From Christianity to Progressive Christianity and Back Again, with Josh Morris

they would always say god is love and what we always meant was love is god we will build the constructs of love and then we will make that our gods it was an idol [Music] welcome to the alisa childers podcast so excited for you to meet my guest today josh morris who is an ex-progressive christian he came out of progressive christianity and now he has his own podcast talking about what his life was like as a progressive christian he interviews progressive christians to try to promote a dialogue to understand the differences between historic christianity and progressive christianity so josh welcome to the podcast it's so great to have you i'd love to start with a little bit of your backstory so there's a reason that you became a progressive christian but i'm sure there's there's some history there so did you grow up in the church were you raised in a christian family give us a little bit of your background yeah so my elementary years was raised with my dad being a pastor he was a youth pastor of a small assemblies of god church and so that's uh in the charismatic movement and it's more pentecostal so very holy spirit based and emotive based on a lot of things and so i was raised in that kind of environment my grandma was my sunday school teacher and all of our family went to the same church growing up and then we would always go out to my grandma's house after church and we would eat these big family meals and have conversations and talk and that was kind of my childhood growing up in the church in a very small maybe 120 people assemblies of god church and i have a brother and a sister that went to church with me and we were you know we were raised in a church that you couldn't say but that was not a that's a cuss word that is a cuss word no this really is true though because i remember my little sister would try to get away with saying but but she would say but butty brown you know like buddy brown so she would like add tea brown to it so i mean you're not kidding i know i know what you're talking about no yeah and so i i would get in trouble for that i even got in trouble for and my mom would probably laugh now if she when she listens to this because she will so i better be careful sorry but uh like if i said oh man that scared the bejesus out of me because bejesus was slain for jesus right and she didn't yeah she didn't like that idea so i grew up in kind of that environment of a really you know your typical kind of southern fundamentalist charismatic church and um it wasn't really until later until i really started uh going down this road of progressivism and i i can uh kind of share my teenage years where that i think that started to take root in my life and so my dad ended up moving to a new church just a couple miles away from the church that we were a part of and it was this wonderful environment we the pastor had been there for over 25 years that was currently there and my dad uh he never got the opportunity to go to college or seminary and so it was just a really big blessing to be able to go to this church and to you know for him to be making the money that he was in the i mean in the ministry world because there's not a lot of money there if um any of you guys know how that goes with ministry and making money and so um it was a real blessing for our family and so we grew there there and we built really good relationships and then uh as i started getting into the closer my junior senior year this uh pastor which we loved and had been there like i said for 25 to 30 years now and that we really admired uh decided to retire and to move on with life and so we as most churches do it gets a little rocky when a pastor from that long leaves and you're trying to bring in someone new and so our board had not been greatly uh rehearsed in this process because we hadn't had to do it in so long and we ended up going with a younger pastor our pastor at the time was around 50ish and so he had some experience he that just comes with age i think and so he didn't push a lot of hot topic buttons or anything of that nature but we brought in a new pastor that came from uh actually the bible college that i went to and he looked very promising on paperwork and it ended up that he was pretty abusive to me and to my brother and really to my whole family and we found out he was abusive to a lot of people in the church he would preach sermons to get people to leave and just really attack people from the pulpit and then he would one day he asked me about uh i i questioned him on some theology that he was teaching because i knew that he was singling out a family that i really loved and was good friends of my families and they ended up having to leave the church over it and so i kind of questioned him on that and he threw me up against the wall one day and told me that uh the questions weren't okay and that i shouldn't question his authority because god had put him there wow and a real abuse of that kind of power yeah and uh so he he would even do stuff like call me my me and my brother were interns and he would call us out to the church and have us stay there like all night so that we would just to make sure that we were loyal so so let's let's camp there for a second so he would have you come to the church did you know like did you bring a sleeping bag did you know you were staying all night or how how did that play itself out no he told us that he would meet us there and then when uh and then he would let us talk to us when we got there when he got there and so we waited around for him and we waited for uh one day we waited all night and then he just said you could go to school because he had done that before and we'd left and we got chewed out for it and stuff and uh wow so we went to school that day like pretty tired and because you know i mean we found stuff at the church because you know how little old ladies like to leave their spot on the pews so they blankets and pillows so thank you for that um ladies yeah so did your parents what were your parents thinking when you know you're going to church oh hey i got to go help the pastor with something and