[00:00:07] Speaker A: Welcome to that makes total sense, a podcast dedicated to exploring God's generosity and justice. I'm Alexis Busetti, a Christian aiming to ask good questions and encouraging you to do the same.
Every one of us is wired by God to live out generosity and justice. But the how sometimes elusa that makes total sense is a way for us to get together, posture ourselves as learners, and challenge one another to practice generosity and justice in a tangible way every day.
Adam, I have to tell you that it feels like it's been forever since I've done a recording. So if I'm a little bit rusty, forgive me.
[00:00:53] Speaker B: Yeah, no problem.
[00:00:54] Speaker A: We were just chatting about how we've been kind of laid back with our families over the holidays, and now I'm like, okay, back to work. Let's see if I can do this.
[00:01:04] Speaker B: No, I totally get that. I've forgotten how to do all human interactions.
[00:01:08] Speaker A: I was seeing the memes last week when I went back to work that I resonated with of, like, I can't even remember my password. Like, I opened up my work laptop and I was like, I had to do this, like six times. I was like, how do I not even remember my password? It was just. I don't know. I was poking myself in the eye when I was putting my mascara on. Anyway, it's week two, and I'm feeling a little bit more back. So happy new year.
[00:01:35] Speaker B: Fantastic.
[00:01:35] Speaker A: Yeah, happy new year.
I'm so thrilled to be sitting here with Adam. We met now we can say we met last year through a mutual contact. And I was so thrilled because this friend of ours was like, I think you guys would just really get along. I think you are working on some of the same things, thinking about some of the same things. And sure enough, I looked at some of the stuff that Adams has written and has been writing, and I'm like, oh, my goodness. Of course. We are really interested in what justice looks like.
We're trying to figure this out. We're trying to through this. One of your chapters, I hope. Get to it. We may not.
You shared an anecdote. We're talking about a particular individual in a congregation where you used to serve and said that his presence often reminded you and your congregation that you were in process.
And that was so meaningful for me because I often want to just be there or just get things done or fix things in some way. But to just be reminded that we're all people in process was really great. So, anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself. I'm here with Adam, and we're going to chat about a book of his that came out a few years ago called becoming a just church, cultivating communities of Shalom. And I know, Adam, this is a different world than when this book was published. This is a different world even than when you were writing this book, which I know takes some time. And so I'm hoping that we can bounce off of some of the concepts that you bring forth in the book, which are still really applicable today, as applicable today as when this came out in 2019, but also talk about how some of those things might have changed since our world has changed post Covid and things like that. So I want to give you the floor. I've talked a lot. Right now I want to give you the floor. And partially, I want to ask you to maybe share some of the things that you shared in the introduction of your book by way of introducing the book, but also introducing yourself, your social location, why this is meaningful to you, what you hope this book and this conversation will bring up for others who are thinking about these kinds of things.
[00:04:01] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I appreciate the opportunity to talk about it like we were talking about. The concepts of the book are things that feel very evergreen to me. They're constantly in my mind, and those realities confront me every day. And so I feel like even though this is a conversation that many people have, in a lot of ways, it's still really important. You know what I mean? You can't return to these kinds of concepts enough. At least that's the way that it is. For me, one of the reasons why I wanted to write something like this was that I found my story in other people's stories so often, meaning, I am the kid that grew up in a predominantly evangelical space. It was overwhelmingly white. It was overwhelmingly focused on being a good Christian by checking the appropriate boxes. My formation of faith was very much rooted in sort of like, eternal security questions and the obligation to live a particular way. Because of that, those are things that I feel like are pretty normative, at least for many white evangelical christians, that's a pretty normal experience.
And honestly, it wasn't even until grad school that I had serious engagement with questions around justice. It took me until even after my time in a christian college to have serious level of interaction with anything that would resemble a theological imagination for justice. And I still remember the way in which those both in the classroom and in the church world and in my own life, the kinds of experiences that seem to sort of coalesce at this. I'm in my early twenty? S and seeing these things open for the first time. It sort of did two things to me. One was it animated my faith in a way that that had never happened before.
And I don't mean to say that then justice became the only lens through which I could think about the scriptural text or think about my faith, but it animated faith in a way that nothing and no one had ever done. And I think it's primarily because of this. You cannot live in the world and think this is the way things should be. To know that that ache that you have for something to look different than the way that it does is not only something that was put there by God, but that actually you share with God.
That is part of how I reflect the image of God to the world, is to share the ache for a world made right.
And that is part of what it means to be human at the most fundamental level. That this is not because I have some sort of political affiliation. This is not because I am dabbling in dangerous theology or anything like that, but that these are the kinds of things that matter to God in such a thorough going way.
