Aaron McManus interview "Let's Be Real & Ask Our Big Questions"

what a pleasure and a privilege to have joining us in the way that so many conversations have had to be inflated on zoom with aaron mcmanus one of the pastors at mosaic leading the uh venice campus the creative pastor but also the host of the manus show on hillsong channel thank you for chatting with us oh thank you so much for having me i'm super excited to do this i'm bummed we don't get to be in the same room but you know this is this is a good a good in-between you guys have created something so special with mcmanus this kind of this safe place where people can ask questions and debate on issues of faith that maybe they don't normally get to and having just wrapped season one it's kind of cool to see what you guys are able to talk about why did you want to create that kind of space and that kind of show well one i i i wish i could take more credit for it but i but i want i gotta thank um pastors brian and bobby houston for just creating space like space for a kid like me one could come to jesus in a church like theirs in new york and then find my way back in los angeles and then end up doing a show on a on a channel that i never thought i'd have a show on to work with people that are just so lovely and brilliant and australian um no but i you know when we sat down with the hillsong team they they had i think more of a vision for it than we did initially we were a little bit skeptical as um people in los angeles are and and so just just to i think we started with this podcast spot already where me my dad used to just sit down and and kind of have raw transparent conversations and a lot of it was like i'm a verbal processor and i wanted to talk about life and the things i struggled with my past and and just be more transparent i felt like people especially with like you know huge movements of just kind of cancel culture and people just outing each other and blaming each other i wanted to go like look here's my life it's an autopsy and let's like break down my broken moments and and i could be more transparent and how can i do that and then and then the hillsong team kind of approached us and and then decided to give us lights in a stage and a team that would produce us and do this thing and it was just really cool so i'm actually sitting on our um the makeshift set because mcmanus was mid-season in the first season and then they were like look covet happened and quarantine happened so our amazing producers ben and steve uh hit us up sent us cameras and then we built a little set in like our i'm in the middle of our church right now so this is like our middle of our theater and we just put some screens up and we have a little set and i'm here so all of that like with through all of that now we're here yeah and it's so awesome i mean everybody's creativity and the kind of the breaking of boxes around how we do stuff has really had to happen in this season but for anyone who's watched the show as i have you see that you and your dad erwin really have such a strong bond and a great relationship you're so transparent about the ups and downs of you the sort of past that you guys have experienced but tell us about how you have formed that bond because i don't think all fathers and sons particularly but fathers and their children in general not all of them have that connection so how have you guys made that work you know i i'm not entirely sure i know that one my dad is an incredibly patient and loving human being and i know that like him him coming to jesus and having relationship with god he has treated me so much so much so much in in sight of this concept of loving me unconditionally loving me through my brokenness through my pain through my questions and my doubts and my volatility and my anger at times and and i don't know how he did it i don't know how he did it he didn't grow up with a dad he had no example he just genuinely committed uh his life to to being a great father a great husband a great um leader and and and i remember when we were when we were younger he obviously was he i grew up in kind of in the ghetto in east l.a and in south dallas and my dad was planning churches kind of in the inner city and i grew up with pretty much like most of my friends were in internet of juvenile detention centers and and it was just a different i thought i didn't understand who white people were growing up and my dad was like i in a car on my way to church my dad i asked my dad you know who what are white people and he's like your mom look at your mom when you get home your mom's wife and so i just had this concept you know just told me when he was planning churches he just said if it ever gets too much for you like please let me know because i want to choose my family and obviously i'm choosing my he always obviously chose his calling but he never made it secondary he never met a secondary he never left us at home he always brought us with us always explained the vision i always took the time to walk us through the difficult moments and really help us understand and for him there was there was no calling without um his commitment to his family and so i'm really grateful because he never left me behind and and and there's this this moment where we were in an airport when i was younger and he was walking really fast and he was leaving me and i was like dad wait dad wait that way and he stopped and he was like look i'm waiting for you i'm always gonna wait for you but remember this when i'm older that you're gonna always wait for me when you're running ahead and i i'm reminded of that just now randomly and and that just the story that's just who my dad is he always weighed and always he but he's also on this other side he's this futurist who's just insanely compuls like an impulsive compulsive and just driven to to to drive towards the future so you never know what you're going to get when you wake up in the morning right i think that's so true and i was just thinking i mean even if you have to wait for your dad when he's older i don't think he's going to be going very slow because listen to his teachings would be familiar with the fact that he had surgery for cancer on his stomach and then played basketball like the moment he got out of hospital so i feel like you'll still be able to go pretty quickly yeah no i i think i'm still gonna be catching up to him for quite quite some time so yeah yeah yeah but talking of the you know the challenges people have had with church obviously you're not the only one who has walked that there's a lot of people that have had their difficulties with faith than trying to understand where they fit in but i think what you've been able to do with the show so beautifully is show how and even with the battle ready podcast find ways where people can authentically genuinely ask questions about things they don't fully understand and where the church is actually proactively having a voice in discussions of whether it's race you know more more sort of um right now uh and or more recently i should say or anything how do you think the church can do better at being part of these really important really real conversations yeah i mean i think this is one this is a start creating spaces like this where we can ask questions and push the boundaries and really really be unafraid and i think i think it stems from this idea that that we feel very unfamiliar and very afraid to question this idea of question the idea of god it starts with that when i was really young i asked my dad i said i said i i don't how do we know it's god how do you know it's jesus and he and he dropped me off at a buddhist day camp he dropped me off at scientology in the middle of hollywood he dropped me off at um i wouldn't studied mormonism with some friends from from basketball