What should be our posture to the quickly changing, chaotic world around us? We all know about the early church in the book of Acts, but what about after that? What was the church's approach to the world around it in the second and third centuries? Can we learn anything from them? Stephen O. Presley believes that our time is not so similar from theirs and we can learn a great deal from how they interacted with the world.

He serves as the Senior Fellow for Religion and Public Life at the Center for Religion Culture and Democracy (an initiative of First Liberty Institute) and Associate Professor of Church History at Southern Seminary. 

Stephen O. Presley earned his undergraduate degree at Baylor University, Th.M. from Dallas Theological Seminary, and Ph.D. from the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. He is married to Haley and they have four children and reside in McKinney, TX.

Travis and Stephen talk about his new book, Cultural Sanctification, and how there is really nothing new under the sun. This was one of the best and most invigorating conversations ever had on Apollos Watered and it will help you in your calling to engage the world for Jesus.

Learn more about Stephen and get the book.

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

We are no longer living in a Christendom, which I define as the institutions are defined by Christian mores. There is now a range to use. CHARLES tur. There's now a range of moral options of which Christianity is just one.

And that is reminiscent of that second and third century world.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollos Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and. I am your host. And today in our show, we're having. Another one of our deep conversations.

As we navigate life in the modern world, it's only natural to look to modern solutions to our problems. We do it sometimes without even thinking.

But what if many of the problems we have are precisely because we are looking to the latest and greatest and we don't realize that it's all been done before and that Solomon's words are true, there's nothing new under the sun, and that a better way forward is actually looking to the past. Today I'm talking with Dr. Stephen O. Presley about his new book, Cultural Sanctification.

And I'm having this conversation in large part because one of you actually mentioned the book in one of our YouTube comments. That's right.

We are paying attention to what everyone says on our YouTube channel, Facebook, Instagram, all of it.

And when I find that there are people mentioning books and it wasn't just one person, there were a couple of people that were asking me about this book that made me really want to seek out the book and the author to discover what was this all about and why were people referring us to this book? Because really, there's a ton of overlap.

As a matter of fact, I don't think I've ever had anyone else on this show where we have found more common language and a common sight into the future as to what is needed. Stephen's main thesis is that in order to engage the world that we're living in today, we need to look backwards.

Now, I would say that yes, we are to look backwards, but we're also to look all around us. I mean, there are many places to look. But his main thesis is looking back.

Now, you might say, well, of course we look back to the scriptures, to the early church, that's true. But what happened post Apostles, I mean, what about the first few centuries?

Because really, they were dealing with some of the same problems that we are facing today.

They're not identical, but there are many overlaps and by the time this one's done, I think you're going to be convinced that there are so many things that they address that we can learn in our time, that we can learn and apply so that we might be able to go forward and see the renewal of the church in the West. So let's dive into the first part of my conversation with Steven Presley. Happy listening.

The question that we are always asking ourselves is how do we engage our culture today? Do we withdraw as some people advocate for, or do we fight? What do we do with politics?

Do we remain faithful or simply faithfully present in it, or do we seek its transformation? How do we engage our world today? I mean, these are questions that are not new, but the church has wrestled with for centuries.

And it's really no different today. We're still looking for a way to engage our world.

And each generation, as each Christian group embedded in a culture, has to figure out how to engage it for the glory of God. And that's why I've invited today's guest onto the show, Dr.

Stephen Presley, who is the director and associate professor of church history at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary.

He's taught courses at several universities and seminaries and continues to teach graduate and postgraduate courses in church history and historical theology, as well as courses in early Christian theology, exegesis, apologetics, and worship. He serves as the senior Fellow for Religion and Public Life at the center for Religion, Culture and Democracy.

He's married to Haley, and they have four children. Today we're going to discuss his new book, Cultural Sanctification that seeks to engage the world like the early church did.

Stephen, welcome to Apollo's Watered.

Thank you so much, Travis. It's good to be here.

Okay, are you ready for the Fast five?

I'm ready.

We both have four kids, so the first question is, what's the craziest thing about having four kids?

For you, the craziest thing about having four kids? It's just when you think it can't get crazier, it gets crazier.

I have a good friend that says I'm a conservative, which means I think it can always get worse.

I like that. I've never heard that definition before, but that's really good.

Yeah.

How about this one? Because you always have four kids. How old are your kids?

