Wokeness or Awakening? Why Today’s Issues Should be Shaping the Church's Mission - with Mike Frost

Prepare yourself for an enlightening journey as we sit down with internationally acclaimed missiologist and author, Mike Frost. Embrace an intimate narrative of his spiritual transition from a Catholic background to a life-changing evangelical conversion at 19, which carved his leadership path.

Through a plethora of diverse experiences and insights, Mike Frost illuminates the evolution of the church and the essence of its mission. In his new book 'Mission is the Shape of Water', he explores mission through the ages and around the world, pointing out that context is everything and will help us shape our mission expressions today.

Transcending the past and present, our conversation ventures into the future. By addressing the challenges of our time, we shed light on how the Church can respond. The discourse unravels the need for the Church to address key issues such as racial reconciliation, women's inclusion and the climate crisis - all while striving to shape communities in a world that is increasingly hybridized with technology.

Join us for this heartening conversation with Mike Frost. We navigate the complexities and challenges of faith, leadership, and mission in today's world.

If you want to purchase Mike's book (which we highly recommend) you can purchase is here https://www.amazon.com/Mission-Shape-Water-Learning-Inform/dp/1955142408

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:07

You're listening to the Reconstructing Pastors podcast. I'm Ruth Lawrence in.

Speaker 2: 0:11

And I'm Kirk Romberg. We're recovering pastors talking about what it looks like to make sense of our calling and community expression on the other side of deconstruction.

Speaker 1: 0:22

Our hope is to create a safe space to explore the bigger picture of the church, both the present state of the American evangelical church and what the future may hold for those who are searching for a better way.

Speaker 2: 0:35

We're really glad you're here. Let's get started Well, we are super excited to have with us as our guest Mike Frost. Ruth, you and I have been following Mike now on social media for a bit here and enjoying his posts and enjoying reading his material. So Mike is an internationally known and recognized misciologist and author and he is the co-founder of Forge, along with Alan Hirsch, and perhaps maybe Mike and Ruth's favorite description of you, mike is an agitator and to me that sounds like the part of the washing machine that makes the spin cycle go back and forth really fast and shake everything up. But so welcome Mike. We're super glad that you're with us today and we recognize that you're coming to us from Sydney, australia, so it's tomorrow for you. So welcome from the past.

Speaker 3: 1:30

Thank you, yes, and I'll let you know that tomorrow is fine. So far Nothing has happened. That's terrible, at least in the Southern Hemisphere anyway. So, and I'll try to be as agitative as possible in this conversation.

Speaker 1: 1:43

That's awesome. So we're one of the things that we really want to talk about on the episode is this book that you've just brought out. That Mission is the Shape of Water, and we're going to get to that. But we would love just for you to share a little bit about your leadership journey. I mean, what part of the reason for us doing this podcast is to engage with pastors and ministry leaders and the journeys that they find themselves in in this time that we find ourselves, especially in America. So would you kind of just share a little bit about you know, your leadership journey, your call. Did you start in a conventional church setting? How did that change? That's more than one question. I'm real, I realize that. But yeah, if you could share a little bit about yourself, mike, in that space, that'd be wonderful, sure.

Speaker 3: 2:36

Well, I mean, I grew up in a nominally Catholic suburban family, so I would say we were probably more kind of nothing much at all culturally Catholic, I suppose. But I was a very spiritually inquisitive child and so by the time I became a young adult I was very. I was exploring all kinds of religious perspectives, including my, my families, of Augustinian Christianity. But I ended up really being quite overwhelmed by some evangelical friends who talked to me about the grace and love of Jesus, and I had a very profound conversion experience, I suppose we used to call it when I was about 19. And this might not sound like a leadership journey, but this is the kind of roots of all of this. I was a young, white, confident boy, articulate, pretty smart, studying at university, and I'd had this kind of profound experience that I found kind of overwhelmingly beautiful and freeing, and so I just told everybody about it. I mean, it's just, it's like anything you discover something that's marvelous, then you start talking about it. But I ended up in an evangelical church where that's actually encouraged, like that's affirmed, and so I, unbeknownst to me in a way, just ended up on a kind of a leadership track, a leadership pipeline. It's like you're young white male, articulate, confident, loud, and you can string like a few words together. You end up putting, being put into situations of leadership and, in particular, preaching. And then eventually you're told, like you're cut out for ministry, you should study theology. So I'd been an English and history teacher, but I went back to university and did a theological degree. I ended up going through an ordination track and so by the time I got to my mid-20s all of that happened very quickly I ended up as the pastor of a pretty large Baptist church in the Hills District of Sydney, where Hillsong comes from, without even, I think, having a good hard think about whether this is what I wanted, or even if this is what God wanted. I think I just assumed that all the affirmation and all the success, if you like, of various kind of challenges I was embracing indicated well that God must be behind that.