practice he dropped he took me to japan and i studied chintu hinduism and and and he refused to let me make a decision unless i was adequately educated and so he's he's like if you want to question god and have questions go out and seek but every time you go to this day camp we're going to sit down with a process what do you think and i would go i would go to the the the the different day camps or different like different services and i'd come back and be like that definitely isn't it well this definitely isn't it at one point he just said he's like aaron at some point you have to figure out what you believe and he's like and i remember i sat there and i told him i said dad how do you i know i believe in jesus i've already met jesus but i just have so many questions and he's like it's okay to have questions god's bigger than your questions and and i truly something that's so simple that that um i referred to as like when i was a child but i do still believe that to be true now is that god is much bigger than our questions and it's okay to question and it's okay to challenge and it's okay to understand and i know that we're never to test god but i do think i do think god understands that in maybe in our brokenness or maybe in just our humanity that we have tons of questions that we're curious people that are curious beings and that i don't think it ever makes him inferior when we have moments of of of going god are you out there i think if anything god wants us to always be asking so that we he can show up in every moment and i think the thing that i've learned in all of this is to see that god has been moving in my life throughout my life even the moments where i didn't believe right if anything i hated god he was there working intricately moving in my life opening doors closing them moving me from places of danger into places of more danger and and and i and i and i i think we as humans have just this this this journey to go on where we have to continue to ask questions and we have to create safe spaces for our children and the next generation to go okay look like let's not start from this expectation that you love jesus let's start from this expectation that jesus needs to meet you where you're at in your journey and you're going to meet jesus in your life and and i'm really appreciative that my dad and that hillsong and and the houstons create that you know well and it's a huge thing like to hear you say that your dad you know took you to buddhist camp and and had you study these different things that would make some christian parents feel so uncomfortable you know the idea of even letting you know that scientology existed would make some people feel so uncomfortable and yet it was a freedom that your family your dad gave you and to me it makes me think of some of the problems that you talk about in the show with the church and maybe some of its you know beliefs around letting people think freely and different things like that whatever people's issues have been but i think what what you communicate in the middle of that is that you saw all these different problems and maybe these challenges within the church but got to a point where you took ownership over them and said the church is actually my problem my thing that i'm going to do something to fix talk us through that journey and and what some of those problems were and then how you actually decided to take ownership over changing them yeah you know when i when i met um when i met pastor carl lentz in new york i was so shocked because growing up i think i was 22 when i first met um pastor carl and it meant nothing to me i didn't know who he was he was just tattooed and had a hoodie on and i thought he was a drug dealer and and not to say that just just having no context have no context and then my dad's like you know who that is and i'm like i don't know who that is do you know who that is and he's like he's a pastor and you'd really like him so you maybe should be nice to him and i always remember having this moment but i remember i remember being in this place and and kind of and kind of um understanding for the first time that there were people out there like pastor carlin's that actually liked my dad and actually respected him and i grew up in such a maybe a hostile environment where my dad was very much forward-thinking especially for southern california where so much of it was a certain type of thinking and and and i was really criticized and kind of ridiculed in my first year of college i went to a baptist college and there's nothing against baptists or any different denomination but i lived on a dorm room floor where it was all the theology majors and i was a business major and one day they all came in my room and said so why is your dad a heretic and i was like i don't know i'm not entirely sure which which you know which belief were you questioning and and i think for the first time for me it was i didn't really like christians i it was so much not so much church it was it was the people who filled the church i didn't wasn't really a fan and so for for me to find people who were my tribe and were my people people who accepted me and people also who maybe didn't agree with everything my dad believed but but had a respect and an honor for people who put themselves out there to preach jesus and speak on jesus and and and share the gospel with the world they were able to to find in that common denominator and for me i think the biggest the biggest thing is who we are as christians and i look back at my life and go man i offended so many people my temperament my my my the way i am the way i'm i'm a bad friend at times and there's so many things i hurdles i have to to jump over and i was gonna climb but but i think it is really the betterment of ourselves to be a better tribe as a whole what happens when when people get to know us and know us well will be i think the the test of time will last a test of time it will be a reputation and i think as we open ourselves up more as the church to be accepting and to be open-minded i think it's just different i think it's it's being willing to accept people for who they are even if they're very different than us i think christians even as christians we have such a hard time politically accepting whether it's the left or the right and you know i'm in the u.s and it is a it is a melting pot of of anger when it comes to the president or to the governors or to the mayors and everyone and then it's about your faith and then but in in arkansas voting your faith is blue and then georgia voting your face faith is red conservative and it's and and both and everyone's going to hell if you don't vote your faith so i guess we're all going to go there if we don't and it's so confusing we make it so difficult and i think we have to remember that it really is about being a great neighbor and loving each other and loving jesus and and starting there you know it sounds cheesy but it genuinely is i think the foundation of what we believe and who we are as humans hey aaron thank you so much for chatting with us thank you hopefully we can do it actually in la sometime in person come come whenever be our guest

Channel: Hope 103.2

Views: 1,322

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: christian radio, christian, radio, christian radio (radio format), christian radio live, sydney christian radio, christian radio station, christian music, christian online radio stations, christians, christian song, christian live, christian news, aaron mcmanus, erwin mcmanus, mcmanus tv show, mcmanus show, Hillsong Channel, Hillsong TV, Pastor Interviews, Cancel Culture, Preachers, laura bennett, doubting God, faith questions, authenticity, cancel culture

Id: bGbUG9Ui7eU

Length: 13min 15sec (795 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020