Live No Lies Podcast | Episode 5 with Jon Tyson

[Music] is the great quest the holy obsession the vision of my life to have christ formed in me is this regardless of what i do for god or how i serve god or where i live or what my job is or whatever it is the burning inner quest of my life form the son of god in me form the image of jesus [Music] [Music] john thanks for coming on it is always great to see you you are one of my dear friends and i don't know if we can say partner quite yet but collaborator on a regular basis and kingdom staff and my love for you and respect for you is very very deep so thanks for being with us today i hope you're doing well are you in new york right now i am mate and it is always great to chat with you those feelings are mutual and looking forward to talking about things that really matter 100 so i quote you in my book a few times in part three which is on the world i quote your book beautiful resistance and really just the title alone is worth the price of admission because that's your kind of moniker your name for the church at an aspirational level what the church has the potential to become and so you know i write about kind of church as a counter practice and often we don't think of church as a practice or a spiritual discipline but it very much is it is a habit it is something that we do with our body and our mind and our relational world and we set before god for him to do what only he can in us and through us and you know in biblical theology a church is like a contrast community to the world you know thinking there the language of our mutual friend tim mackey from the bible project this kind of contrast between what is and what could be so talk to us about what's behind like why did you choose that title and what's the kind of operating motif behind that book well i was i actually was trying to figure out how bonhoeffer which is basically where the big idea come from how bonhoeffer a committed pacifist uh is executed for his participation in a plot to kill hitler i was so wrestling with my pacifist leanings and just war theory i was like what happened in bonhoeffer that made him sort of do this and so i'd read quite a bit of stuff but there was a new biography that had come out uh called a strange glory by charles marsh and when i was reading that i i actually got sidetracked away from my great question about bonhoeffer and pacifism into bonhoeffer's vision of counter formation that's what gripped me out of this book and there's a scene where bonhoeffer is invited to help build the underground church which is a resistance movement against the complicity of the protestant catholic church to the third reich and so he he's given this uh building and a piece of land with which to host his little pastor's training school it all looks very very humble but it is when you read about it it's a very very intense common life and so this is where he was modeling the book life together this is where cost of discipleship came from and one of his friends who'd heard him lecture and by the way bonhoeffer was a like a genius i don't use that term lightly carl bart called his doctoral dissertation that he wrote at age 21 a theological miracle and he was just he just had a staggering mind but one of the things i loved about bonhoeffer it wasn't intellect he was committed to embodying the way of jesus yeah so one of his friends who had heard him lecture earlier sort of was getting some some intel that bonhoeffer had set up a community a pastor's training community and it was too intense and he was sort of and this was basically like an underground seminary right yeah yes it was like it was you know it wasn't very large couple dozen pastors and it was out in the middle of nowhere and it wouldn't have looked like anything um beautiful resistance opens by me standing on the ground where that happened i went there it's now in poland to uh to go see with this this happened but one of his friends basically is like this is too intense so he he comes out to spend us some time with bonhoeffer to basically taught him talk him out of so much spiritualism like sort of calm down so bonhoeffer comes from like a upper class family right he's a professor it's like come back to your senses you've abandoned your career all of you marriages all the things what what is this what is this spiritual zeal it's unbecoming for elite an elite to have so much sort of you know just raw energy for something it's just like get your gentle senses back so bonhoeffer takes him in a boat they roll across the odor sound to an airfield where hitler has uh uh is training his troops so there's planes taking off and landing and there's troops marching in formation and they walk up onto this hill and bonhoeffer basically launches into a speech to his friend about what is happening to the church and he talks about how the church is being co-opted he talks about the discipline of the third reich to form people and he basically makes a comment pointing to think involved which is where he's got his training school this this what this what i'm doing this thing that i'm forming this community of people this has to be stronger than this pointing at hitler's formation process of training soldiers for the third reich and he talks about the need to produce a harder stronger kind of person with a stronger formation than that of the third reich and so you've got this prophet on a hill contrasting his vision of discipleship with hitler's vision of forming people into soldiers for a great war and his basic line is this must be stronger than that we must form people more strongly than hitler is trying to form people and they get back in their boat and it says they wrote back in silence and i've always loved that image because a lot of times i think when you and i talk about discipleship we talk about spiritual formation we talk about mission i often get people kind of pushing me to calm down a little bit and i think i don't think people understand the stakes and the time of history that we live in in how urgent it is that our formation again has to be stronger than the formation of the world so that's that was the vision of beautiful resistance and then in some some ways it's a book complementary to yours it's basically trying to ask the question what is the world doing in terms of shaping us and then how do we resist it not with sort of like a militant defensiveness but with a gracious compelling beauty and i sort of try and contrast those things in the book yeah you know whenever i teach on formation you know at the beginning i always say spiritual formation is not a christian thing or religious thing it's a human thing we're all being formed and we're all becoming a person we're all indexing in a certain direction you know trending in a certain direction for better or for worse and two all christian spiritual formation is counter formation to that of you know in my paradigm the world the flesh and the devil we're already being formed by the world and so i think that's a great mistake that christians often make when they approach formation or discipleship or whatever you want to call it is you know like we're a white board or a a blank slab of clay that you know jesus is just going to form us now we've already been deformed by other cultural currents so talk to us about that would you agree with that disagree with that in your pastoral experience as people come into your church you know you're in new york there's a high turnover rate just because of the city people coming in and out of the city every few years what's your past and from all over the world what's your pastoral experience as far as formation and counter formation no i definitely think that's it um one of the great things that woke me up as a christian so here was my paradigm why would you want to be a christian those people are slaves to the church i can be free and autonomous in the world and one of the things god showed me that made me leave my basically teenage hedonism was like you're not free in the world you're actually a slave to the world and jesus has come to actually set you free i had