Speaker 3: 5:02

But these were the 80s and this was the heady days of church growth theory, which is very influenced by market theory and the social sciences, much more so, I think, than theology or ecclesiology. And so I got to a point in my mid-20s, mid to, you know, around 26, something like that when I could see all the levers that were being pulled behind the curtain and I was pulling a lot of them and I recognized that a lot of what we were doing was just seeking to kind of out-attract other kind of attraction churches in our neighborhood. So we had to have the best music and the best children's ministry and the best youth ministry and the best preaching and the best this and the best that. And I came to a point where I realized a lot of what this was drawing from me was not Holy Spirit power and it wasn't even kind of a theologically directed kind of energy or impetus, it was ego and competitiveness. I was having to kind of outshine, you know, other pastors and other churches and I just became kind of sick about that, ruth and Kirk. I just I couldn't, I couldn't unknow what I was knowing and seeing.

Speaker 3: 6:22

And at this particular point in time my path crossed with another young guy who'd gone on a similar journey but ended up in a different setting. His name was Alan Hirsch. He'd ended up going down the track of revitalizing small or dying churches. I was probably more in the kind of attraction or suburban church growth kind of thing. But we were both, even though in different settings, going on the same kind of journey and asking ourselves you know, is this all there was to it? I mean, I've just become like a Christian kind of performing monkey in a big Christian business. In a sense. I was very young and I was a bit immature and I just didn't know how to think through processes of change management or anything like that. So I said that I wanted to resign and just get out. It wasn't for me. And my deacons were like no, no, no, no, no, things are going great, the church is growing, god is blessing you. So I kind of staved that off for a while.

Speaker 3: 7:17

But then this experience I'm about to tell you about is not particularly dramatic or or or interesting, other than it was the last straw for me. I was standing outside our church and these are the days before the internet guys said no one could look up online who was preaching in my, my church on any given Sunday. A little convoy of cars pulled in. Someone from the first car ran over to me and said are you preaching tonight? And it so happened that I wasn't.

Speaker 3: 7:44

No, no, I said, but we've got this guest speaker and you know she's awesome and it's great. It'll be all you know, or I did all the kind of sales routine and it's like okay, no, no, no, but you're not preaching, right. Okay. So he jumped back in the car and the convoy turned around and they would have gone to Hillsong or Castle Hill Presbyterian Church a little circuit of these churches that young adults would kind of try and my first impulse was right, I have to preach every Sunday. We can't let that happen again. And immediately after that I realized that was not from the Holy Spirit. That's not God telling me. You know, you and only you can preach in this church on Sunday. That was just sheer ego. That was like don't let them go to the church down the road.

Speaker 3: 8:27

And as I said it's not a particularly dramatic experience, but I just clearly remember being the last straw For me. I was like I can't do this. I can't play this game. This isn't what I imagined like church and church leadership and a faith community inspired by the gospel of grace and love and justice and peace making. I can't see it. And so no disrespect to that church and the people in that church, but I just had to resign.

Speaker 3: 8:54

And then Alan and I just started like reading Leslie Newbegin and Stanley Howell-Wasson and David Bosch, and we just started conspiring. We became a little reading group, the two of us just trying to re Well, we would say now, kind of deconstruct our ecclesiologies and reconstruct it around mission. I ended up getting a job teaching ideology and sociology at a community college and went through this whole process of unraveling, as he and I then worked through ways in which we might rebuild. What does it mean for us to be called by God? What is the church? What should the church be? And that ultimately led us to writing a whole kind of curriculum around that and creating a little course to help other people who are exploring the same kinds of questions, which ultimately became the program that you introduced earlier, kirk, which was the Forge Mission Training Network.

Speaker 2: 9:47

Wow, that was a beautiful job summarizing your story. I found myself so caught up in it, identifying with some things, with a lot of things actually, you know, changed the circumstances, but maybe the particulars I don't know that I ever had a convoy show up at my church to hear me preach, that's. But maybe that's a good thing. And I love the heart and the resistance, I would imagine, to the potential temptation that you could have gone and didn't. So, wow, we applaud you for that and for the work that you've done since then to take a different track. And that's kind of what you know before we jump into your book, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading and talking with Ruth about in Vice-Versa.

Speaker 2: 10:40

What you just explained and you even used the words deconstruction, reconstruction of what you're doing feels like it's about maybe 20 years or more earlier than what we feel like a lot of people are going through now, maybe prompted by COVID, with circumstances, the cultural climate in America, the evangelical church being in crisis, you name it.

Speaker 2: 11:03

We started this podcast, reconstructing Pastors Podcast, in response to the very things that a lot of pastors are going through, similar to your story. Again, different circumstances, but something is rising up within that is wanting to be honest with who it is and what it is that God's calling them to be and do, and that means somehow I can't do what I've done before and I can't go back. But I'm not sure what the way forward is. And it sounds like not only have you been there, but maybe in your spaces you've connected with a lot of people in that similar journey. So wondering if you can tell us a little bit more about that journey and, specifically, what are the challenges that you feel like pastors are facing today in that journey, especially maybe here in the United States?