then you don't come home all night what what what were they thinking yeah so my parents uh they definitely once they found out that that happened my dad put a my dad addressed it with the pastor and told him that it wasn't okay but it wasn't also like abnormal for me and my brother to be out all night with our friends we actually had a rule at the morris house which is my house we weren't allowed to come home after 12. and the reason for that was uh because we have guns in the south and my dad uh gets really nervous and jumpy he grew up in uh my dad was actually my dad's awesome and he actually grew up in a gang when he was younger in in memphis and like he got stabbed with an ice pick but anyway so he's very jumpy yeah he's a jumpy guy understandably and yeah yeah in los angeles so my mom knew where i was every second of the day yeah i grew up in bentonville arkansas so it was very safe it was um it was not a place that people really worried about their kids late at night and so we could stay out all night but we couldn't come home after 12 we had to like either sleep like at a friend's house or something like that and that's what my dad assumed that we were doing anyways and so the first couple times you know me and my brother were pretty quiet about it and we were there and the pastor wasn't there uh that's when my dad kind of talked to him and we never had that experience again but it's still you know the abusiveness of um he would just yell at us all the time he would like i said he put pinned us up against walls he did very abusive things throughout his entire time there and eventually that came out as it will and there was a huge church split over it because some of the people didn't know what was going on in the church where others did and so there was just this terrible split in our church which hurt a lot of people and some of those people that i still see today that went to this church you know are still hurt and bitter over these things which i mean bitterness is hard to get rid of and that's where my progressive started was through bitterness and hatred for this man that um controlled me for so long even after he left and i didn't even know it yeah and so um ended up get my dad left the church uh we kind of ended up homeless for a while because my dad was making all the money and we were waiting for people to come into our house evict all of our stuff because we had been six or seven months without paying a house payment and so i played music and toured so i took all my music stuff to a friend's house so that if evictors came to like sell my stuff uh they want to get my music stuff yeah and so protect those guitars yeah that's right and um so eventually my dad got a job at walmart because bentonville's the home of walmart and that's where this church was and uh we kind of got to new normal and then my senior year my dad put in for another church in the south and that's where he went and i went to springfield missouri which is where i decided to stay but i went there for bible college and did my whole life at bible college and uh really didn't i i've told you about this before at least but like i am really saddened by my uh kind of seminary experience because it was very emotive and i like i said uh i think if i would have put an effort and tried but uh i would have learned a lot more but a lot of my professors did a lot of things off like faith-based stuff and like reading the old testament all the way through in new testament and so i didn't learn very much in my seminary years except for maybe some like foundational stuff of how to read the bible and how to interpret stuff and so i had a very weak biblical literacy even in bible college interesting yeah and it is interesting that it's someone that was going to become a pastor and that was my track to become a pastor to do the same things my dad did and my brother did and you can walk out of seminary and become this passenger that knows nothing about the bible wow and that's kind of where i was at i knew a lot about theology i read a lot of books about the bible uh from great theologians from great guys from great people that uh are still super solid christians and you guys with c.s lewis and all that but and those books are great nothing against those books but if that's what you're you're supplementing with your biblical reading and your scripture time yeah you're gonna walk away with a very shallow faith because there is also a personal aspect i knew it was kind of like the i knew god in the sense of like i know oprah i've you know or just whatever big tv show like you know like yeah i i've i've watched oprah and so like i know her because i know that she's famous and i know a lot about her because you know you can google anything about her but i don't have a personal relationship with her right and i think that that's where my seminary really was i read a bunch of books about god but i never got in the word and i never really had this relationship in this eye-opening moment of like this is what the gospel is or yeah you know those personal deep characteristics of god that are so vital to actually growing and learning to live yeah you know have a relationship with him so you have this perfect setup essentially for becoming a progressive christian you have you grow up in the church even with what sounds like wonderful christian parents in a in a loving home but you have this abusive pastor who is very obviously abuse of power he's telling you you can't question you can't question his authority then you go to seminary and you realize uh that you know you haven't really had this personal relationship with jesus so you know have you thought about even as we get into more of the story of you becoming a progressive christian do you think looking back on your life before that point would you say you were a christian or had you really not put saving faith in jesus yet how would you characterize that that's a great question and uh no i i would say i was not a christian i think that i liked uh i was selfish i was still so selfish and so me minded because i liked where christianity got me uh in the south and especially still in the midwest to a great degree