God would put it in my heart and also have a vision for transforming the world. And that that actually is what the biblical story is.
God setting the world to rights, as others have said. N. T. Wright sort of puts it that way, setting the world to rights in Christ. And that that actually has implications not just for some day, for eternity, but that the people of God can animate a way of life based on that imagination. And so I think that's one thing that it opened up a way of understanding my christian faith that was worth waking up for and being a part of every day.
And that sort of led to kind of a long life trajectory of learning.
And I had a professor at one time introduce this notion of Manny Ortiz, who, sadly, is not with us anymore. He passed away a few years ago, but he was a professor of mine, and he talked about a hermeneutics of repentance. And this, I think, is sort of the second thing that to me crystallized why it is this is such an important topic, because you're captured by this new idea, this new notion that God wants a world full of righteousness and justice and that we can be a part of it. You can become a zealot pretty quickly. You can become kind of a fundamentalist about it.
And I'm sure that I did. That was a long time ago, but I'm sure that I was that way. And I remember sitting in the class and he was sort of unpacking this notion of a hermeneutics of repentance. Meaning, do we come to the text? Do we come to our theological work with a repentant posture versus a triumphalistic posture, if I could put it that way. And it was such a humbling experience that it still sits with me to this day.
Meaning, when we come to the text of scripture and we're examining all these things, do we come to it with this notion that I am so blind, I don't even know what I don't know. I don't even know the right questions to ask. And his idea was that a hermeneutics of repentance leads us to better and more humble questions.
That, of course, provides answers. But the idea is not to master God, to master the text, but to allow God to allow our theological work to open us up to things. And I think that what was important to me in that was that it helped me understand the ways in which my story, my social location, my privilege, those were all in some ways liability to participation in the work of justice in the kingdom of God. And that that would require, like, a thoroughgoing and ongoing work of repentance in my own life to be able to be somebody who could participate meaningfully in this work that God was doing, that it wasn't just like, okay, now that I've had this realization, I'm going to lead the world in this, but I am part of this community of faith, that God hasn't put me on earth to be the protagonist of his story, but part of the choir. And I think that that's a big piece. So, anyways, that's a long winded way of saying those are the two experiences that I think about that were just so instrumental to me to say, the church is starting to talk about justice a lot now, and that's fantastic. But what would it mean for us to become that kind of church rather than just do justice oriented things in the world? And I think that sort of repentant way of thinking about justice is helpful for me, at least, as somebody that has always had a foot in that white evangelical or evangelical adjacent.
[00:11:08] Speaker A: No, Adam, I appreciate you sharing that. And I want to get straight to what you just said. Justice not as a strategy, but as a way of life, of who we are. But before we go there, I just want to kind of throw out something that I've been thinking about lately that came up as you were talking and with this hermeneutics of repentance, leading to better question asking. And that really resonated with me, because even when I started the podcast in 2019, that was kind of one of the ways that I kind of phrased for myself, what am I doing? Where am I kind of in my faith journey? And I think because I had a similar upbringing in this, I'mixed hispanic and white, but my church world was predominantly white, predominantly evangelical as well, where, as you named, answers were key.
That was it. I grew up in this similar space. And I think you also mentioned we're concerned about things, about eternal security. And so it makes sense that we would want the right answers and kind of want to share the right answers because we want to be Billy Grahamish about it. We want to know that. We know that. We know that we are secure, that our neighbor's eternal salvation is secure. And that is a different discussion. But that pathway, that journey kind of, I think, I don't know, maybe especially for people with personalities like mine who kind of enjoy doing things the quote right way, it feels really natural to people like me. But that can lead to some of the things that you're talking about, checking boxes or wanting to be focused on evangelism in a certain way, that maybe doing acts of justice looks like checking boxes and then doing it for some purpose toward this, and not necessarily as opposed to which that's the debate that's been going on for a long time, right? Kind of this social gospel versus whatever, but thinking about God's transforming work, as you put of making rights in the world, is a different kind of paradigm to look at our lives as christians.
And so I just kind of want to name that almost for myself because there's probably some other folks out there who have had similar experiences and maybe similar to you, too, where you just kind of were like, oh, my goodness, this is different. This is a different way of thinking about things than I have in the past. For me, these were conversations, justice oriented conversations were ones that we always had at home, but they were always really separated from what I experienced in my christian communities. And so that was part of my story, is when I was having justice oriented conversations and really feeling like, oh, my goodness. As people who love Jesus, this feels very natural. But then in the christian communities that I was in, I wasn't seeing anything that was oriented toward that transforming work of God like you're talking about.