My oldest is 16, all the way down to nine.

All right, so then we have a very similar problem. One item that you can't keep in the pantry is what?

The one item we can't keep in the pantry is cereal. Absolutely. Cereal and potato chips. They will be. My children are like swarming bees. If a box of cereal, it's.

It's the pantry or a range of bag of chips, I mean, they are. They evaporate.

What kind of cereal are they into?

Oh, man, they love, of course, Froot Loops. They love. You know, we try to steer them towards the Raisin Bran, but that. That doesn't get taken. Right. That sort of. That sort of sits there.

But the Fruit Loops or the, you know, the Frosted Mini Wheat, the sugary ones. That's the sugary ones. Good ones. Evaporate.

Okay, number three, with four kids, you gotta have a date night sometime. So the best place to go on a date night is where?

The best place to go on a date night for us is just out to any restaurant where we can sit and talk and have adult conversations. Conversations that don't involve, you know, all kinds of teenage drama and. And drama of middle school and elementary school and.

And just talk about life.

Our lives are very parallel. I have one in college that's graduating, one in high school, that's graduating, one in middle school, and one in elementary.

And I felt every one of those.

Oh, man.

Those categories right now. I realized when I was dropping one of my kids off, I'm like, I've been driving to the school for 18 straight years. This is insane.

Anyway, that's right.

Every day they come home, I often ask them about their day and, you know, of course, do the. The fatherly thing. And it's like, what drama? What drama happened today? And try to keep track of.

Trying to keep track of who's doing what, what's saying what. It's. It's a wild. It's a wild time.

Okay, number four, then let's get into a little bit more of your field. If you were to visit a time of church history, post apostolic, okay, outside of the Bible, the New Testament, but what time would it be and why?

You know, I spent a career studying Irenaeus. I've spent a lot of time studying the second century.

I mean, I would want to be in Leon in the late second century, definitely after 177, after the persecutions. But I would love to. You know, I've spent. I've spent so much time looking at those early church fathers. I would. I would.

Especially the apologetic tradition. I would love to have some conversations with some of them. Maybe some time with Augustine, maybe some time with Augustine, too.

But that, that second century is fascinating to me. It's a transitional period that I find fascinating.

Well, which we're going to get into in a bit. But let's not, let's not get too far into that. How about this one? So we've talked about that, but what about one historical figure?

I mean, you know, we already know you like Irenaeus, but who's a different figure outside of the ones you just mentioned that you would love to interview and sit down and have a conversation with and why?

I have a lot of questions for Augustine.

You know, I've worked through City of God and I love the second half of the City of God where he just walks through the history of salvation and I'd love to sit and ask him a few questions about, just about framing the City of God. If I was going to move to a modern period, it might be Luther. I just find Martin Luther fascinating.

Some of his writings and you know, in a reformation kind of context, but in the early church. I would love to sit with Augustine and pick his brain and ask him some of those questions.

You know, it's funny you mention that I think of different figures from history and someone once told me, they said, I'd love to hang out with Luther, but not Calvin. But he doesn't seem like he was much fun.

Luther had a stein of beer and it had all the books of the Bible and he could go from the law and the prophets. And he said his table would have been a very fun conversation.

I've been there, I've been to, I've been to Wittenberg and I've seen his house and the, toward his museum there and the table talks that are there. But yeah, living in Calvin's Geneva might be a little bit more of an interesting, interesting endeavor, leaving it with Augustine.

Like I remember reading his Confessions and I was like, it was eye opening for me. I was like someone who's struggling with the stuff and talking about the stuff that I have to talk about.

Like we're not getting into the nature of Christ. He's dealing with all the sin in his own heart.

Good.

Like I get this guy.

I know, I know.

You know the times I've taught Confessions and read through it and worked through it, it continues to communicate some of those important truths of, of just self examination and recognizing, you know, I need to think about my own house and, and some things that I need to get in order and yeah, I mean I love the, I love the opening of Confessions and the praise that he gives to God. There's so much there.

Well, we're going to talk about all this historical stuff. Let's jump into the book.

So we're going to talk about your book, Cultural Sanctification, and some people are going to say, what in the world is cultural sanctification? Okay, where are you going with this? I have no idea. We have cultural apologetics now. Cultural sanctification. What's going on here?

What is cultural sanctification?