it is brownie points to be a christian it gets you places and people like they think that if you're a christian especially since i had a degree that said hey i'm a christian from a bible college that you know i'm a good guy i tell the truth i'm honest i do i i work hard and i'm not going to be much trouble at the time at the time did you think you were a christian i yes i would have said i was a christian and i was just and this will come into my progressive christianity a lot but i was just legalistic i was i was trying to always better myself and do everything to be this good person and i was just serving myself and because i liked this moral system it was good it worked but also when i acted right or when i did something right it got me places and so it was just all for me and it was in the end it was not satisfying at all and it was tiresome and that and i think that that's where a lot of the [Music] pull for progressive christianity was so easily attractive to me because you see all these ideals and these social justices that you can go out and you can do something about you can you know you can go protest uh women's rights you can go protest lgbtqa plus community and you can go do all that and you feel good inside it makes you feel good and and uh especially in springfield missouri it is cool to do all that especially uh it's amazing in this midwest how much progressive christianity has affected our culture even in the midwest where we always thought and i can even sometimes i still even hear pastors which is terrifying to me that oh well the liberals are like on the you know on the coast it's like you're like no no we have we have liberal christians here too and uh to think that we don't is it you you're blind and you're you're gonna have some mistakes sadly that or you're gonna have people in your church that are going to be led astray and we need to be aware of uh the wolves at the gates and that's good and sadly sally we weren't so so how did you get introduced to progressive christianity because i'm assuming usually it's like a subtle kind of shift where you don't realize it's not like progressive christians show up at your door and say hey we're progressive christians come on over and join us you know it's usually something that happens over time it's a slow kind of subtle like frog in the in the kettle so to speak so how did that happen for you yeah um so after i got out of college i met my wife and we got married and well i met her in college but we got married after college and so uh then uh we started going to church and i was on the fence about working for a church and so i was thinking about getting involved in a church and i ended up starting to work with kids and i fell in love with working with kids in the residential facilities and with behaviors and so we decided just to find a local church here in springfield that we would enjoy and kind of settle in and do our best to help uh once again that workspace mentality right there uh to serve and to do good in and to help uh grow and to you know and i mean it wasn't malicious or it wasn't like this hateful like this knowingly self-satisfying uh endeavor that we were trying to do we really wanted to like bring people closer to jesus and introduce them but we were doing it in such a legalistic way that we thought that it was giving us merits or we it was it was bringing our about our salvation and so we ended up uh getting into a small group that uh was at our church and it was ran by some elders that were about the same age as i was maybe a little they might they might be a little younger than me and they seemed very loving and varying and they were i mean it they didn't seem that way they were authentic genuine they loved sharing their stories they liked talking uh about hard theological questions but they never wanted to answer those questions and i really found that freeing because i came from a legalistic where i had to know the answers and i you know i had to know the right formulas and i had to basically hit the right code on the vending machine so god would give me blessings and what i wanted and so these ideas of like well you don't have to have answers sounded wonderful yeah and in college i i this is really funny and i don't mean this pejoratively or negatively towards this author or writer but rob bell was very influential to me in college in my seminary and the reason why is because his books i don't know if you've ever read them uh i've read a few of his books yes okay uh of course you have white would i even ask that um but anyways um so his books are written and i i'm a teacher now so i teach special education k through fourth almost like a fourth grade book because he though the way he spaces the words and the he he gives them like little short like one answer he writes books like blog posts yes yes there's lots of space and it's all br you know uh blocked like a blog post there's no indentation um i actually find that very pleasing to the eye to read books that way you know because it's very it's very uh aesthetically pleasing it flows easily so yeah i know exactly what you're talking about and i yeah and so i don't mean that like a negative thing against him or like he writes like a fourth grader he doesn't write like a fourth grader i think he's very smart and he knows how people can read and to and to be honest if i'm sure a lot of your listeners have read multiple theology books and sometimes those can be very weighty very small texts and like they're hard to get through so he knows how to get to a mass audience he really does and i think i think when somebody's talented at taking complicated subjects and if you can take a complicated subject and explain it to a child that means you understand it really well and you're a really good communicator and that's what rob bell is is he's a brilliant communicator and and um you know i've even said when i've written reviews of his books it's like this is the most brilliant thing i've ever just completely 100 disagreed with you know and like i disagree with him so much but he is i mean you can't you can't get around saying he's a brilliant communicator so yeah i i hear you and so uh i