Speaker 3: 11:49

Well, I mean for me I don't know how that journey would have unfolded if I hadn't have met someone like Alan and we hadn't have found that kind of camaraderie, as initially two of us and then our wives were drawn into that, and then around us a gather, a number of other kind of pastors or ex-pastors, but definitely at that heart of that, doing it alone, particularly when there's sort of disillusionment or maybe anger or disappointment at least, that things hadn't worked out the way you wanted or they weren't what you had thought they should be, it's done a good place to be alone in that kind of setting. And so, and having someone like Alan and I hope he would say the same of me for him was just permission giving. It was like there was like okay, someone else is going through this. He didn't have the same kind of journey as I did. He came from a Pentecostal background, having been brought up in South Africa, I guess the similarity to us we were both brought up in largely secular homes had a very profound conversion experience. He meant Pentecostalism, me and evangelicalism, and then it ended up in ministry before we kind of knew it.

Speaker 3: 13:01

And so there was a common kind of journey there, although there were some differences, but he's a non anxious kind of presence. That guy is just like what I would be, like who are we? Is this like we doing something wrong here, or is is thinking this inappropriate or we stepping outside the bounds of orthodoxy here, or you know, he was just a very warm, non anxious presence and that's what you need in a setting like that someone just to hold your hand as you're going through it, because you kind of the ground that you've got a built things on now has kind of shifted out from under you and it's difficult to figure out when is their solid ground here? That I can kind of find some balance in which then allows me that sense of balance to then Explore the future. You can't explore the future when everything is Is off kilter, and so a community in that case it was just one person which developed it, as I said, into more people who gathered around us, a non anxious kind of presence, and then the freedom to explore, like the freedom to be daring enough to explore. But I mean also have to acknowledge that both of us were confident white men and so they're also Around that. There are the resources, there's a kind of fearlessness that can come from people who are privileged in that regard, and I don't underestimate that. It's far more difficult, I think, for for people of color and for women who are seeking to kind of find their way through this maze of figuring out, you know, what is my ecclesiology or my theology or what do I understand about leadership when there is an already kind of affirmation of you being the kind of person of leadership that you are, which is why both our land, I, have had like a very strong commitment to wanting to support and encourage women in leadership generally, but also in a process of Thinking through alternative or new ways of being church. So I Don't know if that answered your question. I forgot where that question was going there for a minute, but I think there are lots of plus. Also, you did mention yet you did mention that kind of the, the Current or peculiar issue that related to the kind of world of post COVID, and it's extraordinary. They're gonna write, you know they're gonna write gazillions of books and PhD thesis on this, just like just what did a global pandemic do Like to business, to culture, to the arts, to education. I mean, it's just, it's had, it's had an extraordinary and I don't think yet fully realized effect on culture and that includes, as you were saying, on the church, on On church leadership and its confidence in church and church life.

Speaker 3: 15:36

I feel like what we were going through in the 80s was like a real sense of being straightjacketed by a Model of church, church growth theory that was working. For a period of time it was actually attracting people, often from other churches, but there was a sense in which people would say to me back in those days what are you complaining about? It works, it's good, it's great, my church is awesome. And so it took a real sense of Restriction and kind of a busting out. That was how I felt, what I felt I was doing back in those days, whereas today I don't feel like anyone's thinking well, it's really working, it's great, everything's awesome.

Speaker 3: 16:15

And there's a general sense of on. We kind of like Like, I don't even enjoy it myself, how am I expecting anybody in my church to enjoy this? And there's a sense of kind of listlessness and a sense of which we feel become and uncertain about the way forward if lots of things have collapsed around us. There is no overarching. Hey, this is the model of church and it works. No one's found that and no one's presenting that we're all seeking to discover our own unique Callings within our own particular settings, and that's a much more difficult kinds of thing because it doesn't come with the energy of breaking out. There's a listlessness in that. It requires a Resolve to move forward in rediscovering what might be the next steps for us and, I think, actually a much more difficult challenge than the one that we were going through back in the day.

Speaker 1: 17:11

Yeah, I, first of all, I just want to thank you for mentioning the inequality in this, in this space, of it's different for women and people of color, and how, even back in the 80s, for you and Alan, just the fact that you were together and you were White males that had resources was helpful, and I thought that what you said, kirk, was really interesting, though it's always like you guys were early, early adopters of this and obviously there were there were more people in that space too, but it feels like there's a surge right now of like we're all catching up and, like you say, I'm not sure what, what were the triggers of that? Covid was certainly part of that, but as you describe your journey with Alan, it makes me. It makes me laugh a little bit because it feels very descriptive of my journey with Kirk, and you know, we both came out of church ministry and set up a coaching company because, honestly, we didn't know what else to do, and so you know, we're both pastors of 25 years trying to make sense of our calling With all of these questions, and I think, as we would meet once a week in Starbucks To like talk about our business, but we'd have like an hour before even our business meeting, where we're like, can we just like talk about this question and just having the liberty and the companionship To, and the safe, the safety to know that someone knows you, you're not being disloyal, you love God, you love the local church, you're passionate about it. I mean, for goodness sake, we gave our lives to this thing, you know, like this, but then the disillusionment that comes with that and all of that stuff. So it just, it just is very warming to hear You're an Alan's journey, because it feels like it's is very similar. It obviously in very different contexts and different time, but I think that the advice of find people to journey with and sometimes, if you're going to be a pastor or a ministry leader, that might need to be outside of your space, your current space, because Not all of these questions are going to be accepted or, you know, it might not be okay to have this, the space to really Question everything. So you know, our heart here at Reconstructing pastors podcast is to try and provide some of that space for people with the podcast and we've got a cohort that we run with these amazing pastors across America who are in that space and we're trying to provide that type of table to process.

