's the case, you know, can we volunteer together at the soup kitchen? You know, or do we see a need that no one is meeting, that the church could meet, but we need more than us. We need us and you.

That kind of stuff is so important. It's so much more real. I'm not really.

I've gotten less and less interested in abstraction, which probably people are like, then why are you a theologian? But the kind of theology I like is not abstract. It's really real.

It's really rooted in text and the text of scripture and in the sacrament and in the life of the church. So, I mean, you can say whatever you want, theoretically, about the unity of the church, but how about just do it?

Yeah.

Yeah, how about just do it?

Good friend of ours and host of a different show on the Amazon Podcast network, Leah Robinson, one of the hosts of Theology on the Rocks.

She is a practical theologian and she often makes the joke that everybody is doing theology and then she'll make the joke of like, yeah, every theologian is actually a practical theologian. They just want to act like they're not.

You know, I just love what she does that because as soon as someone calls her on it, she's just so quick witted, she always turns it on their head. And I love it. So much fun. Yeah.

So if you're still curious to know more about Sarah Henlick Wilson, Reverend Dr. Sarah Henlicki Wilson. She has her own website and it's probably the easiest one we've ever plugged. Sarah Henlicky wilson.com. So check that out.

Yeah. And I'll link it in the show notes, most likely.

Yeah.

And if you go to my website, you can sign up up for my newsletter, Theology in a Recipe, which quarterly gives you an extended theological essay and recipes that are somehow connected to it. Because I like to feed people with food and the gospel. That's my shtick.

Yeah. I highly recommend the, the one about the seven bowls, which is also how I learned she was an Alice in Wonderland fan.

But I didn't know it was only the book because I like both. They're very different.

Oh, that's where the question came from.

I see now, like, oh, Alice fan, let's make it, you know, it was.

An essay on Revelation with seven bowls of snacks instead of seven bowls of.

Wrath, which are wonderful snacks. I haven't tried.

Really good.

But they look good and all the food that's in them, I know, I like. So yeah, yeah, yeah. So definitely recommend people check that out.

One last thing we do before we get to like our wrap up stuff and all that is to just I.

We like to ask everyone who's been on our show for a practical action, something that would help better engender Christian unity, you know, around the globe in our local neighborhood communities, whatever. What's something that you think our listeners could stop and do right now that would help better engender Christian unity?

All right, I'm going to tell you something they should just not stop and do, but stop doing. I've gone to a lot of churches in the last year since I've been out of the pulpit myself.

And I've noticed that every church, whether it's more conservative or more liberal, it always finds a way to send you a little signal about what kind of Christian it's not. So I go to a liberal church and they make sure, you know, that they're not Christian nationalists.

And I go to an evangelical church and they make sure, you know, they're not Catholics. And you know, it's very subtle sometimes, sometimes it's more overt, but most of the time it's just, just slipping it in there.

Like they can't quite resist the need to set up the contrast of identity. And guess what, folks, if we're baptized, we are all in one body. We are stuck with each other.

And you can be frustrated at the witness other Christians are making, but you know what? They're still in the same body. They're still your brothers and sisters. So how about you stop throwing them under the bus?

That would be my recommendation.

All right, so what, what changes in the world if we stop othering people? You know?

Well, you remember that song quoting John's gospel? They'll know we are Christians by our love. How else are they going to know we're Christians unless we love each other?

That's right. That's right. So our last thing and then we're gone. Almost outro stuff. You know what we like to call it? Our God moment.

And we just talk about where we've Seen God in our lives recently.

Whether that is a blessing, moment of challenge, mode of worship, whatever it may be, I always ask Josh to go first to give the rest of us plenty of time to think. So Josh, do you have a God moment for us?

Yeah, I kind of easy. Because today we had to reschedule this for the second time to be a little bit later today and luckily our guest pastor was really generous.

Just some issues with my mother in law and things going on at the facility she's staying at right now and we had to go talk to them, figure stuff out. Is kind of stressful. It was a lot, but sounds like everything's being taken care of. We were still able to record this podcast.

I still got to talk to Pastor Syria, which I was really excited to do and you were both really kind about recording later. So that's my God moment. It's just, you know, appreciating you guys.

Thanks. For me, my God moment is more kind of a challenge kind of worship.

But it's the struggle of everyone else's perception of me lately that you're too awesome ever since, pretty much, yeah, perfect. It's like an imposter syndrome kind of thing.

Like I don't pretend to be anything I'm not, or at least I try not to and people levy these expectations against me and eventually I'm always like, whatever, it's fine, I know what matters is my perception of me and God's perception of me, which I feel pretty comfortable about. So that helps a lot. That helps a lot. It's nice to remember that. So Sarah, do you have a God moment for us?

Yeah, can I have like an eight week God moment? Is that allowed? Can it last that long?

Do you know the actual definition of moment?

I had a 34 year God moment. I was born, I'm still doing that life thing.

Sorry, classic doctrine.

If someone says the definition, we're good.

As I've been waiting, being forced to wait for my next call, my husband and I have been taking an extended road trip around the US and we'd had some disappointments of what we thought we would end up doing.

So we just said, well, well, we have this time, let's just travel, let's reconnect with people, let's see our home country that we haven't been in much and we have been so absolutely surrounded by God's kindness and mercy and abundance and he's put us through some stuff that we needed to go through. I think me especially part of growing to the next next stage of life and so forth.

It's been really hard while being completely, completely surrounded and loved the whole way. And I would say that if I didn't believe in God by the end of this, then I'm the most ungrateful wretch who ever lived.

All right. It's always a good lesson to learn.

Yeah.

So if you liked listening to this episode, please consider sharing it with a friend. Share with your enemies. Share with the cousins.

Especially your cousins.

Yeah, especially your cousins. Once again, go to our website. Purchase one of the T shirts if you want to show. It helps us raise money for our needs.

It helps others know about the importance of our mission to educate and unite the modern church. Josh, what shirt are you wearing right now?

The Holy Trinity knot. Sorry, my camera's weird, so I always do like the motion in the wrong side. Yeah, but Holy Trinity knot, it's great.

Got the Irish Trinity knot on the back. It's got the pastoral. Might like this reference to the Apostles Creed. It's got the. What is it? The one God, one church.

But I'm trying to think holy, apostolic, Catholic on the different side.

One holy, Catholic and apostolic. Yeah, that's nice scene.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, you're right. What am I okay? Yeah.

But maybe just designs the shirts. It's no big deal.

I am not smart. That's why we have smart people on, so we can interview them. Yeah. Podcasting is easy that way.

Yeah, that's why the Tonight show works.

Also though, do check out some of the other shows on podcast network I mentioned, Theology on the Rocks. TJ and I on Systematic Ecology if you want to hear some. Some more nerdy content. Parish nationally does a lot of stuff check out Let Nothing Move.

You want to hear some. Some Bible content and then check out Brandon Knight doing Kung Fu Pizza Party.

Yeah. But we do hope you enjoyed it.

Coming up, we'll be having Dr. Thom Thomas J ord back on to discuss his newest book, A Systematic Theology of Love, Volume 1. They were going to be having another round table discussion on evangelism, mission work, and other means of outreach after that.

We soon begin to, or we plan to soon begin a series on behind the scenes of ministries from local churches to church publishing and to infinity and beyond, ad nauseam.

Yeah.

Finally, at the end of season one, Francis Chan's gonna be on the show.

Yeah, he doesn't know that, though. Someone does have to tell him.

Yeah, someone could ask him for us.

You ask, tell either way, as long as he knows to show up.

Demand.

Yeah.