Definitely oriented toward evangelism, but usually oriented toward kind of the life after, when everything will be, but not necessarily thinking about kingdom now. And I know you have a section like that in your book, too. Anyway, not just a section. It's kind of threads throughout anyway. But I just kind of wanted to throw that out there and just say these are kind of things that I've continually been mulling on for a while. But I think that for many people who grew up in evangelical spaces, sometimes these conversations can feel, especially right now, with a lot of the polarization and partisanship that we're experiencing, they feel very binary. When I think kind of what your experience, from what I'm hearing and my experience is that these are things that it ought not feel binary, it ought not feel oppositional.
But this is, and this is leading into where you were going, not justice as something we do or a strategy or something we check off with some other agenda, whatever that might be, but justice being just a part of the fabric of who we are as God's people and how that might differ or enlighten or enrich how we have seen ourselves maybe as the people of God and being discipled in kind of different ways.
Anyway, if you could talk about that kind of how you see justice as a part of who we are, I almost don't want to use versus but versus justice as a strategy or as a thing that we do, I think that would be really helpful in kind of furthering that conversation.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: Yeah. And I get what you mean by saying you don't really want to pit justice as a way of life versus justice as action in the world, because, of course, justice is action in the world.
But I think that we can think about justice as only out there versus something that's fully embodied, that actually works its way out as a reflection of the character of our communities. And maybe that's a way that I would want to put it to get to that. I guess I would say that in my experience, and I hope that it's changing somewhat. But in my experience, much of what the church has done in the world has felt sort of disembodied to me.
And I don't mean that it's duplicitous necessarily, but that we go out and we do things that are compartmentalized only to that space, that it's not reflective of our way of life as a people in normal day to day life.
And then I think that that applies. As churches got excited about engaging with issues of justice, or churches gained some vision for connecting with their communities, particularly folks that live on the social margins and those kinds of things, we rush to action without considering the ways in which it's calling something of us. And I think that the part that makes that challenging is that that can turn those kinds of works into, like you say, the checking the box. But checking the box is really about accomplishment.
When I check the box, I accomplish something. That's why I like lists, right? I want to be able to see it and know that I have done it.
And then when I can put that list away, then my mind is free. So I think those two things apply here to this idea of justice. If justice is only stuff we go out in the world to do and I check the box, then justice becomes a record of my or our accomplishment.
And I do think it is hard to make a biblical case for the church having a good record of action in the world.
We have a fairly checkered history, even back into the scriptural world of the church being a positive presence in the community. I was just talking to somebody that was saying everybody thinks christians are dumb and mean, and we want to prove that's not the case. Well, of course, that's not true.
But also we can point to many instances where our presence in the world has been less than stellar. And so I'm hesitant about any approach to justice that allows us to claim accomplishment. And that's sort of informed by that notion of a repentant posture as we think about it. And one of the things that I think is just so important is that as we are out in the world and engaging, I think a couple of things happen. One is, I think we're exposed to our own blindness to issues or the plight of people.
Many of us, and many people probably listening to this are from communities where they're daily confronted with injustice. They're daily confronted with inequity. They have a lived experience of being under the thumb of social pressures that are oppressive and manipulative. But there's also probably many people who don't have that. And so to be exposed to it at all, I think, ought not make us feel like we've checked the box and accomplished something.
I think it ought to cause in us a posture of lament that I didn't know this was happening, or I'm learning so much more about the ways in which society can enact ungood towards others.
And so I really think it's hard to think about justice as something that allows me to sort of sense accomplishment. I think it should cause me to lament the ways. There's so much more to go.
And then I also think that there's a sense in which to be a participant in our society means that there's nothing that happens in the world that I'm really disconnected from like I am participating in a society that produces inequitable ends. I'm a participant in a society that favors certain kinds of people over others. I'm a participant in a society that creates opportunities for some people and creates a lack of opportunities for others. And whether or not I'm conscious of or actively contributing to those things is largely irrelevant, right? Like injustice doesn't require my consent to happen in the world. I am a participant in a world that does this.
And the question ultimately then means what is my responsibility as a citizen of the world and as a neighbor of people who experience wildly different outcomes and opportunities than I or others do? And for me, that requires a transformation of character, that requires a commitment to a particular way of life, and that is kind of an inside out work. And so certainly, like you say, you don't want to pit action against internal transformation or community transformation, but certainly as christians and as local churches, as we engage in the world, if it's not producing a sense of, whoa, we've got some things we need to think through for ourselves, the kind of people we are, the way we live in the world, then I'm not sure we've oriented our justice work the right.
[00:22:39] Speaker A: Yeah, my mind is going toward ecclesiology.
Ecclesiology in Babylon.
So here we go.