Speaker 1: 19:46

But one of the things this is the thing that I wanted to ask you, one of the things that I know we had like a, a bunch of bucket questions around the church. But one of the things that both me and Kirk really were aligned on was this question around mission. Like we were like hang on a minute, what are we doing? Everyone would say the missional language. But I think deep down and this was applied to the big sea church that we were seeing around us we were like, actually, are we really being missional? What is the purpose of the church here? And like, I think, the desire for me I had a big conversion experience too the desire for me was always to share the love of God in society, to bring these amazing elements of kingdom God's kingdom, god's rule and reign in a way that changed the world. You know, that was like my starting point and I think we were in our Starbucks meetings. We were like, oh my gosh, is this even happening? So that was kind of where we were at.

Speaker 1: 20:54

But that leads me to this book that you've just brought out, because it's all about mission and obviously that's a massive part of what you've been unpacking in these years and teaching. But can we start that? I'd love to talk about your book about mission is the shape of water, and I know it's getting some really amazing response right now across the globe. But could you tell us a little bit about that? The book Like. Why write it Like and why now? Was there anything about the timing of now?

Speaker 3: 21:27

Well, can I pick up on something you were just saying, ruth? I think that I think we used to quote back in the I don't know if anyone ever said this or it's just like a kind of a trope but we used to say, oh, jesus came preaching the kingdom and what we ended up with was the church, as though somehow, like, kingdom was magnificent and church was like a poor reflection of that, and some churches have been poor reflections of that. But the link between kingdom and community is absolutely essential and I would say any community of faith which is seeking to alert people to the reign of God, which is not just about the fact that you can get a heaven when you die, but this unfurling of God's reign, which is actually about joy and peace and healing and justice and an immediate experience of the presence of God and deliverance and salvation and new life that has to be embodied by a community of people, a family of people. And so for a lot of what we were doing back then was like discovering kingdom, like for a lot of us, like the kingdom language was used by Pentecostals to describe speaking in tongues or kind of words of knowledge or miracles and the like, and I think that healing is part of the reign of God. Some kind of progressives or liberals will talk about it as a kind of a social justice initiative, but it's and it is. It includes all of that and so much more.

Speaker 3: 22:54

And I think one of the things that I went through in the 80s, in that kind of rediscovery of who am I and what am I doing, is my job isn't to grow the church as an institutional or an organization or an event in a particular place on Sunday. My job personally is to alert people to the reign of God and to equip other people to do that, that we might do it collectively, because no individual can manage it by themselves. So discovering mission was recognizing actually the mission of the church isn't to grow like brand Jesus or brand Baptist or brand Anglican or Pentecostal. Our mission is to let people know a new world is coming and there's a whole new way of being human that's being made available to us through Christ, the Jesus birth and teaching and death and resurrection and ascension, not just His birth. All of it actually kind of points to this whole new way of being human under the kind of reign and rule of the glorious and beautiful triune God. Now, that was kind of breathtaking to me when I discovered that, and the two people that really helped me most were David Bosch, a South African Missiologist, and Leslie Newbegin, a British former missionary, retired missionary and both of them were just onto it. It was just like wow.

Speaker 3: 24:11

When I would read their work I would be like I want this world. I want a world where there's no sickness or disease. I want a world where there's, where everyone has enough, where no one goes hungry, and I want a world where there's joy and the presence of God among us and freedom and peace and reconciliation between people and a whole new way of being, a kind of a redeemed society, like a family, in which all are welcome and no one is excluded. Like these things are beautiful ways of thinking about being human and that's what we're meant to do, because it's not just like hey, come to church on Sunday, we have better preaching than the church down the road, or we have an awesome children's ministry that your kids are going to enjoy. Like there's nothing wrong with meeting on Sunday or having ministry to children, don't get me wrong, unless it's all in the context of wanting to let the world know this is what the world is like. We're not Americans, we're not Australians, we're not British, we're not. We're not cleaving to any kind of kind of cultural interests. We're not trying to generate a particular brand or a particular ecclesiology. We're wanting you to know a new world has come and is coming.