like a completely false understanding of reality and when i realized that jesus came to set me free from the deformation of the world and changed me into the person i was like born by god to become it was a source of liberation and joy now this happened in a pentecostal environment so it was like pretty dramatic you know a lot of course a lot of wow and a lot of sizzle and it did take me i don't know 27 years a plus to sort of realize oh oh i was more formed by that system of the world than i even know i was up this morning meditating just realizing how far i still have to walk down the way of the cross how much in my inner man is still formed by the things of the world it's it's quite remarkable so yeah i've so i had a personal awareness of that that has definitely informed my pastoring you know new york i mean sociologists have shown that if you live in new york new york you end up walking faster you literally it is one of the fastest walking cities in the world you paint your physical pace of walking changes when tourists are dropped into manhattan so my question is like if your pace of walking changes subconsciously what else do you think is changing subconsciously well i'm telling you everything you're the story of your life your sense of self meaning values um joy the enemy all of these things are like being radically reframed wherever we go and i i think it is very very true that we are dominated by explicit ideologies that are at war with the christian vision of life and they are forming us so if you sooner so that there's a there's formation happening on the level of narrative this formation happening in the level of personal story this formation happening the level of identity what it means to be human and then we are radically enculturated piece by piece step by step um all of us in some sense are like breaking bad moving slowly down a pathway towards destruction in the world never consciously thinking we're going to end up there but these small series of steps take us places we never thought we'd go and a lot of times i see that in pastoring in new york so if you think about romans 12 i think you imagine being a follower of jesus and being in a house church and then walking through a part of the city of rome i've spent quite a bit of time in rome and imagined this moment walking from a villa to another community where people are reading this letter and you've walked through the city of rome and you're walking past the theater where pagan stories are told you're walking past brothels you're walking past temples you're walking past uh you know roman ideology and narrative pax romana propaganda you're walking past the cult of the emperor and you're walking past all of that and then you sit in a room and then you have to try and ask the question okay if i'm not going to be conformed by the world what is the world what is rome and how is its religion practices values habits hobbies taboos how is all of that shape to be and how does jesus want to reshape me i think where the church goes wrong and this is what you see a lot is that we we are very aware of one kind of enculturation and ideology but we're completely blind to the other one so for example people who are deeply concerned about like you know critical theory or neo-marxism are often completely unaware to the the ways that they are radically spiritually deformed by america excessive consumption hypernationalism so yeah we're formed and one of the most dangerous ways the world forms us is that it forms partial blind spots and partial things of truth where we just we just can't see properly so the church then as you mentioned has to be fundamental to its purpose radically counter-formative and that's why churches that simply mimic the practices of the world the values of the world fail in their fundamental task which is to help people become like jesus yeah i mean it's do not be conformed to the world but be transformed so there's that you've already been deformed right so now it's counter formation be transformed by the renewing of your mind so i mean you mentioned ideology both of us live in cities i think anywhere you live just in our cities the ideology are so in your face you know what i mean it's just like literally in every other storefront window um and you know willard defined ideas the kind of root of ideology as assumptions about reality yeah not as reality reality is what is ideas are our assumptions about reality and the wonder of the human mind is we can hold ideas that are true and we could hold ideas that are wildly untrue and that's the danger don't you think that often the ideologies the the world view that we live into that we even view the world through it's just these unchecked assumptions i mean part of why i think both of us wrote our books i'm i'm interpreting my own heart and yours was to attempt to kind of expose so many of the secular narratives on the left and on the right that are just kind of assumptions for people that are actually deforming them you know one day at a time so what advice do you have for somebody whether they are living in you know middle america or somewhere else in the world and in particular if they're living in new york or a portland or in l.a or i mean our cities are formation machines what advice do you have somebody these these cities and now the internet so even if you're just sit at home in your bedroom these are formation machines the internet and our our context our city or town are forming us like what advice do you have to a christian in a place like this whose heart is be transformed by the renewing of your mind well i i think it's i don't want to sense a four-step process but i think there's four distinctives you have to keep in mind you know paul paul says to the galatians and the galatians experienced the radical power of the gospel and the supernatural so this is like a charismatic this is a word in spirit church when it was born but he says like who has bewitched you like who cut in on you and and so his response when they are you know basically experiencing like heretical theology going back into legalism he says like i'm in the pains of childbirth until christ is formed didn't you so number one we have to realize the great apostolic vision and mission was the formation of christ in the hearts of god's people and and we talk about that a lot but i really like this is what struck me so much this morning is the is the great quest the holy obsession the vision of my life to have christ formed in me is this regardless of what i do for god or how i serve god or where i live or what my job is or whatever it is the burning inner quest of my life form the son of god in me form the image of jesus in me and when you and so that requires um an awareness of who jesus is and awareness of the character of jesus and that has to be a great burning vision is i want union with christ i want the image of jesus to be formed in me then i think you you hit it then you have to realize i have to go through a season of counter formation which is i have to identify all the deformation that has happened to me so what are the what are the lies i've believed you should not live those lies thank you yes what am i living like how is this snuck in and so yeah it's the renewing of the mind it's the transformation of our of our habits it's the renewal of the imagination it's the widening of the horizon of possibility it's it's it's it's all of those things and so we get an awareness of our places of deformation then we have to have that vision of transformation and to me this this is why i am um definitely a contemplative charismatic paul says in 2nd corinthians 3 that with unveiled faces which talks about the beauty of the new covenant we contemplate the lord's glory yeah that's where the language of contemplative practice comes from right yeah and we're being transformed into his image with ever increasing glory which comes from the lord who is the spirit and where the spirit of the lord is this freedom so there's like your contemplative transformative spirit-empowered vision so a big part of the transformation that i don't think we