really like that and because i didn't have to really struggle through reading and you know getting through a paragraph and sitting back and like reflecting uh i wanted to be a lazy christian and rob bell was really easy to read because it was you could finish a book in a day and so i read love wins in my college and so that kind of started getting me thinking about hell and universalism and all these different questions and i really bought into that lie that rob bell gave through his entire interviews about his book love wins and that was that he never really came out universalist that he was just posing questions like jesus did and so i was like yeah and i remember even fighting a professor at college about this he he claimed that he was he came into the classroom and said i just uh heard rob bell's new book i read a review on it and it's just garbage and started going off on it and i said well have you actually read it because i have and i said he hasn't made any claims he's just asking questions and uh and i remember he looked at me in in the most loving gracious way not like in a i'm i'm about to beat you up with my knowledge he was very loving he said he said sometimes questions are the biggest statements that we'll ever say wow like we say so much in our questions and that really that stuck with me now it didn't really later because i was a very rebellious kid and i did not like authority and i don't like people telling me what to do and um and yeah and so uh i found this small group as i was saying in this church and they started listening to the liturgists and they did this uh bible study called lectio divina which is supposed to be where you read a verse and you try and get everything that you can out of one verse which is a terrible way and it is also um they misunderstood how you actually are supposed to do that uh ancient way of reading uh jews used to do it and it is a very poor way of doing any type of bible study or word study or anything in the bible and but we would do that and we would pull just wild things out and we would er ex exacerbate certain things to a point where it no longer was relevant so how did they do the leftover divina do you we would just read it over and over and over again or what how did that go how did that practice look what did it look like yeah so uh we would read a either a small passage or like i said a a single verse and that's it and then we would sit there and we would take we would we had notebooks and we would write down everything that we could think about with that verse and everything that it could mean to us and everything that uh just basically whatever our minds thought and we would put that into uh the we would say that and then that was your truth that was so like if we were reading uh let's go with an easy one john 3 16. uh so you know we all know that verse and uh you know it's like well what does that mean to you and so we would take five minutes to write everything that we could possibly think about what that verse meant and then uh and then we would all share and you weren't allowed to tell someone that they were wrong their interpretation was wrong you were supposed to collectively take that as a group and then add it kind of into your theology or if it if it didn't help you or if it was uh if it if it triggered you or if it led to a you know a traumatizing experience whatever and not to belittle that that i i sounded a little pejorative when i said that but um what i mean is sometimes in the progressive world everything is trauma and everything is uh and everything triggers so anything that you don't like you can say that either a triggers you or that it's traumatic and so um and then you don't have to fight with that anymore because it's traumatic so it and uh there's this wonderful secular writer name uh it's not it's jonathan height and he wrote the coddling of the american mind it's a great book great book and uh but he's a secular guy and he talks about these trigger warnings that we started adding in even colleges and the funny thing that jonathan hype points out is that you go to college to learn things and like if it triggers you like you need to work through that and learn how to learn those things and that information and so it's very interesting and so we would use like triggers or oh that's harmful and so if if something was harmful you didn't have to use it and you could exclude it and we had friends that ended up coming out as uh gay in our circle and uh and my sister ended up uh coming out to me around the same time and so i really had this emotive pull to uh really dive into scripture and try and make uh this sin of homosexuality okay and so uh matthew vines was someone that i read immediately off the cuff and i listened to his unbelievable podcast and i with i think it was sean mcdowell and um anyway so the debate they had that's right the the kind of formal debate yeah yeah and so i i went all in trying to justify how homosexuality and the bible could be could coexist and what i found is that i had to erase some of the bible i had to get rid of um i had to get rid of a lot of paul and and that's okay because progressives don't like paul anyways um yeah and so that's true which is which are rough i mean that's a majority of the bible and then you have to deal with uh and like i said poor biblical literacy i i didn't have great uh knowledge of the bible and so it was easy to write stuff out because i didn't at the time know like uh that peter writes about how paul is a brother and that his scriptures are sometimes hard to understand but they're good like in that they should be in the bible and uh you know and then jesus's words about scripture and how he viewed it and so i didn't know any of that stuff and so it was easy to take out the bible i i could take out whatever i wanted and make it fit whoever i was and we were we learned really quick that we didn't want to get into biblical discussions so we quickly quit doing lectio divina because it wasn't very helpful and so we started listening to podcasts and we'd talk about it like the liturgist or uh the rob cast which is rob bell's podcast or um jyn hat maker or whoever we could get