Speaker 3: 25:24

And so to the book. It was like well, listen, if you think that all you've got to go on is a few examples you might have heard of around the place or that you've read of are happening in various places in the world. Now why don't you take a look at the last 2000 years of the history of the Christian movement, and what you'll discover there is that when Christians are committed to alerting others to the reign of God, wherever it might be Europe, africa, south America, you know the South Pacific they've done extraordinary and in some cases incredibly diverse kinds of things. So the title Mission is the Shape of Water is my way of saying. You know, mission is always mission. It's alerting people to the reign of God. It's anchored and rooted in the idea of the coming reign of God. That doesn't change. That's always been what Christians have been committed to for the last 2000 years letting the world know that what Jesus said and did and unleashed, is unfurling and history is moving to the end that God had intended from the very beginning.

Speaker 3: 26:30

But the shape it takes is very different in different settings and different places and among different people and at different times in history. So just like water is always H2O but it could be shaped like a bottle or it could be shaped like a lake, in the same way mission is always mission but it gets shaped differently, very differently, like radically differently, in different places, in different contexts and at different times. And so in the introduction I talk about how I'm just trying to kind of develop a kind of healthy Christian memory which kind of frees us to imagine myriad ways that mission could look today. It's not got to look like the church that you grew up in. It doesn't have to just look like you know the stories you read about from what Christians did in the 20th century Like boy. When do you discover what they did in the 10th century or the 3rd century or the 19th century? So I know history can be a bit boring for some people, but, man, I always say this is church history, but only the interesting bits.

Speaker 2: 27:35

You know, again, as I was listening to you talk, I found myself I could sit and listen to you for a long time. I'll be a part of the convoy. How's that? I'm just joking about that, but I think what I felt, something happening in me as I was listening to you talk about whole new world coming, and a new way of being human is available to us in Christ. That feels a lot different than what I've grown up to or observed as a believer to be traditional evangelism Believe this set of principles and you get to go to heaven when you die. And what you're describing, though, feels attractive. It feels like something that not only I desire, but the world desires at once and longs for, and actually there's hope for that, and that hope is available in Jesus. So thank you for offering that as well as how that's been lived out by the church over the centuries.

Speaker 2: 28:32

In your book you explain about ten different areas, and you recognize that there's multiple expressions oftentimes in these areas, and but you you highlight some that it was fascinating to read the shape that mission took and the adaptations that people made in order to be good news people and sent people in their generation, and for us to not repeat it but be inspired by it and to ask similar questions in that process, you, you, I felt like you did a great job. Speaking to our human tendency I'll say my human tendency to maybe pinpoint particular periods in history or individuals in history that we might be aware of or admire especially, and think that's what mission looks like. So I'm just gonna repeat that why is it that we have that tendency to think, and what would it look like for us to embrace God's mission as being in the shape of water and to bring his mission, his kingdom, what it looks like to be human to our generation, in our world today?

Speaker 3: 29:45

Yeah well, context is absolutely essential. The simple answer to that is to understand the cultural context in which mission is being presented. Because you're right, I mean people will look back and think that person's doing something I'd like to do, so they become a champion. So, like, a lot of people have been really taken by the whole orphanage industry, like let's fund orphanages around Africa and Southeast Asia and the like. It it seems like and feels like you're doing something really important and good, like you're rescuing all these children and you're providing them with a caring environment. And often they will reach back and I say, look, this is what Amy Carmichael did in Southern India and this is what Mary Slesa did in the Niger Delta. But in both of those cases those women had orphans foisted upon them by their context.

Speaker 3: 30:36

I mean Mary Slesa, I mean gosh, mary Slesa was this red headed, wild Scottish woman who went barefoot through the jungle and went up rivers that people said don't go up there, they'll kill you, but she just took canoes up these like tributaries up into the Niger Delta. I mean she was just a powerhouse woman, but there was a context in which twins were considered to be cursed and so if you gave birth to twins, you just left them out in the jungle to be eaten by wild animals Lest they bring the curse upon the village. So she starts happening upon a discarded children. What's, what is a woman to do? She gathers them up. I mean always picture her like, like writing a canoe up some like some remote tributary of the Niger Delta, with six or eight kids. I mean literally, she would walk with children on a hip and three or four toddlers following behind her, where she would go to preach. And so in the end, she Establishes what else could she do? She establishes effectively an orphan, she orphanage, she kind of builds a facility and starts rescuing these children.

Speaker 3: 31:42

Now, that was the context that shaped her. She can go there to start orphanages. It was simply this was a need that she needed to respond to. Today we would say orphanages are the worst place for a child to grow up in. There's disconnection from extended family, from culture, from language. I mean, you do anything, you should do anything today not to raise a child in an orphanage, but often what we'll do is we'll go check this out. Amy Carmichael did this in southern India, was incredible. Let's like, let's repeat that here and now, which is not the way it ought to be. I reckon Mary Slesser and Amy Carmichael would be the first to tell us not to so in that respect.

Speaker 3: 32:23

It's like wait, wait, wait, look at what's happening now. Let's let's not just pick our favorite missionary stories and then say they're the justification for doing what they did, in the same way as we have this kind of nostalgic notion about the church in Jerusalem. You know, if only we could get back to Jerusalem. What? Why wait a second? Like Jerusalem and all sorts of problems. You know, the Greek speaking widows weren't being fed. No one was leaving Jerusalem to go to the other ends of the earth.