spend enough time really talking about is getting out why is beholding the glory of jesus behold like really asking what is the kingdom of god who is this beautiful king and contemplating that and that that is a big part of our transformation that then leads us to the the last stage which is consciously confirmation it's being conformed to the image of the sun and this is our destiny we've been predestined to be conformed to the image of the sun so number one you've got to have that vision of formation number two be aware of where you need to be where you've been deformed get a vision and practice of transformation and then the goal of that is confirmation is the image of jesus so to me it's it's it's being in a community that values this like you know we we have talked a lot about either like hype church doesn't do the job life has gotten too hard for hype to be spiritually effective and it's it doesn't change who we are it doesn't speak to the kinds of people that jesus is wanting to form us into so yes it's a vision of jesus it's an awareness of the ways we've been deformed it's counter-formative practices that push us and move us and reshape us into different directions it's in a community where jesus is lifted up and beheld in all of his glory and then there's i think that community is on a journey to live in the kingdom of god and so those kingdom practices provide the guard rails of common life which resist the way of the world and so yeah i would just simply ask people because a lot of times there's so much christian activism and there's so much christian uh experience chasing you know like the desert fathers talked about spiritual greed for magnificent experiences rather than just like just a humble passion for christ himself so make sure the church is centered on christ that you're in a community that is actually practicing the way of jesus and that that is providing you the fuel to be able to move out in the world on mission with these practices of resistance i think like all of that in your mind and you're looking for that and you're living into that is a lot better than just quote finding a church i like yeah that's gold i want to i want to drop down here for a minute and i'm 100 with you on the you know i think a gracious interpretation would be that in a previous era when the cultural architecture of the wider world was a little bit more christianized the main problem was kind of like apathy in the church and how do you kind of wake up the church from a kind of spiritual slumber to to pursue jesus that's no longer the moment that most of us are living in it's like it's like daniel and babylon you know what i mean it's like a furnace of of formation how do we not bow the knee you know and that calls for more that you know that calls for a different kind of posture so just two follow-up questions that i'm hearing in my mind for people who are listening one what would you say to somebody it's sad in my mind as somebody who is very much in the formation world like that's my driving passion what i'm giving the next kind of chunk of my work life too but how it's often co-opted by radical individualism and how often you know people that will take formation seriously almost do it at the expense of becoming a part of a local church rather than woven into the fabric of a local church so what would you say to somebody who would be a hundred percent with you counter formation contemplative practice counter habits to the way of the world but they would say why do i need to be a part of a church you know i live in wherever and there's not a john tyson isn't you know preaching down the street and you know my church doesn't even talk about the way of jesus or whatever why do i need to be a part of a community why can't i just do this with myself and my spiritual director or some good books and podcasts well i think when you ask the question who is jesus into whose image are you being formed jesus jesus life was given for others the son of man didn't come to be served but to serve and give his life as a ransom for others and a community of love requires other people to be a part of it by this will all men know that you are really my disciples by the quality of your love not the quality of your counter practices and if those practices are only turning you inwards in to sort of self-reflection and not outwards in self-sacrifice you're not living the way of jesus you're doing life hacks and they may be like good antidotes to some of the brokenness of modern life but that's a different thing than becoming like christ look at like behold the son of god washing feet behold the son of god forgiving enemies behold the son of god's patience with his disciples drawing them aside instructing them teaching them and training behold the son of god concerned to leave the 99 to find the one you know like that jesus life was lived for others and true spiritual formation will always drive us beyond the self into the heart of the church otherwise it's just like renewing project self and it's not the kingdom of god now i do want to acknowledge that some people may actually need a disproportionate season of like time alone and thoughtfulness but i still think like that's if that season becomes your lifestyle you're in trouble yeah because you know jesus had that rhythm he would withdraw to be with the father and then he'd come and pour himself out and he you know he often withdrew but most of the gospels are him engaging and in fact we barely even know what happens when he withdraws we're just told he doesn't and then we get little glimpses like the father's saying listen to my son i love him you know like it's basically going in for divine union and affirmation and coming out to serve the world and i think that's the rhythm of following jesus not just project self yeah you know i we both read uh because you did a series on this recently cornelius plantinga and i quote him in my book on sin some of his writing on sin was just i found it extraordinary but his idea i mean yeah how do you read a book entirely on sin the whole book is on sin and it was a page turner you know and something we can all relate to but his idea of sin and this is a more ancient christian idea you know as opposed to the kind of reformation view of sin is like the transgression of law you know this kind of judicial view of sin the more ancient you know and still eastern orthodox view of sin is it's like a disease that has infected your heart and your whole body that has that has that is literally killing you the result of it is death you know the wages of sin is death it doesn't say that god kills sinners it says that sin kills sinners you know it pays in death and you know if the root of so it's like this cancer it's like this infectious disease that everything we touch we infect even if our heart is to help and to heal and if the root of human sin is at some level self-will the will you know i think augustine said this turned in on itself the will that was inconvenienced yes open and surrender and yield to the love and the wisdom of god through union with the father and the son and the spirit that will is then closed off to the father the son of the spirit and turned in on itself and we become you shall be like gods we become the own the self becomes the new god the new center of the universe the new locust point of authority if that's the root of human sin and if sin corrupts everything it touches then that's going to come into even our own spiritual formation our own discipleship practices our own prayer life and it's so easily going to be co-opted by this bent part of our heart and i don't mean that in some like you know heavy anti-your uh you know actually have a very robust view of human goodness and the imago day just in a self-awareness like this can corrupt even our life with god even our prayer lab robert mulholland you know who i love his little book on invitation to a journey kind of the best all-in-one place book i know in formation and he opens by just going off about how uh spiritual formation is being formed into the image of christ for the sake of the success and