And you've got a lot of use, some great word pictures in your book that have helped me in my theological imagination. As I was reading through it, you've got some threads where you talk about Israel being in exile and what the prophets were trying to require of them, praying for the community, living there well, marrying and settling and planting and growing and reaping and things like that.
And along those lines, you talk about the church as a demonstration plot, this kind of agricultural comparison. Agricultural, not simile. Why can I not think of the other word? Anyway?
But I want you to talk about that. And then, just so you know, what's on my mind, kind of underneath it, is when you give kind of examples of what you see churches doing now and kind of models that, biblical models that might be more amenable to this justice as a way of life. So one thing that struck me, and this is a long intro, so take it wherever you want. But one thing that struck me was this, we see the church being franchised like a franchise model.
I will say in that I had a conversation a few years ago of someone who was at the time working as a pastor, staff pastor, and said for he and his family that they couldn't see themselves ever going anywhere except for this one, and I'll use your word for this one particular franchise. Like, they were planting in various places. And it was like, we will always be a part of this church branch. Fast forward a few years later, and they're not actually. But for them, it was kind of that. It was that or go home. That was it. Which I think speaks to what you were bringing out in the book. And then also another example that you give is kind of the cool, cool. The cool hipster church, which I used to joke, my husband and I were members of a church for nine years before we moved to Houston. And I used to joke all the time, and it's still true that we were like the two uncoolest people in this church.
I was like, they really shouldn't have let us in because we just weren't cool enough to be there. But when I read those two models of kind of like, what are we doing?
They really resonated with me. But I can say I had not thought about them in this context of justice oriented congregations and justice oriented ecclesiology. So anyway, so that's a lot. Demonstration plots, franchise stuff, Babylon.
But take it wherever you think would be helpful for us.
[00:26:14] Speaker B: Sure. Yeah. I mean, if we wanted to lay those three churches, demonstration plot, church's franchise church as cool kids, maybe we just talk about that and see what sounds good after that. So, in my mind, I grew up in central Illinois, so I grew up in the middle of farm country, and one of my very best friends and I had a season of life where we were doing ministry together. And he grew up on a farm. And so it was funny, we were both pastors in New York City, and we had an agricultural disposition, and he certainly had one that just fit perfectly in Brooklyn, New York. But that's where this idea came up for me, was thinking about the church as a demonstration plot. Because you drive by these cornfields to an untrained eye. I really kind of like mine. I grew up among the cornfields, but I didn't really farm. They all look the same, except that they're labeled.
And these cornfields are labeled according to seed type and cultivation strategies and these kinds of things. So they label them so that farmers, when they see those signs, say, this is what this seed and method produces. Right? This is the fruit of this way of farming.
And if you like it, you can apply these to the way that you farm. And I think in many, many ways, that is a great sort of crystallized metaphor for what it means to be the church, ultimately, to be the church. Is to cultivate a way of life that produces fruit that can only be labeled kingdom of God. So that when you encounter, when you drive by, when you come face to face with the garden of the church, you see that this is what the kingdom of God produces in the world.
The seed of the kingdom of God and the way of life, the practices, the cultivation methods of the kingdom of God, all of it together produces this kind of fruit. And if that kind of fruit is compelling, it is possible for you.
And as an aside, that's my baseline way of thinking about evangelism as well.
I guess what my hope is that that metaphor gives us a vision of church that is not like colonizing. It's a way of thinking about church, because we talk about the kingdom of God, right? And kingdoms advance through hostile takeover. And I guess I would want to make the argument that the kingdom of God operates by a different logic. And the demonstration plot, I think, checks our hostile takeover tendencies as churches by causing us to focus, frankly, all of our energy on the seed and cultivation methods of the community for a very public way of life. Right? It's not a private, it's not a cloistered way of life. It's a very public way of life.
But that way of life is the substance of our demonstration of God's intentions for the world. If you see the garden of the kingdom of God at work in a local community, you ought to be able, even if you don't have all the right words, to be able to say, this is the way of life that God wants for everyone.
So I say that to say, I think that is, when I say justice is a way of life. Like, if you look at the church and you don't see the seed and cultivation of justice in the way that people interact with each other and the way that they organize their life and the way that they do their individual and communal and social practices, then what of justice? Do you walk away thinking that God is concerned about?
And so I think that, to me, is like the baseline. We've got to be thinking about church in that way. And I think that there's plenty of scriptural support to extend that out beyond the metaphor to actually some of the major theological categories. So when I say the demonstration plot sort of checks our hostile takeover tendencies, I'll say this, and I hope to say it generously, even if I say it bluntly. I do think franchise church is a model of kingdom advancing through hostile takeover. We take more ground by expanding the geographic web of our church's franchise and I do think that it's not all bad, but I do think it operates by a logic that is not supported by anything that I understand as sort of the logic of the kingdom of God.