Speaker 3: 32:52

There are all sorts of ways in which that church was great at has limitations. We learn from those. We learn from mistakes. We learn from what's good and useful. But to your question, the most important thing is to explore our own contexts in order to figure out well, what does the reign of God, what does peace or justice, or joy, or healing, or the presence of God? What would it look like? How might it be shaped in this particular place? Okay, I tell you another story.

Speaker 3: 33:20

One of my favorite stories out of this book is about a woman called Alice Silly Harris who went to the Congo believing that she was just going to go and be a conventional missionary, which is a preaching missionary. She was a British Baptist she had a husband went to teach the Bible, convert people, plant churches very conventional conversionist type Christian mission. When she gets there, what she discovers is that there's a genocide unfolding in the in the Congo base of the king Leopold from Belgium I'd go set up the whole of the Belgian Congo as a concentration camp and that the Congolese were being forced to provide quotas of rubber to his company. And if they're quota didn't why? Enough, they had to pay or make up the tear by having a hand or an arm removed to make up the white as punishment. So she encounters this when she gets there and then she has this new fangled contraption called a personal camera. This was the late, like the 1890s, into the very early 1900s. As she starts photographing portraits of these amputees these people are victims Of the criminal activity of the king of Belgium and then goes on a speaking tour to 30 cities in the United States, right across the UK and Europe, and showing like slideshowers this was unique, no one had said anything like this. They're called magic lantern shows.

Speaker 3: 34:50

She was showing horrible pictures of people who were disfigured by the force public which was King Leopold's private army and created so much outrage in just five years of doing this that the whole of the Belgian Congo was unraveled. The parliament of Belgium rebute to the king. The Belgian Congo was dismantled, set free, like she set free, millions of people who were suffering under unspeakable privation and atrocity. Now did she go to Africa to become an advocate for social justice and freedom? No, but mission shaped the context, shaped her mission in in real time, as she was there and I love the story of the way she utilizes like a new fangled version of technology and her incredibly indomitable spirit actually changes African history. I mean, it's an astonishing story. Context is the most important thing. What does joy, or peace, or justice or or healing? What does it look like here and now? How might we alert people to that in this particular place and time?

Speaker 1: 36:02

I love that, mike, and the contacts, and I think that there's just this from listening to you does. It seems there's this fine line between being inspired by history of mission and being informed by it, and so I guess we should be informed by the partnering with the Holy Spirit in the context that we find ourselves in, to figure out what is our response. You know what is our response, what are our ways and be and still be inspired by what's been before, but understand that we have our unique contribution to bring in partnership with the Holy Spirit. And I'm curious as well I know this is a little left field question, but I know that last year around Was it last year, no, this year, this year, february and we had the Aspiri revival and I just you know, I think that it.

Speaker 1: 37:05

I remember watching all of the reactions around that and it was so confusing, it was like it felt quite polarizing some of the reactions on social media and, and I think that there was a sense of you know, is something happening again? And I think there's a tendency, even with revival and whatever we think revival is, to have the same thing. It's like, well, that happened back then and we want it to happen again in our time and I'm just curious I'd love to hear. Before we started this episode, I said if I can get Mike to talk about revival. I know it's not your the main thing that your books about, but this is just for me. But I would love your thoughts on that, like how we tend to repeat something, how we can form a lie, something, and and yet you know, within that space there is God at work to. And how do we like, how does revival blend with mission? Could you speak to that space?

Speaker 3: 38:08

Well, I know you're not American originally, ruth, but I think Americans, generally speaking, are haunted by revival. It's kind of endemic to their culture. America has been shaped by revivalism. I mean not only shaped by revivalism but the great awakenings they're just, it's draped over the Christian experience even to this day the stories of widespread conversions, incredibly deep conviction what widespread mass conviction of sin, the embracing of holiness and holy lives and a puritan culture, and these kind of flare-ups of deep, deep, deep, extraordinary experiences of the presence of God. And I would say, yeah, that's the reign of God. Conviction of sin, a call to holiness, a new way of living, conversion, experience of people who've been outside the kingdom, and so there's this sense of wow, these things have happened since the 1700s. This flares up regularly. So I wonder whether some of the kind of almost obsessive like get to Asbury and check this out, is alike. As to your question is, like it's happening again, like here we go again. This is a very American version of Christianity and it didn't turn into that. It turned into a, I guess, a relatively short but kind of deep experience of the presence of God. I mean, I wasn't there but at least what I've read about it, there's an incredible sense that students felt about the presence of God and conviction of sin and an extraordinary sense of the grace and forgiveness of God.

Speaker 3: 39:54

But the thing that I loved about it and I mentioned it only briefly in this book is the fact that nobody was running this. There was nobody in charge. There was no Jonathan Edwards, like from the first grade awakening. There was no DL moody from the third grade awakening. There was no celebrity, there was no committee. No one was running this or promoting this or generating this. I'm not suggesting those people were generating anything, but there was no one who became kind of the headquarters of this sort of movement.