he just goes off about for the sake of others not for you this is not like christian buddhism where you just like have some tips and techniques to become a nicer happier person though that's really good and i'm not against any of that a lot of christians need to become nicer happier persons but this is about like how you take up your cross and how you discover life on the other side of death you know so i that's what i'm hearing you say like i get asked a lot what are your fears with spiritual formation and when people start to take it seriously you know most people assume i will say legalism because that's a major problem because practices for example i do a lot of teaching on the practices of the spiritual disciplines they're all means to an end none of them are the end the goal of sabbath is not to sabbath the goal of scripture it's not to read scripture the goal of prayers i aim to pray it's all theosis and union it's to become like god and with god but that's actually not my major fear i think just generationally and maybe this is just being located in portland if there's a spectrum with legalism on one side and hedonism on the other if the culture is so far toward hedonism that uh any movement toward the other direction feels like a healthy counterbalance my main fear is is radical individualism and project self that formation will just become a christianized version of kind of project self how do i get myself a little nicer a little happier a little less anxious all of which are good things but none of which i think lead us into the life of the kingdom it's it's it's such a temptation you know i think maybe legalism and other generations i mean you just think about the generation coming out of world war ii okay coming out of world war ii they were the great generation the greatest generation they gave themselves for country for neighbor you know young men weeping because they were turned away because they weren't admitted to the military that deep sense of shame of not being able to sacrifice your life for others and you know david brooks writes about this um and then you look at and then what came next was the me generation you know the counter culture movement in many ways was about you know self-actualization not not cultural identity or servanthood and only i only referenced that point is because we're now sort of 70-ish years fueled by staggeringly effective technology to focus everything on the self yeah and so it's it's so we're so far into that there's not even another way of thinking culturally you just can't even you can't even reach back to your parents and ask them was there another way to live it's like so much of it is oriented towards the self so yeah getting we will default to that and other other generations may have defaulted to legalism but we certainly are not i think we are defaulting into how do i use this for me yes and of course there are personalities that are still wired that way but they are very much a small minority in my pastoral experience you know small low single digits you know and that doesn't mean they're not important it means the overall message i think is take up your cross yeah it's very simple if the if christianity is defined by love love requires others yeah it's just it's like so if your practices are not pushing you to others they're not pushing you to love and so love requires other people and the church we have to be around and honestly i can tend to like i was talking to our church on sunday about the danger of of church driven by preferences here's the preaching i like here's the worship i like here's the community groups i like all you will do is overlook you will build massive deficiencies in your life with god and you know because you'll make the assumption that your preferences are god's preferences and so anything i like is going to form me into the kind of person that that god is like it's like no that's why you need to be around annoying people and receive them as a genuine gift oh these people are reminding me that i have set the center around my preferences this is why you need to be around the poor the poor are a gift to us because they they have a different different view of reality and they have gifts to bring us that are often overlooked in all of our affluence and our luxury and so if the goal is formation and you ask how am i formed most of the ways that we're really formed is relation getting around yes brings us out of ourself into the life of others yeah i mean this this is a trinitarian theology you know the best why is god trinity because god is love and love cannot exist outside of relationship and we're made in this image we cannot exist outside of this relationship okay second follow-up question for somebody listening and then we'll move on is what advice do you have just not to put you on the spot but walk us through a a morning or a day in the contemplative life of john tyson in new york city like teach us to pray i guess is the question here any thoughts you have and you know you're john tyson so everything you do is turned up to 11. it's the beauty of who you are but uh yeah walk us through what does contemplative prayer what does what was life with god what does you mention you know the old idea of beholding and becoming that beautiful vision from corinthians 2. what does that look like for you in your ordinary day everyone's different um i i shared this with your congregation i think at some point during the pandemic i i think our church has three pillars we could tangible presence counter formation sacrificial mission that's the three things our church is built on and i think in some sense it's the it's the venn diagram of those things that is the kind of disciple we're trying to produce so my day is built around those things it's built around enjoying the presence of god so i spend my mornings you know i i set my alarm i get up early if you're not a morning person don't worry about it do do what works for you but this is my my life i get up early um i i do two things with that time i read great devotional literature i just read for the heart you know i love charts but if there's a chart in this book i don't want to see it i just want to read for the heart i want to learn from the mystics i want to learn from the saints i want to learn from the mission i want to learn with people who have walked with god and i try and take that in my spirit and just receive it with joy and then i basically do like a lectio divina i call it how to spend time with god truth insight mission encounters just like basically read think pray live and i just i read the lectionary you know i got into that a while back and um just have some sort of bible reading plan doesn't matter what it is i've done bible in a year i did that for a decade and i slipped back into the lecture because i i missed parts of the scriptures so yeah i'll meditate slowly through it i'll look for something to stand out i'm reading in the gospels this morning and it said jesus saw their faith and said to the man your sins are forgiven i was like jesus saw their faith how can he see faith jesus do you so this is not faithfulness this is belize's conscious belief in the possibility of god to act do you see faith in me lord increase my faith i mean that that is a door into contemplation wonder hunger prayer so i spent you know probably 20 minutes sitting there with coffee in my hands saying lord increase my faith i love you help me to love you more i believe in you help me believe in you i trust you increase my trust in you and then i'll just sort of like journal about it and um and then that's that's my morning and i'm literally trying to enjoy god i'm trying to enjoy his presence so that no matter what else happens during the day i have peace in my heart to draw from to center my spirit on the living god then during the day i'm basically trying to interact with god you know like sort of like the vineyard where is the father moving the only way not to be overwhelmed by the need of the world is to find what god's asking you to do about the world you know what's he asking you to do and so i'm always