And I think that one of the reasons why we do it unthinkingly sometimes, or we fall into categories or fall into patterns of thinking where we embrace that is sort of like a misapplied strategy for mission. One of the things that I talk about in the book is the way that mythiologists, maybe 30 years ago, started thinking about this notion of the homogeneous unit principle, which is a fancy way of saying that people want to join communities of sameness. They don't want to cross barriers of difference, if that's cultural or otherwise. And as a mythological strategy, the idea there is, how do we contextualize a gospel message in a way that people understand in their home context when applied to church or church growth? The church growth movement was sort of founded on saying, underapplied version of this mythological strategy is we create churches around sameness, and then we appeal to sameness as an integration method or an assimilation method. And so by franchising a church, we take what we know works in community a because it appeals to these particular demographic factors that we've identified, and we appeal to that same type of person in another space.
And I think, if we're being honest, the franchise church appeals to upwardly mobile and culturally white spaces, and that doesn't mean they're all always white churches. But if it's a predominantly white lens and it assimilates people into that, I don't think that that creates anything of a way of life that reflects the fullness of the kingdom of God.
And I also think it sort of codifies the barriers between church and community that I would hope that we'd be working to undo.
In my mind, I think franchise church is one of the most difficult barriers to church that can cultivate God's vision of justice in the world.
And maybe as a subset of that you talked about that. I sort of explore this notion of cool kid or hipster. I think that that is a derivative of a franchise. But I also think that we can just get caught up in an aesthetic that seeks to appeal to the artists and trendsetters in a way that causes us to forget about the people that, I would argue, God has a very special concern for.
And I do think that it's a way of organizing our priorities around what I think is charitably still called, like, the cultural elite. Right? Cool kids and trendsetters and all of that is a version of cultural elite that if we cater to that, is a version of cultural elitism that tends to exclude folks on the social margins. And so does that mean I don't like cool music or does that mean I don't have an artistic sensibility? Absolutely not. I do think all of those things can be thoroughly integrated in a justice oriented church. But I do think that churches have in some ways, sort of uncritically catered to that aesthetic or sensibility. And then folks on the margins tend to intuit that this is not a place for them, if that makes sense.
[00:35:00] Speaker A: Yeah, because you were talking about it.
I want to go back to what you were saying about what do we want to cultivate, how is this a barrier? But I also just want to mention kind of from the congregant side, one of the things that struck me about the franchise model or even the cool kid model, I'll start with the franchise model, is that in the same way as like a fast food franchise, the person being drawn in is being drawn in because there are expectations.
We know what we're going to get. If we see a sign that says such and such church, then we know, oh, this is the pastor. I've heard him on the radio or on tv. I've seen this. I'm familiar, and I know what I'm going to get when I go in. Just like I know a Big Mac is a Big Mac is a Big Mac no matter where I go. And so I'm drawn in by that. And there is something not just about a first impression, but about how are we drawing people and welcoming and inviting, maybe how are we inviting people into this community? Says something about what the expectations are once you're inside of the community, I think, which is this is going to be a comfortable space for you. You know what you're going to get when you walk in? You're going to get this kind of lens. You're going to get this kind of worship experience. You're going to experience this kind of community.
And I think even, I might say even not necessarily just to pick on churches that have franchised themselves, but even I notice I've gone to various church websites for different things over the years, as we all have. And I kind of even just chuckle to myself sometimes because I'm like, every sign is, you're home now or welcome, you're welcome here, or something like this, where just even that model, that kind of even megachurch model or franchise model or whatever looks kind of the same. And so even though it might be a standalone congregation that doesn't have a connection to anything else, they can still feel like a franchise church in that you know what you're going to get when you walk in. And I think that was one of the things that I thought, okay, if I'm someone searching for a new community, I've moved in somewhere, or for some reason I'm without a community and I'm looking for a church community, I'm kind of thinking, what expectations am I setting up for myself? Am I setting myself up for a place where I'm expecting to learn something from a different perspective, where I'm expecting to hear from a perspective theologically that I haven't heard from before? Am I expecting to be stretched in a certain way, or am I kind of expecting to go in and get a big Mac and come home? Or maybe I go in and get a Big Mac three times a week, but it still kind of looks like.
So from the perspective of a member or a congregant not being on staff somewhere and thinking, what are we trying to do here? But just kind of thinking about it from someone who might be invited into that space, there is an expectation that's set for me where I kind of get to say, oh, I kind of know what's going to happen here.