Speaker 3: 40:22

And I think I quote a woman who went from a Baptist seminary from Kentucky. She went to Asbury to check it out and she was seeing organization, like people were wheeling in whiteboards and writing up prayer requests and food was arriving. There was some form of organization to maintain this kind of worship service that just seemed never to end. And when she said, well, who's in charge? The answer was no one. Like we don't even know. Like someone just thought we needed food, someone just thought we should write prayer. Like there was no central organizational structure.

Speaker 3: 40:55

And the point that I make about that in the book is it seems as though movements are happening like that in this day and age. There's no central office for Black Lives Matter or for the Me Too movement or the 24 7 Prayer movement, so these things spontaneously emerge and they are decentralized and widespread and they're often, at their heart, kind of moved by women and people of color in order to kind of call people to an awakening, to a newness, to a new perspective. And whether you agree with all the goals and aims of Black Lives Matter or Me Too or any of those kinds of movements is immaterial to me right now. The primary thing to recognize is they're not being led by a small committee of well educated white men, and I think that we need to be open to the possibility that God might very well be bypassing what we think of as conventional or recognized kind of leadership structures and personnel and generating newness in life. This is what happened in India, which was really extraordinary.

Speaker 3: 42:07

A lot of Christian mission work was among the elites or the upper class in India, believing if we can convert lots of people who become future politicians and business leaders and what have you, it will trickle down and India will become Christianized.

Speaker 3: 42:24

But it didn't work. But actually where Christian revival has broken out in India has been among the Dalit people, the so-called I hesitate to even use this term, but the so-called untouchables, like the poorest of the poor, have seen like remarkable movements of God happening among them and it feels to me as though this is God's way of operating. I just step around what you think are the kind of conventional or recognized understandings of leadership and I work among a wild redheaded lady with no shoes in the middle of the Nojir Delta or among the Dalits in India or among a bunch of kind of student punks in Asbury. This is where things bubble up and I think probably have always happened that way. It's just that we often kind of get we get become enamored of what look like really muscular and dynamic expressions of leadership that aren't necessarily the kinds of things that God is at working.

Speaker 2: 43:25

I love that because it speaks to, I think, what seems to me to be a real predominant theme throughout your book, and that is the almost, the deprofessionalization of mission, the decentralization, the de-clericalization I'm not sure I got that word right but the, where our tendency oftentimes, at least as Americans, is to see what's going on in the world and the problems of our country and to say things like we need another Billy Graham or we need God to do this or God to do that, and Billy Graham's ministry was wonderful for its day, but it's not necessarily for this day, otherwise God would raise up someone to do that. And you respond to that tendency of ours, maybe to kind of take a passive approach to mission. And well, if God would just do this and raise up that person, then all this would be better as opposed to maybe taking ownership for myself that I am to be a person through whom the kingdom of God can move forward in my own context and I think you say something like and it connects back to the idea of water wouldn't God rather use millions of nameless, faceless people I'm not sure use that language but unknown people to move his kingdom forward and the message of Jesus forward in their own context. And so, with that in mind, you close out the book in the epilogue, with some idea of where the water is flowing. And you admit you're not a futurist, you're not into prognosticating and predicting what's going to happen next.

Speaker 2: 45:17

And yet you do have some thoughts that, as I read them again, I feel this surge of hope rising up in me and thinking my goodness, I hope he's right, because this sounds beautiful, this sounds like what I want to be a part of, and I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to what you sense is or maybe could be next for the church, for mission, for church. What would your advice be for church planters? I'm guessing it wouldn't be go rent a school and buy some chairs and rent a band as a first approach. It might be something different.

Speaker 3: 45:53

Yeah, and, as you say, I say that I'm not a futurist. But to your previous question, I think, where you're asking about context, all I'm doing in that chapter is saying well, what are the challenges that our context throws up at us? Because they will be a clue to what mission should be shaped like, and one of them I've already talked about and that is the emergence of grassroots movements, of so-called unqualified people. That seems as though we're living in an era where these things bubble up regularly and slowly shift culture in a particular direction. They don't build institutions, they don't build central offices or employ people. They become kind of well water. They kind of lift something and just move it gently in a particular direction.

Speaker 3: 46:43

Even if some of the kind of voices in groups like Black Lives Matter or whatever it might be, seem strident and some people's minds are fencing, all they are doing is highlighting for us the importance of exploring. Are there better ways to look at policing? Are there better ways for us to explore the issue of race? What does it mean for us to understand genuine reconciliation between races in our culture? Similar to with me too movements, no head office, no imposing of any particular kind of rules or laws. All they're doing is saying what would happen if we just believed women, if we just listened to the voices of people who have been and obviously this is effective churches significantly who have been bullied or assaulted or unheard or misbelieved or unbelieved, I should say what would happen if we actually took these things seriously? I see movement in those directions. Slowly but surely that is to be much more movement in those directions, but listen to what's happening among kind of movements that are emerging.