trying to discern you know lord do you want me to step out do you want me to speak do you want me to be silent do you want me to give a prophetic word do you want me to speak to a stranger i'm just trying to be present with god and ask what are you doing and you know one of my mentors always had this phrase he said whenever i step into a room i ask this question where have you been working in advance to extend your kingdom you've been working in advance how do i step into it so it's question it's a lot of it makes days exciting makes days exciting i mean yesterday yesterday i had i had a moment of just glory and divine encounter by the handing of an umbrella it seemed so small and nobody on planet earth would have recognized it but me and the other person but it was a moment of the kingdom and i was like gosh to have a life filled with these kingdom moments that's that's what i'm wanting to do so sometimes there's spiritual warfare i have to resist sometimes there's boldness i have to act but i'm trying to ask where is god working and how do i join him and then at night i am a little bit of an old-school pentecostal you know i i grew up in a binding and losing environment and um yes so i i believe that god answers our prayer i mean jesus jesus says he told them this parable they should always pray and never give up there's something about contending prayer persevering prayer i have a prayer list i have prophetic words i have promises i have longings i have you know and i'm trying to ask that these things happen i am and not pray i am praying that for god's that he would lead me not into temptation and he would deliver me from evil all i have and all i am delivered from the evil one i'm praying for the advance of the kingdom i read this amazing book called calling in the name of the lord that was a biblical theology of prayer and he says biblical prayer is this it's calling on the name of the lord to fulfill his promises that's it that's what prayer is it's mediated in the new covenant it's it's it's calling in the name of the lord through jesus for the father's promises but it's it's still like we are asking god to do what god has said he wants to do and he loves when we remind him and call on those things so that's like i basically have three movements of prayer one is would be described as contemplative one would be described as sort of charismatic i'm looking for the activity gifts of the spirit and then one would be described as sort of like contending is yeah really crying out into session so i made a i made a i don't want to call it a deal like like i'm always asked and i think deep in my spirit i am a revivalist at heart there's something in me that longs for just you know breakthrough encounters with god but it's like what can you do to facilitate that we can't whip it up but there is an invitation in the book of hosea which says break up the fallow ground and so i i've made like sort of a covenant with god that i will give god the majority of my media consumption and i will replace it with the diligent pursuit of him and it's like look there's nothing wrong there's like it's not sinful to watch a show on netflix unless it's a sinful show but like the principle which watches well the principle of the principle of watching television is is not evil i remember um uh pizza gazero saying like one of the principles that god had to really break out of him was like it's okay to watch tv you know but but i just said i remember david wilkinson um who's the founder of times square church he said he used to watch two hours of tv at night and god said to him give me that two hours and i'll use you significantly and i walked past times square church this week and i just was like this whole thing was born out of a man who trained two hours of tv for two hours of prayer and so i'm i'm looking to sort of like enter into the burden of god and join jesus in the garden and uh god really are there any burdens you're looking for a watchman on the wall and i want to give my knights to that so i am a little bit pretty and a little bit i'm very idiosyncratic i'll often slip out when people are watching tv and i'll just i'll go down the street or into the park or down on the pier and i'll just ask god lord but here's my list here's my heart here's my life and so to me that sort of balance of enjoying god and then working with god and then contending for the promises of god i found to be very very rich and it sort of keeps me in balance because you know all of us probably have a dominant strain time with god working with god or contending for god and i think i need all three of those to push my heart in different directions man it's beautiful it's beautiful is the right word it's a beautiful resistance i mean what i'm hearing and you know it's interesting both of us you know are different but have a lot of similarities i think in our teaching and preaching and both of us say things that you're quote not allowed to say in our cities you know that directly contradict the the uh secular ideologies that we swim in but i think if you were to come and visit bridgetown or church of the city it's not like it's not a tone or a spirit of anger or us versus them right you know what i mean talk to us about what what kind of culture is born out of this kind of a life that you're putting language to yeah it's you know i was thinking this morning to follow jesus well is to carry contradictory things in your heart at all times and if either one of them wins you sort of corrupt your witness and so i was thinking about this as like it's weeping for the brokenness of the world and it's delighting in the glory of the world at the same time yes so like i'm walking i'm walking through new york and i see some of the most beautiful art it's done by secular people and my heart's just drawn into glorifying god and then i take two steps later i saw this on sunday i saw someone shoot up heroin and i'm like oh here is this image bearer who should be the most glorious artwork of god absolutely dominated shooting heroine in broad daylight and so it's it's to both celebrate and weep at the same time it's to carry that in your heart it is a profound yeah it is a profound sense of anger and a profound sense of hope you're dealing with all of these contradictions so if all you are is like enjoying the world and you're not weeping for the world it's like you are tone deaf to the human condition but if all you are is weeping it's like you're blind to where god is actually breaking in and the goodness that's inherited and everything so it's learning to carry both of these things and i would say for the most part the default state today is tending towards the broken side of things and spending that much time in brokenness gravity and heartache and injustice can can sour the heart angry negative critical person i had dinner with gary hargan once um who's the founder of ijm and you know the thing that just struck me the most how joyful he was and he sees basically the darkest dark spot on the underbelly of the world working with you know sex trafficking for the most part yeah and i just was like you are very different than i thought and he said if you do not learn to laugh you will go insane he's like you got you have to acknowledge both sides of this thing so yeah i i'm you know understanding secularism a lot of folks and this does require just a touch of pre-knowledge but it's like a lot of people think that we're in what charles taylor calls secularism too which means like there's a war for the removal of god from public life and i'm like we lost that war i'm not a culture warrior i i live in a different plot a different vision of reality which says it's my job to make jesus beautiful again in the midst of the brokenness of secularism so i'm more of an artist than i am a culture warrior you know and i think a lot of there's nothing less appealing to this generation than self-preservation and fear and so much of religious language is about preserving our rights and fear of what's coming and i i do not want to have a spirit that buys into that i want to i want to jesus is my peace i give