our hands on we would read the we would also read those books we were super into the enneagram and we read books about that and then that led us ultimately to the father of modern uh progressive christianity richard rohr okay this is interesting i'm interested to hear you say this because these are connections that i'm making right now where you know i didn't talk about the enneagram for a long time on the podcast because yeah i know a lot of historic orthodox conservative christians that use it and so i did i wasn't seeing the connection but it was the richard rohr factor that convinced me that it's really kind of been like a trojan horse and your story lines up with this perfectly where the enneagram can be an introduction into the teachings of richard rory you know maybe you like his book on the enneagram and then it leads you into some of his other teachings which you're right he's just like the father of modern progressive christian of the movement really he's considered almost like i i was thinking about it today he's kind of like the pope of the progressive christian movement essentially so that's interesting to hear you say that because that sort of i mean i know it's just anecdotal but it sort of verifies at least the trajectory that i'm seeing in a lot of people going through the enneagram and then finding richard rohr and then just going off the rails completely deconstructing either into progressive christianity or out of christianity altogether yeah and i i i think that i've the only way that i would as well a anecdotal as well but i mean it's what all my progressive christians did and like we even had people that would journey out to his uh meditation centers and would go uh do all that kind of stuff and so it was and um so i got all wrapped up in progressive christianity from that kind of small group and from the podcast i was listening to and i i feel like this is a good warning for your listeners and for just anyone listening that the things that you do listen to do shape and affect you and uh so i'm not saying that you know you shouldn't listen to some of these podcasts but make sure that you are in scripture more than you're listening to richard rohr or rob bell or really anyone i mean even you know myself or lisa or you know whoever you listen to like uh because this was all that i listened to and it really got a hold of me and i was willing to put everything aside that i knew because it was what the echo chamber was echoing all around me and so when that's all you hear eventually it's going to take its toll and an effect on you and so um so so what was um now at some point you made your way back so you you kind of have this perfect setup to become a progressive christian and then you go down that route you're getting into the liturgist podcast rob uh rob bell in fact i want you to tell your rob bell tattoo story too um but richard rohr and all that stuff and then at some point you come back and which is very rare josh you know how rare this is usually when people deconstruct into progressive christianity uh they only continue on that trajectory either they become uh not even identifying as a christian anymore or even they might identify as an atheist or some kind of broader spirituality but you are one of the rare ones that came back to an orthodox faith and so i'd love to know what were some of the factors that that caused that to happen but before we do that let's let's talk about your tattoo because this is such an interesting story yeah uh it's a it is a story to say the least um so and you know all progressives love a good story so that's right so uh after being at this uh after being in this community group for a while and going for weeks and you know becoming really indulged in uh progressive christianity i ended up buying tickets he was close he was in tulsa which is like a two-hour drive from where i live and so i bought tickets and ended up inviting like this uh really close friend of mine who was a yoga instructor that was really also giving me some like new age stuff that i was kind of interested in and she gave me this book called the four agreements which was i read but i don't really remember a lot about it but um it wasn't great now that i can remember some parts of it but anyways and so um we all went out there me my wife uh my co-host on my podcast and uh this yoga and trucker and we sat through his everything is spiritual too uh kind of performance and at the end you got to kind of harabel comes out and you can talk to him and kind of hang out with him and kind of just talk to him for a second which is kind of cool because you don't get to do that with people and especially when you admire people uh you think that they're a lot harder to access than they probably really are and so i had this tattoo on my forearm that said uh fear god and he kind of read it he's like what what did your tattoo say and i said well it says fear god and uh he said why would you serve a god that you fear and i was like oh man that's profound deep and that's deep and um so i thought about it for for like a week and it really messed with me and so i actually ended up going and getting it covered up and i ended up getting trees which is fine like trail running and all that good jazz but it was the now looking back on it i was so caught up in this movement and this idea that i was willing to change a lot of core things that were easily if i would have thought about them and actually like had any ounce of biblical literacy it wouldn't have shaken me so much it's so interesting this story because you know when we read in scripture where it says the fear of the lord is the beginning of wisdom i mean even to begin to be wise we have to start with that foundation of of fearing god and and in the progressive world they don't like that concept they don't they're but i think they're interpreting the word fear differently than i think the what the bible actually means by it but that that is so interesting that that he would say to you why would you want to serve a god that you would fear that you would have to fear and so you kind of have this souvenir of your time uh in progressive christianity in the form of