I, you know, as. As I know, you know, I, I have wrestled with what term to try to use to capture the mythological endeavors of earliest Christianity.

So of course, we're, you know, the book is really, is really tracking 1st century, the 2nd century, the 3rd century, before the rise of the emperor Constantine, trying to examine the lives of Christians prior to that. And as, as I talk about, they're. They're not saints, but they have a posture.

They have a, they have a missiological, they have an apologetic, they have an evangelistic posture that is one of engagement that I try. I try to capture.

And so I talk a lot about virtue in the book, and I talk about living with virtue, but an embeddedness, an embedd, a culture that is pagan, that is not Christian, trying to live lives of virtue in which they themselves, as a Christian community and the institutions that they create and interact with are trying to instill and inculcate virtue or sanctification, sanctifying those kinds of communities, the kinds of culture in which they find yourself. So that's the term I settled on and I describe in a little more detail in the book.

But it is tough, as you know, it's tough to come up with how to capture some of those things in a phrase.

And it is simply because there's so much flying around right now.

We're all trying to scramble to find definitions on how to engage and different narratives to draw from, different stories to look to and what you've done.

And by saying engaging the world like the early Church, you're not referring to the Book of Acts, you're referring to the first two centuries specifically, much more the second century than anything else. Why that period of time?

Yeah, I mean, I begin exactly as you said. I'm focusing on the second century. I mean, given who wrote kind of the history of Rome, you know, he.

The second century is really the height of the Roman Empire. By the time you get to the middle. I mean, Rome is sort of the Pax Mormona. The image of Rome that we think of really comes in the second century.

I begin in Acts and I kind of show, let's say, Paul on Mars Hill.

And, you know, Paul before, you know, before Felix and Festus, Paul In Rome, you get the gestures in that direction, and then, you know, in like a first Peter 1, Peter 2, live such good lives among the pagans that they see your deeds, or 1st Peter 3 may always be ready to give a defense. What you find in the second century is all of that taking on lives, all of that.

Like, you know, you meet Polycarp in Smyrna, defending the faith before Roman pro council. You meet Justin Martyr writing in Rome, apologies to the Emperor, defending the faith and explaining the faith.

You meet Irenaeus and Leon writing catechetical manuals to train people to live faithful lives. It's a transitional piece that I just look to some of those impulses and then. And then try to say, okay, can we learn anything?

We learn anything today.

I think if you look back at the history of the Church, that early century or early centuries where they're living surrounded by paganism, are a fascinating kind of intellectual dialogue for today.

What I find really fascinating is the fact that you're talking about the Roman Empire at its height, right? And I. I don't know what this has to do with it, but in pop culture right now, they're talking about men, always thinking about the Roman Empire.

Have you seen this guy talking about men think about the Roman Empire every so often? And I even started following a group as a Christian. I'm like, am I.

Am I committing sin here by following this Roman Empire thing and thinking about the Roman Empire? And I think it's cool, even though. You know what I mean?

It's just.

Some of this comes to mind. But I'm looking at this going, all right, what can we learn from these guys? Because you're right, they're in a cultural moment where.

And you see this in the book, it's as if all the advances they went. Had to go back to the beginning or. No, where we're at now, we're going back to the beginning. Very similar to the second century, Right?

What did you mean by that when you say back to the beginning? Because some people are like, I don't. I'm not following you right now.

Yeah, well, you know what you just said about the Roman Empire? I remember when I was writing this book, in the middle of it, one of my kids was reading Percy Jackson, was reading one of the Percy Jackson novels.

If, you know the thesis of Percy Jackson, basically, the gods, you know, the pagan gods take over New York City. So you're. You're literally.

It's like Percy Jackson is like a living illustration of what I'm trying to. What I'm trying to write what I'm trying to capture. And that is, yeah, the opening scene.

I go back to one of the most famous baptisteries in Rome, the Lateran Baptistery. And it's actually a trip I took to, to Rome many years ago. And I stood.

This is like, this is a place where membership, where Christians were baptized and where I talk about transfer from the Kingdom of Darkness, the Kingdom of Light, and I just talk about how the Baptistry was empty. So I draw this sort of ironic kind of thing in that we are back where we started.

Here I am at one of the earliest Christian fonts that was built to signify that many are coming into the church. But now we're back where we started. No one's joining the church.