[00:38:37] Speaker B: And you're absolutely right. Actually, I think I even have some sympathy for folks that are wrestling with, how do we do church in a space where that is the norm. Either we've bought into it for the last 15 years, and now we're trying to think new thoughts. And all of this, that's the social contract that's been set up. You talk about that. This is almost 20 years ago. I was traveling in a foreign country and had been eating locally for days and days. And I went to a McDonald's because I wanted something that was familiar, and I ordered the Big Mac, and it was a whopper. And I thought, this is not what I wanted. And it made me, like, it stuck with me so much that now, almost 20 years later, I'm still telling that story. And I say that to say, like, if you change the social contract on people without explicitly narrating the changes that are happening, then it's an immediate, visceral, like, negative reaction. And so I'm sympathetic to the challenge of pivoting away from the franchise model or even just the franchise logic, as you say, you don't have to be a franchise to buy into the strategy of, we'll mimic what works elsewhere in order to do it. So you don't have to be the big boardy campus place to actually be doing the exact same thing, but then changing that on people because we have these ingrained expectations that we didn't even know that we had. And I do think that that's a big part of the challenge. Certainly something that I try to talk about in the book, and I'm really sympathetic to both pastors and christians that you say just that are sitting in the chairs.
The work of changing our way of life is a long and slow work.
And I think that there's something about the immediacy of our world today.
If it's the way that we think about social media or our access to news and what's happening all over the world and the way that injustice is in our face constantly, there is a sense in which that demands an immediate response. But becoming a particular kind of people is the stuff that you have to start sowing in the field now in hopes that it bears fruit later. That doesn't mean we wait to do things in our community or to engage the issues that are pressing, but I think we need to have a realistic perspective on the amount of time that it takes to become a particular kind of people together.
[00:41:13] Speaker A: Yeah.
And talking about that togetherness, one of the places in your book where that really, I would say maybe two places where I really felt that resonate with me were when you talked about hospitality in relationship to kinship and also aspects of communal worship that we experience on both of those.
I don't know if we'll have time to completely go into it, but I think if we're going to use the language, I'd like for you at least to brief us on, like, high ground, low ground aspects of community, folks, as we might say. But hospitality and kinship, communal worship. But this overarching idea of discipleship.
[00:42:08] Speaker B: In.
[00:42:09] Speaker A: Those contexts, really, I will say that ministered to me, because, again, for me, I think justice has been one of those things that I think, just by default, I think it is. It's something that we do. It's an out there thing, and so it can turn into. And for me, I think often it has. I'm embarrassed to say it, but I think it's just true that it has kind of turned into something that I do for them sometimes.
And therefore I can. I'll speak for myself, but I think many of us might experience in this community. I might say, well, I'm doing the work of discipleship, or I'm kind of doing the things when you place discipleship in a much more mutual context. When you talk about hospitality, kinship and worship, and you do it in ways that I think can really be informative and could shape how we see and do discipleship inside of our churches, inside of our christian communities. But that comes, I think, from this idea of this mutuality, this being with, as you were just talking about.
Yeah. Can you elaborate on any of that?
[00:43:41] Speaker B: Sure.
I think when you want to explore this idea, you come back to the idea of what is it that God is creating in the world? What is it that God is doing? What are the intentions? And I think one of the ways to answer that is that God is creating a people that is representative of every tribe, tongue, nation. God is creating a world in which there are not haves and have nots, but that we all share in the abundance that God has for us.
And I think that that's clear. Like, if you want to think about it as an eschatological reality, but the idea is that what God is going to do one day, the church has an opportunity to live into now, both because God wants that for us, but God wants it for the whole world as well. Right? And so in that sense, the church demonstrates what God will do one day by a way of life now that overcomes all of the ways in which we fall short of tasting the abundant life of God. And so if God is, like, stitching together this family, I think that's sort of fundamental to who God is, if we know God in a trinitarian way. Right? God is father, son and spirit.
God is family.
And in creating all of us, there's a sense in which God is extending the bounds of what it means to participate in the family of God, that that was something that God could have protected and kept but hedged off from others. But the actual creative and recreative actions of God seems to indicate that God wants more people at the table.
In my mind, it seems like part of our discipleship has to be not just embracing that that is true about God as it relates to me, but that that is true about God as it relates to all of humanity. And because that's true, then that means that I'm part of this family. That's never big enough.
There's always extra space. And when I become part of a family, I learn new norms. I learn how to engage with others. I'm learning how to engage with difference, right? So it calls me into like a. I am negotiating my own sense of identity based on my relationships with others, right? And my relationships with others. Actually form a significant part of my own sense of identity, the same way that we don't understand the son without the father or the spirit without the son. I don't understand myself apart from the relationships I have with others.