a tattoo of trees on your arm now so yeah so what what led you back uh yeah i mean if to be the funny kind of thing is uh the cover-up if you look really hard through the trees you can still see the fear of god oh good good fear god and do your trail running that's perfect yeah be healthy and fear god yes um but uh and uh sorry what was your just what was your question maybe what what started to lead you back to uh to your historic roots of you know and again it doesn't mean that you went right back into the exact same denomination you were in before but what led you back to a true faith in christ yeah um so i ended up reading a book called tactics by greg cockle which is a wonderful book he just came out with a 10 year anniversary uh i actually just had him on our podcast uh two days ago he's a little bitter about your book outselling his right now actually he sent me an email with a screenshot of my book ahead of his and i send him back and i'm like but look we're both beating tim keller so like let's rejoice that's pretty that's a that's an accomplishment you know we're coming after you lewis we'll see and so um i read this book tactics uh and it's basically just a game plan for having tough conversations with people really it's just the rules of logic and reasoning explained in a very pragmatic great way for christians to have conversations with people of different worldviews and it's wonderful if i would highly promote it and so i was reading that as a liberal christian which i would use liberal and progressive and um yeah in sync because they're they are the same thing yeah and um so i was reading this book to go to my thanksgiving to stump my parents and ask these hard questions like back them into the corner and they would have to tell my sister that she was okay for being gay and then we'd all be progressive christians and skip through the progressive fields and we would be happy together and uh because thanksgiving and christmas were me and my sister against my brother my mom and anyone else from my family that was there because my all my other external family is all orthodox christians as well and so i read that book and it really started making me well like some of these views that i have are kind of hard to answer these why questions and so i then um i typed in oh my friend before i read tactics i read his book uh relativism by and it's this book is hard to find now but i think you can find it on amazon by like people that own it before like a used book but before that my friend was in our community group uh my friend that came out and he actually was my roommate in bible college so uh anyway so he was talking and he made a statement he said i've never felt so firmly planted in mid-air because of all these ideas because the whole idea of progressive christianity is that you don't stand on any foundations that anything goes and it's it's very relativistic and so he was saying that's a good thing my feet are firmly planted in midair and it is awesome yeah he said he's never felt so free he he feels that he he was bound down by fundamentalism in uh these foundational institutions that hold us down and suppress women and gay people and cause slavery and all these very incorrect thinking but he said i've never felt so firmly planted in mid-air and i was like oh man that's a good saying and so uh and so i thought that he got it to be honest i thought that he got it from like a richer roar book and i was like i'm gonna go see where he got this book and so i googled it and that's where greg cochle's book came up from relativism because that's his uh subtitle because that's his book refuting relativism he's saying feet planted firmly in midair is not the place to be right yeah it's not a good thing and so and so i ended up buying it and i figured that i could pick up some few pointers and uh some ideas on it that i could refute greg's argument wow because when i first bought it i thought that it i didn't like i said i was very low biblical literacy i was also i would read bits and pieces that i liked and so i would buy books and then read part like kind of like you do in seminary like where you when you're studying or a research paper you know you don't read a whole book you kind of scan and then find what you're looking for and whatever but and so i bought it thinking that it was going to be this book about relativism and how it was going to help me argue for relativism which is really funny that is because that is a yeah that's a contradiction right there in itself because i'm making a statement about relativism being yeah you're saying relativism is true which means there's objective truth that relativism is objectively true right yeah and so i bought it and i started reading it and i figured out really quickly that he wasn't the type of christian that i was and so i was like but that's okay we're still in the same boat we're in the same christian boat as i thought and because we you know progressives love everyone except for fundamentalist christians but everyone else we love a lot the progressive movement does and so i started reading it and his argumentation was very loving but very just the reasoning and the logic that he used was hard to refute so that sort of uh as greg loves to say it started to put a pebble in my shoes um very irritating and very just always in my mind i remember my wife was pretty solid uh even theologically throughout this whole movement and she was always questioned me as you know a great wife normally does so she was always pushing back a little bit and very gracious and loving which is icono sizes my wife is patient and loving and so this whole time she was very slow she would help with different theological things he would kind of push some questions and then ease back if you know i was getting frustrated or whatever and so i ended up reading that book and then i got his tactics book and then i was going to use the tactics book like i said for thanksgiving and december to argue with to me and my sister we're going to team up against everyone else and we were going to win yeah and which is funny because the first rule in greg's tactics book is this is not a manipulation tool