I cite works like Bullivant's Non Verts and the Great De Churching and these other things that show we are no longer living in a Christendom, which I define as the institutions are defined by Christian mores. There is now a range to use. CHARLES TUR. There's now a range of moral options of which Christianity is just one.

And that is reminiscent of that second and third century world.

What, what I thought was really interesting is you're going through the book, you're, you're. And we have this, this advantage of looking at it in retrospect, where we know the history and how it developed.

But at the time, they're trying to figure out their own footing because they're considered really non entities. They're fringe people. Like, why don't you just get in line with everybody else?

Why don't, why do you guys have to insist on being different and being distinct? Just stop and.

And there was all this confusion about them as you talk about where they're confused of incest, you know, calling each other brother and sister, Love feast cannibals, because they're drinking on the body and blood of Jesus.

And you read this and you're like, I just imagine coming out of church and trying to explain this to your friends, but they're like, okay, just tell us, what is this church thing that you're doing right now? We don't understand. We're concerned of you. Like, like it's like a Roman intervention in the ancient world. Like, you're bringing shame to us.

Like, me and your mother are really frustrated. I would have been happy if you went out and gone to tattoos or whatever you want to do. Who is this Christus guy that you're following?

Yeah.

And they are struggling to find the language to Explain to people what they're doing in the world. And you're right. We're back where we started today.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's interesting. If you read, for example, I mean, every chapter begins with kind of a story.

So I try to use some kind of illustration or story.

But one of them, like I mentioned just a second ago, Polycarp's martyrdom, one of the earliest martyrdom accounts we have outside the New Testament, of course, Stephen, in the Book of Acts. But.

But it's fascinating in it, you know, you have. You have a Christian who, first of all, the Roman soldiers show up to arrest him.

He invites them in, he sets a meal before his enemies, and he asks them, before you arrest me, let me go pray.

So he goes in the room and prays, and he prays for so loud and so long that on the way back, you know, the soldiers are convicted because this guy is so pious and he's shame. Like you say, he shamed them, you know, Then he gets into the amphitheater and the crowd's calling for his death.

He's got a Roman official, a proconsul, sitting in front of him, and they're like, you know, he's like, just pinch. Just pinch. A little incense. And, you know, right there, he quotes Romans 13. He quotes a version of Romans 13. You don't understand a pro council.

You don't understand a political figure that my God is king over all. How can I deny my king? You're asking me to deny my king. You're asking me to deny what the apostle proclaimed to me.

And you're reading this and yeah, you're. It's like reading it now in sort of this post Christian world.

Things that were refracted for me, things I hadn't quite understood or saw in some of those texts. I see now in some of what's happening within the west in particular, and what's happening with Christians. And yeah, they were not perfect. And I.

And I do talk about some of the differences between today and back then, and they were not perfect. But I do love watching sort of organically, just how they're trying to engage the world while they are embedded. And it's.

It was a fascinating kind of intellectual study or study to kind of think about some of these things.

What I really loved, as I'm walking through your book, I appreciated the story, especially with Polycarp Blandina, a figure that I didn't know anything about historically. But you are seeing them. I mean, these are martyrs.

These are people that are standing true for the faith in the midst of the public world at which they live, it seems far removed from our audience. They think, this is not my world. It is more than you realize, because I think we have compromised a great deal.

We like the idea of martyrdom in theory, but when we're faced with the everyday realities, this means you might lose a job, you might be without employment, you might be sued, you could be, you know, you could be all over the evening news, or, you know, you might be all over bloggers talking about you online or YouTube videos, people that are. It's your. You will be ostracized and canceled. In some respect. They're dealing with the 2nd century Cancel culture that we're dealing with today.

I mean, I hate to import, you know, export terms onto that period of time, but I'm trying to get people to see that this is so applicable to the here and now where they're at. And this, I think it begs the question, how are we preparing people?

And have we as a church, have we forsaken our responsibility of formation for the preservation of institution? And I think Dallas Willard talked about this. When a church removes itself from formation, it becomes the institutional preservation. And.

And you even mentioned in the book, later on, in the end, when you're talking about, if you come from a seeker church background, which I don't hear that much anymore, but we, we still have the idea of what it means where church is about, hey, everybody, come here and find your best life kind of idea and find fulfillment. And we're not forming them. We're fooling ourselves.