But I think we live in a world that sort of codifies divisions between people. And if I think about all of the ways in which we try to talk about those divisions, I think they all sort of share this commonality of, like, high ground and low ground in society. You could think about that geographically. Like, if I live on high ground, I'm protected from threat in a way that I'm not if I live in the low ground.
Just here in our community. In our community here, we have a river that cuts through it, and the people that live close to the river deal with flooding, and the people that live on top of the hills don't deal with it. That's a little cliche, but it's actually, in our news, in our community, you think about old military strategy. People want the high ground because it's a defensible position that's safe, and people on the low ground are threats to our own sort of defensible safety. And as I think about all of the intersectional ways we might talk about privilege, if that's race or socioeconomic or gender or whatever it may be, they all sort of operate with this logic of there's a strategic social position and a non strategic social position that's not talking about inherent value. That's talking about socialized value. Like, there's clearly a place you want to be. You want to be on the high ground. You want to be in the spaces where there are movers and shakers. You want to be in positions of socioeconomic advantage. There are places where the color of your skin or your gender provide particular advantages that have corresponding disadvantages if you don't share those characteristics. And so I think that our society is sort of, like, cut up around all manner of different types of high ground and low ground. And I think that high ground and low ground is one of, if not the greatest enemies of actual human solidarity that we have because of the intrinsic way that we are sort of socialized to want to protect the advantage for ourselves and others who share it with us. And I'll say again, I actually don't think that that needs our active complicity. I think protecting our advantage is something that we can do passively.
Those are the things that war against our ability to actually have any manner of kinship that actually welcomes a community coming together across any kind of difference is if, unless we are willing to identify, examine and dismantle the ways in which we strategically try to protect our social advantages against the other, whatever the other is, then we're going to have a hard time becoming a community that can come together across difference. Right. Those differences become places of divide, rather than places of really interesting exploration of what God might be doing in our midst. And so one of the things that you talked about at the beginning, sort of my mentioning that person in our community who is a constant reminder, I think the reminder to me is not, oh, we need to be a place that can do better to serve x, y and z person, but that person is a reminder to me, if I'm paying attention, of just how much I try to keep myself apart from people who are different than me or people that challenge my sensibilities.
We do everything that we can to sort of insulate ourselves from struggle and strife and for many good reasons. But if we're going to be the kind of community that I think God imagines for the church, then we need to be willing to interrogate the way that we try to protect ourselves from the other. Right. And that sort of does the damage to the ability to be a community of kinship, as Greg Boyle would say. And that's where things like, how do we practice hospitality in our church? How do we build community when we gather for public, if it's worship or otherwise, what do those gatherings say about who was in mind when we planned these spaces?
Those are the kinds of things that are simple, actually fairly ordinary things churches do all the time without thinking. And that's precisely the issue. We do them without thinking. And so we end up in systems that foster divide. We don't even know we're doing it.
[00:51:19] Speaker A: Yeah, no, it's so true. I wonder if you'll, as an example, maybe talk a little bit about when you were serving in a congregation that had a food pantry and the people who came to get food from the food pantry were guests and kind of where that language and what that ended up looking like for you guys.
[00:51:44] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, it's also a good example of how even our best intentions, it can be hard to get out of our own way. And so I say this with a degree of, like, we're all in process, we're all trying to learn how to do this.
Here's a big church that embraced some of the franchise DNA, as I was talking about earlier, but had a vision for connecting with, serving, demonstrating concern for folks who dealt with food insecurity. And so created a food pantry, which is a pretty common thing for churches to do.
And they had a really heart for it being a different experience than the inhuman and inhumane way that we often dole out charity in the world. And so you want to applaud that. And so created lots of humanizing ways of moving through a food pantry. If it was like, set up like a grocery store so you could shop, and there were ways that you could choose things that you wanted versus just getting predetermined allocations of different things, it was high touch, high relationship kind of thing.
And also, instead of saying, here's somebody who's coming to the food pantry, they use this word guest, which was meant as an invitational and hospitable word. And in a situation where you've got a community food pantry, guest is a better word than you could choose. But one of the things that was interesting was that the longer that the food pantry existed, the more people became part of the community.
The quote unquote, guests who were coming to the food pantry became part of the church. Well, as churches often do, they talk about their ministries on Sunday mornings and tell stories of what's happening during the week so that people who aren't involved might do this. And I became somebody who was standing up in front of a large group of people talking about all of the good work that was happening because our church was working with these guests week in and week out. And it dawned on me at one point that as I'm telling this story, I'm actually looking into the eyes of people who became part of our congregation because they had come to the food pantry, and this is their church. And in their church, I'm calling them a guest.