you i want to move through the world with the peace of christ and that lets me weep it sometimes and it lets me celebrate with others but it's just a different operating system so how do you yeah cultivating that i think is very very important and don't you think there's more of an opening right now than people realize like in a you know and again this does require some knowledge of charles taylor in a secularism two movement moment you know it's about fighting for you know to keep god and christian values at the center of our society and i agree with you i think we're far past that we're very much into secularism three and so the difference there is it's not that christianity is failing in the west it's that all of the other narratives in the west are failing too the progressive narratives are failing the right-wing narratives are failing capitalism is failing like individualism is failing the redefinition of marriage family and gender is failing and like and it's creating massive anxiety fear outrage people are freaking out and there's an extraordinary moment right now where you know i love your analogy of we're called to be artists like and we don't have to make jesus beautiful we just have to like uncover the things that have stood between him and a true perception of his beauty so i think there's an incredible opening right now what do you see for the future of the church when you look forward like and chart a path what do you see moving forward for the church it's really interesting i i just spent a couple of hours last week like i tried to go back 25 years and just say what are all the things that have shaped my journey with god you know going back to pentecostal revivalism in australia with a great move of god's around the corner and then it never came and then moving into sort of the bill hybris prevailing church model which was like literally compelling relief from the anxiety of revival not coming it was a steady taking of ground an acts 2 church into sort of like a hyperdoctrial overreaction so like five-point calvinism plus into sort of like rick warren's which is like okay i know people actually need practical tools and then no that's not into the emerging church then out of the approaching church into the missional movement and i just like mapped all the things that have happened and again this is predominantly this is like all before you were 25. you know 28. this is white evangelicalism it granted but then i just started to think like what is the next 25 years of the church gonna be and it was like i've got a lot of friends having babies right now and i'm looking at their children and i'm thinking when i'm in my 60s what will i have led and stewarded that enables these current babies to grow up in a thing where they say jesus is better than anything else in this world and so you know i try to spend some time like what what are the fates that they will have to contend with which are like just way bigger than me and i'll never have any influence over and then what is this tiny potent counter culture that we can shape that will help them prepare for these things so i i think the future of the church it's it's honestly it's some things i don't like there's some things that are the future of the church that i don't like um that that are absolutely culturally inevitable um there's some things for the church i'm actually very very optimistic about and it's primarily because like um people are a lot of folks deconstructing their faith right now wait till you deconstruct secularism you want to talk about a journey of disillusionment into darkness and meaninglessness you know it's yes it's it's nil isn't it yes it's awful nietzsche was right and you you go down that rabbit trail and it is a dark place yeah people forget i mean you know i remember at the art of teaching you did like a biopsy on for co we forget nietzsche ended his life like mentally inside like literally out of his mind and so yeah i think the future of the church is discipleship the future of the church is discipleship it is cultural christianity around here will literally melt away it'll just be it's it's gone in a lot of places it will only further disappear it'll be conscious choices to follow jesus i think it'll be genuinely deep formation people really wanting to become like jesus because of the darkness of the world i think it will be explicitly christ-like not generically christian there will be a re-emphasis on the person of jesus and the kingdom of jesus is the only hope i think it a lot of it's going to take place not even on our phones it's going to take place in ai glasses you know what efforts there's there will 100 be an augmented reality discipleship movement for good or for bad we should probably think about a world that is like literally geo-mapped and is there anything redemptive we can do towards that um and i think we're going to start seeing like two things at once discipleship will be better locally than it's been in decades and more digital than it's ever been in decades it'll be local and online it will be formation and mission it will be it will be all of these dichotomies held together in a compelling way that's what i think that's where i think it's going and um and i think it's going to get hard before it gets better i think we're moving into a time of further decline before we turn a corner so talk to us about i know there's a barnes study on the future of the church that impacted you and gave shape to some of what you're doing with your most recent book the intentional father and the primal path so let's kind of end the last 10 minutes of our conversation kind of uh not in a new direction but like a an unexpected ending how has some of that barna research given shape to your most recent book and a lot of your thought about parenting well i i was having a conversation with uh david kinnaman who's the president of barna just a wonderful guy and he just like did have a little throwaway we were talking about raising our sons he's got a son a little bit younger than my son but he just sort of did a throwaway comment and for those listening david barna had a barna which is like a christian think tank and they do research they do like wide scale studies on statistics yeah yeah that's right it's like it's it's data not opinion a lot of times yes so he basically said well you know i think basically when you look at the data we've reached the point of irreversible decline in the american church i said well what do you mean he said well bar remover of god and he calls him resilient disciples he wrote wrote a book about just discipleship and exile um he said you know basically like radical youth discipleship and a move of god it's it's over like you can't turn it around by any natural means and i remember just thinking like oh gosh you know um lord i'll be faithful to you at any time of history in any place by your grace but do all is all i want to do is to manage the slow decline of the america it's like we're born at the wrong time in history holy cow i was like i don't want to do that and so it made me gave me this vision of like i want to work for spiritual renewal and a huge part of that is the radical discipleship of young people and then i went back and started to ask the question like we all know these statistics it's approximately 70 of kids walk away from their faith when they hit college it's like if you had any other group doing so poorly you would ask you would say to him you guys need to change this up are you guys aware this isn't working yes that's like tweak the system that's like throw the system in the garbage and find a new one yeah and i was like and so i had spent uh you know almost a decade being a youth pastor and i worked in small rural churches in texas and i worked in large suburban mega churches and i just realized like our way of forming young people like is non-existent it's non-existent it is and it's i think in many ways it's only gotten worse and so when i was a when i was a dad i still haven't had i was like i've got to do something better like i'll give an example like how does the typical kid grow up