to try and make to beat up on people and but i was going to use it for that anyways and so and as i read it and started looking at the logical the logical ends to my beliefs and like what the alternative to my beliefs were it was jesus and it was the cry it was um the gospel and it was love and it was real love because and i've said this multiple times and i've said it on my podcast and on you know articles and all that but as we always say in the progressive world and this is what we were talking about earlier about the fear of god we don't progressives don't like that idea because they have a wrong understanding of what the fear of god is but they would always say god is love and what we always meant was love is god because what we were saying is that we weren't looking at the bible and uh what god characterizes love as and how that emanates to us what we were saying is we will build the constructs of love and then we will make that our god so god we it was an idol love was an abstract idol that really had no grounds in god and that's why i mean i've been really pondering recently in the last couple weeks it's frustrating that they call it progressive christianity because there's no christian aspect of it except for they're just stealing the names that we use like jesus and god but they have none of their characteristics or none of their their attributes that make them the holy god that we serve and so it's very it can be very frustrating at times so but and i finally kept reading i read some more of greg kogel's book i read reality and i was listening to his podcast so stand to reason his organization really had a big impact on my life and then i also listened to some of your stuff because uh in the earlier podcasts and in the earlier stuff and i just found that i had nowhere to stand and i had no good reasons for what i believed and i found out you know that i was just serving myself and that i was my own god and i made the worst god and it was hard to have the it's amazing that i wanted to be this god because i had the weight of the world it felt like on my shoulders and there was nothing that i could do to fix it and it was exhausting and then once i found the true gospel and jesus and it was satisfying i felt i felt at peace and at rest and i felt like which because progressive christianity is legalism that's all it is is you're you're trying to work yeah you're working all the time to to make sure that you're doing what's what the new social injustice thing is to make sure that your culture is that you're you're culturally relevant and that everyone loves you and the the problem that i always found though was with relativism you can't you know it yeah your truth and my truth can't either the only reason that we love each other is because we really don't we don't operate in relativism we well we were operating in relativism but really what we were operating in is a shared belief system a shared belief worldview but we said that anything goes but the second that you say that homosexuality is a sin or the second that you say that you know that you fight with the idea of the organization of black lives matter or abortion and women's rights it's amazing how quickly that you were going to hell and how much that judgment came on to you yeah anathema if you challenge some of those cultural narratives huh yeah and so it was very difficult and so i just found all of that to be so wanting and exhausting and um and so i ended up leaving uh that life and when i turned my life around and i finally realized what the gospel actually was and that was like man i you know i read all these theology books and now it makes sense wow tenfold a hundred fold like i understand what i was reading in those theology books so much more like so much better because of the relationship that i actually have with the creator god and and i found satisfaction and rest and peace and and that's what i hope that like i mean i like i said i do that like you said i do that uh podcast called table theology and we bring progressives and orthodox christians on just to talk and to have that open dialogue and critique and um i hope that they find rest because it's funny that they they call each other very loving but i was angry all the time i was angry at fundamentalist christians i was angry at republicans i was angry all the time and i was just rebellious i was like i served no one and i had no authority and i'm a schoolteacher as i said and i did i just finished my masters uh three weeks ago congrats that's awesome but anyways so and my philosophy on teaching was kids love discipline and consistency and i have found that authority in my life is the most freeing thing that i can imagine and i hope that progressives can find that because it is exhausting and i feel for them and uh i i really hope that they can find that satisfaction in in christ and really understand what that safeguards and rules and uh the character and attributes of god that are not always the easiest to understand or that don't seem the most loving actually are and they're there for a good reason because and i often hear progressives talk about well like i'm a dad or i'm a mom and i would never do that to my son like god did to his or whatever and it's like that is such a human perspective on such a godly like question and it's actually it's basically saying i'm better than god you know why can't god be as good as me you know yeah and and i just say like well you are your own god and you act very selfishly all the time well it's like you said you're not a very good deity when you you know yeah yourself so josh your heart on this really does come through your heart to lead people out of progressive christianity is evident and i think what you're describing just keeps reminding me of when jesus talks about my burden my yoke is easy and my burden is light and that's what grace really gives us is this light burden i mean we deny ourselves and we take up our cross that instrument of death we die to our old self and we submit ourselves to jesus and there is so much freedom and grace and that and we're going to continue this conversation for a few more minutes over on the patreon page so