Yeah, yeah. So a couple things, like one, for example, in that Blandina account, that's the.

The story I use in the next last chapter, and I think I mentioned in the book, but as part of that account, they mention multiple people that capitulated. Multiple people in the church that pinched incense to Caesar and walked out. You know, multiple people that were. That were under the same pressures.

But here is one, here's this woman who. Who remains faithful to the end, and the community sort of holds her up as an example. And that's what the purpose of that text is.

It's to be an example. It's to say, look, we recognize these things are hard. And here is a posture.

And so the church, the very fact that the text is written demonstrates, like, the struggle that's going on, but that simultaneously in, like, the second chapter, I say catechesis and discipleship is cultural engagement. Like this. We have got to form people. Catechesis is cultural engagement. We often think everything is external.

But when you look at the early church, they put such an emphasis on catechesis. I'll give you one example, and I think I only mentioned this sort of in passing in the book.

But early church, they draw a distinction between the Ethiopian eunuch in Acts 8 and Paul on Mars Hill in Acts 17. What is the Ethiopian dunan? He is reading Isaiah 53, and he looks at Philip and says, what do I need to do? And Philip says, and gives him the gospel.

If you go to Paul, Paul's, like, beginning, how many gods are there? Like, we've gotta. Like, we've gotta start at the beginning. I can't just say, jesus has a wonderful plan for your life.

I mean, there's like a whole catechesis, a whole discipleship. And actually, Irenaeus, in one of his works, he mentions the challenge Paul has among the Gentiles who weren't already formed.

And I see the same thing today. I mean, you can talk about. You can read some of those works, the Great Detourching or some of these works.

We're quickly moving into a culture in which the very basics of Christian orthodoxy or formation are not even known or assumed. And suddenly catechesis becomes a gateway into cultural engagement.

Well, let's lay that out. Of course, that's what Alan Kreider talks about in his book the Patient Ferment of the Early Church.

He talks about those four characteristics, catechesis and worship. And you refer to that so many times. But I think of Keller before he passed away, creating really the new catechism.

And it's this idea of how do we instruct our people? And it's not just for information, information only. It's formation in order to engage culture so we know how to go about it. It's training.

It's a performance script, a bit, if you will. And not only just in information, but how you belong a part of that community.

That's one of the aspects that reading part of the book, the church was not just a means of just coming up, getting Jesus and leaving. It was a community.

And struck me is the process that they had to go through after they came to Jesus to actually see if they could be a part of the community. Are you in an occupation that can be sanctified, that that can be shown to glorify God?

If you can't, if you're in, like, prostitution or you're in gladiatorial games, in my head, I'm going, okay, does cage match count? What about ufc? I remember these guys are UFC fighters. They're like, I fight for the glory of God.

As their tooth is falling out and blood is going down there. I'm just like, I don't know if that really quality, like, these are the things that we're dealing with.

Oh, man.

And there's so many of them.

Yeah. So one image I use because I'm trying to capture. I had the hardest time trying to capture what you're describing. I call it a cultural discernment.

So we have to, like, you have to look through your life.

And so you have this posture of discernment that you're looking through your life in part because you can't assume that the institutions and the structures are forming you in Christian virtue. So when you, when you embed yourself in society, you're constantly trying to discern. They were constantly trying to discern.

Does this profession, does this activity, does this, you know, this, this practice, this festival, do these things promote Christian virtue? And, you know, they didn't. It wasn't like a one size fits all answer. As I talk about, they.

You had to, like, think through the virtues and vice that are embedded in the institutions and professions. And then I also use the language of improvisation.

And I know this can kind of be, you know, a lot of people immediately think of like Michael Scott and, and the office.

I actually thought of jazz. Jazz. Jaz was like, how do I like. That's what I thought. Michael Scott, he's got.

That's what, that's what some people mentioned to me. But you're right. Like the.

And if you look at jazz, for example, the amount of skill and formation that it takes to improv beautifully is a great illustration for what I'm trying to communicate. Catechesis forms you to where you are embedded in a world. And it doesn't matter what you meet.

The tradition and the scripture has formed you in virtue to be able to respond to any and every situation that you find yourself in. It doesn't you always, you know, you miss a note here and there. But. But that's what I was trying. That's what the church is trying to do.