today it's like they get they're like massively dropped into a travel sports system that basically lets them know performing on a uh a field at an adolescent level is more important than stable roots christian faith church attendance this is the most important thing in our family we'll reorient all of our schedules around this so that what i just said is controversial offends people um number two kids are given a cell phone and they're exposed to like the darkness of all of humanity on the internet you know all the stuff that's just come out which we all knew but has now confirmed about like how it's like social media is toxic for teenagers it's toxic the pornification of young brains young men basically marinating their brains in violent pornography like neuroplastics you know their most malleable age of their entire life for like a decade a decade of that and you just go like you know the occasional youth retreat with a cool altar call and some fun games is not going to undo that so when i was a youth pastor i i i kept bumping into these kids who were different than all the kids that i was leading and i found out they were all mormons yes and and i went to the mormons and like literally called up the local mormon state local church and was like hey can i talk to someone about like how you disciple your young people and so i went out and hang out with one of the leaders and he told me about how like you know the the young men are given this priesthood they like literally receive a mantle of spiritual authority and then all of the kids go through seminary so in high school for an hour a day before school they read the old testament one year the new testament then doctrine and covenants pull a great price and then the book of mormon the senior year and then they do a missionary training thing and they're sent on a mission for two years and then they're welcomed back into the community and i was like oh gosh we don't do that yeah and you know like the the dropout rates of mormonism are not as high as the dropout rates of evangelicals in fact every day the equivalent of one southern baptist church 280 something people convert to mormonism in the united states you know it's like it's that it's the fastest growing religion in america right now that they just have a vision of forming their young people and it made me go i've gotta and then upon some measure of reflection i look back and you know i pastored the last youth group well the last ministry i led had over a thousand people and it was large and i look today almost 15 years later who's walking with god and honestly it was the people who came from strong families or who were discipled like a lot of the crowds just not around so i basically said we got to reclaim this we've got to come up with some sort of formation process and that's basically what launched me into writing my book i mean it's interesting i mean first off i had a very similar experience you know i remember when i was in high school i switched high school right before my senior year which i do not recommend and i went to a new high school because i could graduate and half the time it's a long story and uh you know i've spent my whole life on the west coast grew up in the bay area then portland very secular environment where you're like there's no other christians hardly at all around you and at this new high school it's like every other person i met was a christian this was like back in the late 90s when the wwjd bracelet had just come out i don't know that it was ever cool but it was just out and everybody was like oh my gosh you're a christian you're a christian you're a christian and then i found out it's because we were like a few blocks from the mormon temple and so that was where the mormon community was located it was all around this high school and they literally bought a house across the street from this public high school and same thing exactly i think it was like six or seven a.m at one hour every single morning all of these mormon kids would go to this house study scripture study the look at mormon and the level of formation how seriously they took formation it was just at another level i had no prior experience of and i remember thinking whatever we do with our kids has to be that strong or stronger you know so talk to us about where uh what the primal path is where that came from this is something you've done with your son i am just about through with my firstborn son and my sons are three years apart and six days apart by their birthday so i get six days off and then i start round true with my second boy so we're i'm right now i'm plotting our road trip down highway one for an eight day kind of beginning to the whole thing and the fire in the forest talk to us about what you're doing with your son at a discipleship level that the the genius behind it and and kind of what your most recent book which i think is your best book the intentional father i don't know what percentage of listeners or fathers i don't know if it's 10 20 but i just want to take a few minutes for you to put language to what it is that you're doing yeah well one there's a a union psychologist anthony stevens and he says basically although our culture has allowed these ideas of rights and passage of formation for particularly for young men to disappear it's still there's still some archetypal need within us to be initiated and so you know rollheiser says you look at what's happening with young people today and we we go back to ancient societies and we look at how they formed young people and some of them would even die during the ordeal component of the initiation and he says that's so barbaric but he says look how many kids today are committing suicide getting pregnant living with radical rates of depression because nobody's initiating them into adulthood he says there's something needed where for an older generation to walk or adolescents attempt to self-initiate through drugs or drunk driving or jumping off bridges or getting people pregnant or crazy stuff they're literally saying i my body is filled with these chemicals i'm hitting puberty i'm wanting to get outside of myself and experience reality it's an attempt at self-actualization and they're basically saying someone guide me with these energies it's very confusing to be a young person and so if you don't have somebody who helps you channel those confusing energies you're just going to go all over the map trying to make sense of them most societies and um so there's one absolutely a fascinating man who studied 18 languages and he lived at a time of history this is van gaal up when um colonization unfortunately was at its prime and so they were basically exploring the world and sending in reports of indigenous peoples he learned 18 languages and he came back and he realized that all societies basically have a six step process of forming young people into adulthood and we don't have any of it so here's basically what he says number one is separation where young people are consciously taken away from their stable childhood community into a different reality number two they're initiated so they cross some sort of threshold an entry to a journey then they're formed there's a process of formation that happens in three areas they're formed into the story of their community so they're not selfish the religion of their community so they have a sense of reference and the roles their gender requires of them to be helpful to their community this goes on for some time then they're taken through what is called the ordeal and the ordeal is where the young person has to go out on their own to test whether or not they have internalized and actualized all the things that they've learned over the years so in australia the aboriginals would do this thing for young men called literally walkabout where they would sometimes for up to six months be out in the hundred degree heat where by the way everything in australia is trying to kill you six months on their own in the wilderness surviving to prove that the opposite of helicopter parenting yes inuit uh would have to go out and hunt and the young