this will be for subscribers if you're not subscribed on patreon go to patreon.com elisa childers check out the different tiers you can get early access to podcasts on tier two you can get access to this exclusive bonus content where we're going to continue this conversation at tier 4. there are facebook groups you can join there are free gifts you can get for other tiers so definitely check that out patreon.com elisa childers but josh as we wrap up this segment of our conversation i want you to leave our listeners with some kind of encouragement i get emails all the time from parents concerned christian parents who have kids your age even kids my age who are deconstructing they're leaving the the faith they grew up with they're becoming progressive christians or even agnostic or atheist and these parents are like how do i reach my kids that are falling for this stuff what advice would you leave them with today if they if they've heard this through i'm sure that they have been so encouraged by your story to know yes jesus still brings people back we know that josh is proof of that we've talked to some others who who god has done that with um what encouragement would you leave them with today yeah i would say that as the christian faith has always led to his hope uh we we we do have a hope in christ and i would also say that don't ever think that they're too far gone and i think that we also have to watch the way that we as christians talk to progressives it can uh they're very easily offended and they they act like they want to have these open conversations and they will even tell you to your face that they want to have open dialogue and that they want to have disagreements but you have to be that is very divisive and the only reason i say that is because i said those things my friend said those things and it was not true after thanksgivings we would always come back and we would talk about how you know our our republican dad or was telling us this that or the other uh so i would i would really encourage you to a read uh your book uh another gospel uh that was that's a very loving way and of understanding kind of how progressives are starting to feel and like especially if they're getting into it because as alisa was kind of having these questions brought up by this pastor it's normally someone else in their life and uh i would just surround them with good biblical love uh good biblical training and uh there's so many things out there today uh you always talk about impact 360. there's certificates out there uh for just good biblical education but also uh if your kids are super young that's the time to start there is so much and a lot of great theologians and apologists and have really recognized that and natasha crane does some really good stuff jay warren wallace wrote some stuff on the new testament for kids yeah uh greg greg cockle has some stuff william rayne craig has a bunch of children's books his children books are excellent william lane craig has these uh they're like i forget what they're called when they're they're picture books right so they're like the what do they call those they're they're not chapter books but they're the storyboard books or they call them you know like the little kid books i'm going to show you this because i have some right here well good and can i just give you a little pro tip everybody who's listening or watching jay werner wallace's books for kids william lane craig's kids book series is really good for adults too because like i said when you're able to explain something to a child it means you're breaking it down to really explain it very simply these high-level concepts and don't be ashamed if you're an adult and you want to read some of these kids books to get a good intro level do not be ashamed the first logic book i read was a book on logical fallacies written for children and it helped me immensely so there is no shame in that but go ahead and show them show them the book so the written kind bear can't sleep oh look at that i haven't seen that one is that newer this isn't by william when crap this is just the the format though oh the format is right so that's the kind of book we're talking about you know where there's pictures and very few words and yes except yeah so william lane crazy yes that's not just your personal collection there that's actually where i get my deep theology from yes you're like oh i have bear can't read right right here in my nightstand that is awesome josh tell everyone where they can find your podcast and your website yeah so uh if you uh want to get in touch with us uh it's table theology.com uh i post articles we uh have our podcast table theology uh table theology and you can find that wherever you get your podcast from and uh so yeah and so i i would recommend that if your child or if it is someone that is dealing with progressive christianity uh we do push back a lot but we also have a very gracious conversation so it can kind of be sometimes hard for people struggling with progressive christianity to listen to our show because uh so i do want to give that warning but we do have a a lot of uh people like elise is coming on our soon uh greg kogel was on ours and so those podcasts would be great uh to maybe start at and i i yeah and so you can find us there and uh we like i said we have a website we have a store where you can table theology.com you can get all of the they've gotten some great blog posts you can find the podcast there i want to thank josh my guest for today and thank you all for listening so much go on over to itunes and leave a great review make sure you subscribe on youtube and also click these the bell icon on youtube because subscriptions don't mean a whole lot but if you click the bell icon that will notify you whenever we release a new video it also helps if you like and comment you know just helps with the algorithms and all of that so we'd appreciate your help with that and we'll see you next time thanks so much [Music] you

Channel: Alisa Childers

Views: 78,012

Rating: 4.9205995 out of 5

Keywords: apologetics

Id: mg8nWHXbwyo

Length: 59min 22sec (3562 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 31 2021