I do not say they do it perfectly, but that you can see. And yeah, you could see today. I mean, with our kids, with. With schools, with life, with our professions, just as you said earlier.

I mean, you're trying to figure out how to live Christianly in a world that is no longer sympathetic to Christian virtues and Christian values.

Yeah, well, as the kids and as we, as you mentioned, we are being catechized. I mean, I don't know how many people have talked about this?

We are being catechized on our online world, are digitized, depending on what your social media diet is, what your news is.

We're all being catechized in one way or another, which means that we're all being shaped to live and be formed in a certain world and a worldview as we go through this. How we catechize our kids is not just giving the information, but it's also giving them skills necessary to discern is.

I love how you said cultural discernment is discern how to engage. And this is what makes it very difficult because I remember growing up, I'm at that vintage where you could get your own TV in your room.

And I remember saying, I'm never going to allow them to have a TV in their room. Well, they don't. They have cell phones, which is worse. And they're engaging a world all the time and engaging a world.

And no matter how much I try, I can't keep everything out. So I have to teach them discerning skills to inoculate them.

Or as one pastor told me, I try to inoculate my kids to the world a little bit at a time and delve into these subjects and questions and stuff that I think our parents generation never would talk about with us. We don't have that option. No, it's in front of them all the time.

You want to talk about sexuality and transgenderism and homosexuality and lesbian relationships and gay. Whatever you want to say. Our kids. And I don't care if they're in a Christian school, matter of fact, sometimes there it's worse, quite honestly.

Yeah.

It just is. Because I think to my kids, my daughter would come home and some of her best friends were gay at school, and she want to have those conversations.

And so I was constantly and again catechizing. Deuteronomy 6. This is what you're talking about. Except it's not just in the family atmosphere.

It's the church and the church's responsibility to catechize. Right. That's what they were doing.

Yeah. And that's so in the book, I use like James K. Smith's Cultural Liturgies.

And I think that's a great book that just talks about how the culture is catechizing you. He uses the image of a shopping mall to argue when you.

When you walk in a shopping mall that everything has been carefully crafted to get you to perform in certain ways. I mean, so there is a performance that is happening. And yeah, you extrapolate that up onto our Phones onto social media.

Everything is carefully crafted for you to perform. And we have got to come up with alternative performances. And I think this is one way evangelicalism has been. Has been weak on.

On liturgy and on worship. We, you know, we sort of go to worship on Sunday, but realizing the spiritual life is one that is.

That lives in these patterns, these, like, liturgical performances.

I talk a bit about prayer and, you know, something like, for example, the Didache, one of the earliest Christian manuals we have, tells you to pray the Lord's Prayer three times a day. Now, the purpose of that was. Was to create a life where you're thinking about the Lord's Prayer constantly. You're thinking about.

This is pray without ceasing. This is a life that is lived, that is formed. So regardless of whatever ditches or dangers you meet, you know, you're.

You're walking that narrow path as much as possible with a heart that's oriented toward God and that's only met through formation. I agree with. With my kids. You know, my wife and I are very vigilant about things that come into our house, but we. We recognize it is.

You know, there is. They have access to so much, they hear so much. And unless we are forming them briefly, I mean, we use the new city Catechism.

You talked about the new city Catechism. You know, we use the new city catechism. We do family prayer.

We do things that are trying to create a liturgical pattern within our family, but then trying within our church to emphasize a regular habit of going to worship.

But I think this kind of thing is what you saw in the early church and something that has got to translate to today of a spiritual life that is embedded and oriented towards the good things of God. But it's tough because that has not been the emphasis always within evangelicalism in the 20th century.

That, I find, is the biggest challenge. It's not just the cultural part.

It's the church mechanism itself and how it's been constructed in the last 50 years, because it has become a part where you get your goods and services and you leave. You're not embedded in that community. Very few churches, I mean, depending on what your background is, I mean, membership may not mean anything.

And I'm like, well, you don't have 4,000 members. I don't care what you say, but what does membership even mean for you guys? Nothing. Nothing. It means nothing.

So you have to have a membership at your church that understands a mutual commitment to one another and a mutual building into one another. I think, though that's a hard thing in this world today because we're fearful, we've been hurt. We know that the motives haven't always been pure.

It symbolizes control.