Speaker 3: 47:53

I think that the church has to take seriously the issues of racial reconciliation, the issues of inclusion of women in the life of the church and society. We should be leading in this respect. I mean it ought to have been that when people are like, oh my gosh, how do we deal with these challenges that are being called for us now in this kind of post-post civil war civil rights movement, oh, the church. Look at them, they're reconciled. That's what they ought to have said. I mean, here we are hearing about women from Hollywood and women from business being assaulted, being bullied and not being believed. Where is there a group of people that believes women, where women are equal and included in community, where the organization isn't just led by me? Oh, the church. Let's go to the church. They've got some clues. That's what they ought to have been saying for us.

Speaker 3: 48:45

What does it look like for us to listen to each other and to develop a genuine community of inclusion and love and grace? Our society is calling for these things to happen. We're not foisting them on our society. That's the society saying how do we do this, and we ought to respond to that as one of the things I say. We ought to recognize that leadership needs to be humble, decentralized and move relationally through the organizational structure we're being called upon to explore.

Speaker 3: 49:16

What does it look like for us to respond to the climate crisis in this time? And I'm just way past even worrying about how much of the climate crisis that we're encountering is as a result of human-centered activity, and I'm just much more concerned about asking why don't we say that our task is to love the things that God loves? And who does God love? God loves the poor and God loves the planet. God loves the planet, and actually what we find in scripture is the planet loves God, like the stars and the sun and the sky are worshiping. They're singing worship to God, like there's this deep connection between God and creation. So if God loves the planet, then ought not to we love the planet and to respond to it as an act of worship to God? That we ought to be the most environmentally conscious people, that we are most focused on issues to do with justice and peacemaking? Surely we ought to be, and I'm so tired of people telling me that, oh, this is what the church to be woke and beyond any kind of simplistic agenda that you can critique in those terms, it's actually about saying this is what the kingdom of God was about, don't you remember? It's all about the mission, which is about learning people to the reign of God. What does the reign of God look like? Our God loves the planet. Our God loves the poor. Our God loves worship. Our God loves peace making. Our God wants to bring healing and joy into our lives, and so look at the context what's happening and what ways do we need to consider a kingdom-shaped response to it?

Speaker 3: 50:57

One of the other things I mentioned in that chapter is we are actually dealing with issues now that have never been dealt with before. I'd say the climate crisis is one, and the other one would be the so-called digital revolution. What will it look like for us to fashion communities in a kind of hybridized world, which includes really deep connection digitally as well as face-to-face, and how might they complement each other? And I don't think old guys like me have the answer to those questions. I think digital natives will explore that for us. But at least old guys like me can say no, this has to be taken seriously. We have to figure out what does it look like for us to use the internet and artificial intelligence and virtual reality and those sorts of things in responsible, kingdom-shaped kinds of ways that foster the values of the kingdom that I've been talking about all morning? So in the book I don't have answers to that, other than to say that's going to be an essential question for the way forward.

Speaker 1: 52:03

Mike, thank you so much for sharing all of that. I feel absolutely stirred and full of hope, like Kirk, as is interesting for me in my own life, because, as someone who's been a pastor for so many years, I find myself studying an MBA in sustainability and have a real passion for trying to bring my leadership into a solution for the planet, the crisis that we're facing and sometimes I've had people comment like that's so random, Ruth, how come you're kind of going in that direction. For me, it feels like this natural trajectory of purpose-driven leaders, kingdom-driven leaders, to go OK, there's a problem here. How can we bring God's solutions into this place and care and love the planet just as he does, and be a good steward? So you're speaking my language so much.

Speaker 1: 52:56

We just want to just thank you for being here on this podcast. I mean, wow, you've given us so much in just a short amount of time and, like Kirk, I feel like I could listen to you forever. But we want to encourage our listeners. If you've really enjoyed this episode, we really want to encourage you to go and grab that book. Mission is the Shape of Water. It is hopeful, it's inspiring. I think it gives us some good handles on what to do and what not to do and a lens to kind of really listen to the Holy Spirit and get envisioned about how we could be the hands and feet of Jesus in our time. So we just want to encourage you to do that and, Mike, thank you so much. I don't know what else to say, but thank you Now.

Speaker 3: 53:46

I really enjoyed talking to you guys.

Speaker 1: 53:48

Yeah, and enjoy the rest of your morning in Sydney, and we will for sure keep in touch.

Speaker 3: 53:55

Peace to you both, thanks.

Speaker 1: 54:00

Thanks for listening to the Reconstructing Pastors podcast. If you enjoyed this episode and you'd like to help support the podcast, please share it with others, post about it on social media or leave a rating and review.

Speaker 2: 54:14

And if you're interested in leaning into this conversation further, we'd love for you to be a part of a special online community coaching space called Reconstructing Pastors Cohort. For details, visit our website at bridgeandrinocom. See you at the next episode.