And I thought, this is the breakdown of kinship, because it's an uncritically examined, unexamined space where the high ground, in this case is, like, socioeconomic advantage. Right. We're not economically vulnerable people, and we're doing something kind for the economically vulnerable people. But we didn't explore all of the ways in which we might keep that divide in place even as the community comes together. And if the idea is a coming together of people into a family that reflects something of God's intentions for the world, then we need to continually be looking for ways that we're actually doing the opposite.
I still think about what would it have been like to be called a guest in my own church, and everybody else is part of the family? And I think that that's the kind of ostracizing language that I participated in, as a leader in the congregation.
Those are the kinds of things that I think becoming a just church rather than just doing just actions, those are the kinds of things that it calls us to interrogate of ourselves and become a different kind of people actionably all the time.
[00:55:20] Speaker A: Adam, we have covered a lot, and I'm feeling a little bit like if I try and wrap this up, my mind is still, I'm still processing so much of what I read, and I finished it this morning, so I'm still a little bit scattered on it. But I'm wondering if maybe you could start to wrap us up in part by just talking about, give us a sense of how you, let's see, give us a sense of how you would hope that we would think about some of these concepts in our own context. Now, kind of in the, since this book was published, we've had the pandemic, we've had an election that end up being very partisan splits for us all over our country. We've seen rises in the voices of christian nationalism. We've seen so many acts of injustice displayed on our phones constantly, and our eyes are being opened more and more to these kinds of issues. And yet, as so many have said, the division is really palpable. We can really feel it. So maybe, could you just help close this by what would you emphasize now as we begin 2024, that is maybe different? Or maybe you feel like deserves a little bit more boldness or more emphasis even than when you wrote this book a few years ago?
[00:57:17] Speaker B: Yeah, no, I appreciate that question. And I think that my mind goes to this notion of solidarity that's not a new concept. But I would say that solidarity is a conversation topic that I've seen be on the rise throughout all the different things that you talked about.
Being in solidarity with is an ascending idea. And, of course, that's great. I think that's fantastic.
My nervousness around that and something that I've been thinking about a lot, and I would hope we would all be thinking about, is, are we really grappling with what the word solidarity is actually calling from us? Because in many cases, I think solidarity is a little thinly applied.
Solidarity is more than changing my social media background to a particular country's flag or it's more than a retweet or it's much more than a hot take also, and it's much more than leveling critique. I come back to actually, in the very first few pages of this book, I quoted Melva McGay, who's from the Philippines, and she writes this incredible little line about solidarity, and she basically says that solidarity is about shared suffering, that any one person's deprivation, any person's deprivation is an indication of the guilt and humiliation of all of us.
That's a really powerful line. And I think that in the intervening years, from when I first encountered her work till now, I've sort of thought that's taken on so much more weight for me, that solidarity is about shared suffering.
And I think that in many ways we're trying to think about solidarity in a way that excludes a shared suffering and fast forwards to the ends of the end of suffering for others. And I think that that gets to my larger point about justice. It can't just be about doing something in the world or accomplishing something in the world. It will involve us being a different kind of person and people along the way. And so when I think about this world, that now we are much more wide awake to the issues that are facing us, what does it look like to have a deep or thick understanding of solidarity in a way that allows me to share in the sufferings that the world enacts as a part of God, redeeming everything? If that makes sense, it's going to cost me something to be a part of this.
And I think that that's really, at least for people that are used to being distant from the concerns of the world or insulated from them. That's really the word that I've been thinking about. And I don't know if that resonates with anyone else, but that's what I've been thinking about is what is a deeper solidarity going to call from me in this?
Because I certainly don't think it's going to come at no cost.
The world that God intends, and I think that the christian story is one that demonstrates that the world that God intend comes at the greatest of costs. And so emulating that way of life in the world, producing that as a demonstration to cost us something.
[01:01:16] Speaker A: Yeah, that's great. Thank you so much. I think that's one of the things is so many of us even have different definitions of solidarity, as you mentioned. And so that's a really good one to end on. I'm so appreciative. I'm grateful for your work and grateful for the evergreen, as you mentioned, evergreen nature of these topics. I hope and pray that the conversations and continue that the transformations, individual and communal, continue. So I'll put the link to this book, which is still a great one in the show. Notes for this episode is becoming a just church. Cultivating communities of God's Shalom by Adam Gustine thank you, thank you. Thank you for coming on and chatting about this.
[01:02:07] Speaker B: My pleasure. It was great to be here.
[01:02:09] Speaker A: The links for all the resources mentioned in today's episode can be found in the show notes, music and podcast production by Seth Busetti. Be sure to give us a review on iTunes and subscribe at your favorite podcast listening app. You can also visit
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