And as we're looking at Christian institutions across the board, you actually refer to Christian institutions in the renewal of those institutions because they convey greater meaning. That's kind of the centering on James Davison Hunter's work there or a ministry like Cardis or Comment that does something very similar.

But as Andy Crouch has noted, this isn't just happening to the church where people are leaving the church. It's institutions as a whole that we're seeing.

So how do we get and help that when people have become privatized and their idolatry of radical or individual autonomy has gone, you know, in fuego, it's just become on fire that they don't want to be a part of the institution because they're fearful of it. How do we help recapture the institutional part in order for the communal identity of catechesis to occur?

This is so hard. I mentioned this at the very beginning about how is the modern world different from the early Christian world, the pre Constantinian world?

So in some ways, one, we are dealing with many of the abuse, much of the abuse and the sin that has happened at the hands of those who have had ecclesial power and institutions that have not always Christian institutions that have not always performed in virtuous ways. So one thing I mentioned this being, one thing is we are now living in a world in which we sort of have to acknowledge.

We have to acknowledge some of those things simultaneously.

This is like a Tom Holland dominion where the church has done some incredible things and institutions created by the church have done some magnanimous, incredible, godly work. So we're often trying to struggle with those.

And I mentioned in one chapter on the intellectual life, like trying to deal with current institutions or create institution. And I say it's going to be some kind of both.

And I think one challenge we have that I don't really get into in the book is with the loss of some institutions like say a university or a college or something, there are people who have invested their Lives in that Christians who have now lost that institution, who now have to deal with the fallout and redirect energies. That's a challenge. This is where pastoral work comes in.

This is where the good work of helping people grieve the loss of maybe one institution, the recreation of another institution, another educational institution, for example. But that kind of sifting work is gonna be challenged.

I think one, at least one way forward is an emphasis on local, and I do mention this in the book, that one way to overcome sort of what technology is doing is reemphasizing, as you said, membership and gathering people together on a regular basis. I know the last thing is people want to go to another church business meeting.

But creating liturgies and habits of getting people together and grow together.

Hospitality, yes. Things. Yeah, it's not that hard. People over to your house to eat, for crying out loud.

Growing together in godliness and getting off our phones and getting to church together. And pastoral staff that will lead people in hospitality, that will create leaders. Leaders that are creating, that are not using.

I mean, this is one of the challenge. I can't remember if I mentioned this book.

I wrote a piece, Christian leaders that are using their positions not as platforms but as servants, as creating environments where people are gathered together in learning hospitality.

I think we need godly leaders, pastors that are kind of leading the charge and creating cultures within our churches and cultures within institutions where servant and hospitality are the orientations not at the expense of godliness and of Christian orthodoxy and Christian morality, but doing so in ways that are Christlike and servant hearted. I mean, I think creating those kinds of cultures in our churches is imperative.

I think it has to go beyond the pragmatic centralization aspect in certain respects that it has to go back into the home localization, hospitality. I was chatting with a scientist. He's a NASA physicist and he was a senior White House fellow. He's an expert in AI.

And we got into a conversation on what are the effects of generative AI in the long term. And one of the things he said is because what we're going to be dealing with in the future is a lack of trust. Generative AI is going to create.

Let's say that you write in your lifetime 30 books, but generative AI says, or people have your name on the title and says you wrote 100 books.

Because gender of AI has created other books in your style, just like we see with artists and images and they look exactly like that and sound like it and what you're going to find. And I think we're seeing this now is an erosion of trust and authority in institutions. And we don't trust what we see online anymore.

We don't trust what we see in pictures. We don't trust. We trust what we can see in front of us. And that's the locality. I think this is your. This is exactly what you're saying.

While we are part of a digitalized world in which we can access globalized realities and get messages from people around the world, it has to be embedded where we are with the people that we're in, in our community. And I mean that. Like, I know that there are those that are fans of online church, and we've had people on the show advocate for that. I'm not a fan.

I just don't think that you can. I understand that there are sometimes the realities and things that you face. That to me, it's like eating junk food. You know, it.

It hits a craving, but it can't last in the long run. And I know I'm offending some of the people out there because we're doing online conversation, but it still cannot move from the local.

And I think even John says this. Second John, third John, I've written to you enough in paper and ink. I long to see you face to face. And he wasn't referring to a zoom meeting.

He was referring to being with people, eating together, supping together, being the body, and taking on that formation aspect, which I think is also very important. As we're talking about kids, I think of Christian Smith, Souls in Transition, where he talks about kids that have grown up in faith.

How did they stay in the faith? Well, their parents lived it, they suffered for it.

They had someone and another adult outside of the family unit that was backing what the parents were teaching in the home and living out. And that's the community that is the.

It comes back to this communal idea of belonging and how to belong in the middle of this world now, but not just belonging for community's sake. And this is where I find you talk about in the. The book chapters. You have five.

Identity is one, citizenship is another, Intellectual life, public life, and hope.

So you're not just talking about engaging as a privatized, spiritualized community, but you're saying is how do we then articulate how to live publicly?

Yeah, and there are some people that are still kind of new to this conversation because they do see the privatization aspect, where it's just me and Jesus. But as some have alluded to and we've talked about on this show, your faith Might be privately stimulating, but publicly worthless.

So what does it mean then, to have a theological or a culturally sanctified public life?

First of all, go back to something earlier you said about online. I would love to have this conversation in person anytime. We could hang. I look forward to a time when we could meet up and we could hang out.

And I want to connect something you said with the lack of trust, the localism, and then this public life. One of the most fervent sort of apologetic defenses in the early church. I sort of call it.

I don't know, I call it a moral apologetic sometime, or an embodied apologetic. But the Christians, let's say, like Justin Martyr, some of the apologists, when they were responding to a.

A pagan audience or a political figure or a pagan intellectual, they would appeal to their lives. They would say, look at our lives. In fact.

In fact, they would say, why don't you just compare the Christian life with the philosophers, you know, those who are hanging out with the Stoics and the.

You, the Aristotelians and whoever, go look at their lives and then go look at the Christian lives and tell me which community promotes human flourishing. I mean, the philosophers may talk a good game. They may have sort of rational inquiry that's. That's intriguing, and that's interesting.

But when you actually look at their embodied existence, look at the communities they create and the vices that flow from that. Look at that and then come look at the Christian community and see which community you want to be a part of.

And so a couple things like, immediately, obviously, the Christians are so embedded in the world, the world can actually see them living godly lives, and the world can actually see what human flourishing looks like, because you have families, you have Christians, you have people of faith who have embedded themselves and are demonstrating the beauty of godliness in the world. And that, you know, that was a compelling illustration. And it's, it's convicting for me. You know, I, you know, I.

I understand that the challenge of living godly lives embedded in a world, as we said, I have kids. You know, I understand the challenge of raising kids in this world.

But, you know, going back to those early centuries, and I mean, I start out with one, One story, one chapter of a. Of an apologist who's walking on the road and his buddy, they pass an image of a pagan God, and the pagan worships it right there.

And then they launch immediately into a. Into a debate. Part of that debate is consider the lives of Christians. And that was one of the motivating factors.

And I hope and pray and long for that to be true for us today.

Can the world around us today consider.

Our lives as a suitable alternative to those that are around us? I mean, those that we differ from, those are of the world. Can they actually look at us as Christians and go, I want to live that kind of life?

I mean, do our lives even look distinct anymore?

I'm not talking about weird as in Amish, but I'm asking the question, can the fabric of our lives in our day in and day out, in our pursuits and our struggles, do they actually show the reality of Christ within us and make people want to live different life?

Sometimes I wonder if we've let our own little cultural idolatries seep into our faith, keeping us to be ineffective, slowly choking the life of God within us so that we are no longer distinct and attractive to the world around us. As Stephen says, the second century church wasn't perfect. As a matter of fact, I haven't. I didn't know that much about the second century church.

I have to admit it. I mean, I've read some of the names and I was familiar with them.

But to delve into it really was eye opening because they were striving to live out their faith in an often hostile environment. So hostile in fact, that more than a few were martyred for their faith.

But the lives that these Christians lived, even under the threat of execution, it showed just how significant their faith was to them that they in fact live better lives than those who mock them. Christianity is much more than a set of private beliefs. It is more than a set of ideals or principles. It is living out a real hope in the real world.

It's offering a way of life that looks like Jesus not just on Sunday, but every day. A way of life that is at once looking forward to the hope of Jesus reign and embedded in the everydayness of our world.

Next time, we're going to continue this conversation and talk about just that. How do we live for Jesus in the real world? And how do we live in true hope? Conversations like these are not for entertainment.

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