men would have to like kill like a caribou or a sea lion to prove they actually had it the recycled the lion native americans had the vision quest today the dutch is one of the last communities but they still do this they call this dropping where they literally drop teenagers in the middle of the woods and have to find their way out but they basically had to test do i have what it takes if they did when they returned from the ordeal they were recognized by the community and they were reintegrated in you mentioned helicopter parenting they did research at new york university to ask the question when did helicopter parenting begin i came back and they found on a sort of a generational map it was the year 1990 and within one generation rates of depression and anxiety raised by 80 after the birth of helicopter parenting because there's some psychological need for young people to be formed and to test themselves in the world and when that is repressed and not extended they are overwhelmed and so what i was basically trying to do was like say to the christian church here's how to reclaim that pathway in the way of jesus here's how to take this universal understanding about what how to form our young people and then put it through the lens of the way of jesus and reinstitute it so i took my son on a journey starting when he was 13 he ran into the water off the coast of new york as an initiation ceremony and when he was 19 after a whole series of formational experiences and curriculum and learning and mentoring after after a gap year and hiking the camino de santiago which is a 500 mile walk across spain he ran into the ocean in a town called finn astaire and was welcomed back into the community of men as a recognized member and so i basically tried to take the best of sort of like developmental psychology to christian discipleship and merge it together into a pathway and let me be honest with you i was actually staggered that this didn't exist now there's like some noble books but they were like formation lights like do a camping trip and have a sex talk and i'm like yeah but what do you do with the other i don't know 1 000 days you have with your kid you know like you've got to have something that is designed to do this so it's looking around and i was like why doesn't this exist and so i tried to like put something in that was like a holistic pathway and i've got something different for my daughter because she's a little bit different but that was the vision like how do we create a formation pathway to produce godly men not toxic men and basically help produce resilient disciples in the midst of secularism so that's basically what the books are it's a practical book on how to do it yeah it's fantastic and it's been the template that i've used thanks to you so thank you for pioneering a path for a new path or a nature path for a lot of us um you know that this is applicable to fathers and mothers and families and the youth pastors and the church as a whole but especially the fathers and again i don't know if that's 10 of the people listening or what but you you've just recently started a great podcast with jeff bethke called the intentional family which was a bit hilarious because you and i released our new podcast on the same day unbeknownst to either of each other so i'm sorry i hope i didn't contradict that in any way but it's been i just got to listen to your first couple of episodes on my run and it was just such a delight i was just like wanted you know like the worst part about listening to podcasts when you're running is you can't take notes you know and so i like find myself like hey siri i keep telling siri to write things down so i don't forget them as i'm running but you had an interesting line at the beginning you said quote i honestly believe one of the enemy's great strategies is to destroy fathers maybe as we as we think about you know your your work on fatherhood my work on the enemy talk to us a little bit about what's behind that quote well i mean it's from multiple it's part of it is theological you know god is revealed as our great father our father and when you think about the archetype of what a father is supposed to do he's supposed to bless you he's supposed to provide for you to protect you to create a sense of like being wanted psychological safety and if you remove that reference point in your life all you do is create a society of unblessed people striving for approval and competing with one another there's no divine reference point of acceptance and love and unconditional care and so number one destroying the theological reality of who god is has a profound impact on on our world today i think it shows up sociologically i mean you know kids kids raised without fathers it is heartbreaking but they are at a cultural disadvantage more likely to go to prison more likely to drop out of high school more likely to be you know to get pregnant before marriage more likely to commit acts of violence spousal abuse the list just goes on and on and on because we are designed for like a an archetypal primal loving blessing it's woven into the grain of the universe and we struggle without it so i i think the enemy's plan is to like get vision get rid of our vision of god get rid of our vision of life and blessing from him produce a competitive insecure society filled with anxiety that competes with one another and then that manifests itself not just inside the church and theologically it manifests itself you know throughout the world today and so i think recovering that that the stable gift of that is one of the great tasks of our world today so yeah it's it's it's multi-dimensional there's some profound thought in that as we and what would you say i don't know anybody that got what your son nate got with the primal path and i know a lot of people who didn't even get the blessing of a father what would you say to people who are listening who are loving and trying to follow jesus but who feel that deficit of blessing that lack of formation and a lot of the deformation of their family of origin or the world itself like what would you say in closing well i mean i always brought back to the comfort of the psalms you know psalm 27 is a beautiful psalm though my father and mother forsake me the lord will receive me yeah and to just literally know that you are received by god to all who received him he gave the right to become children of god not born of a mother or father's will but born of god and that is the beauty of our faith we are chosen adopted wanted welcomed by god and so we really have to spend time receiving comfort from god it says again in the psalms he sets the lonely in families that's so regardless he says he leads out the prisoners with singing regardless of the bondage that we've been in in terms of our family systems we can be led by divine joy into divine community so so you we have to really spend time getting healing in our heart and processing that at a deeper level our deepest wounds many of our deepest wounds are things that happen in our childhood and our families of origin and so you need that like deep sense of renewal and comfort from god and then i think we need to one of the gifts we have being in a part of a church community is that we still have this sense of social fabric and social capital we're still surrounded by this web of relationships though imperfect we are all oriented towards the same thing and i think about you know in the gospels that when peter's kind of freaked out about the rich young ruler and jesus says whoever's left home or father or mother or brothers i will give them back to him and he says and in this life a hundredfold those things will be given to you rely on the church community you know that we have natural families of origin and the church in some sense is like chosen family it's like we get to construct families and communities of healing around us because of the grace of jesus and i would have said like i don't want to skim past hey the church will fix everything because often it complicates things so it's like you've got to spend time receiving the father's love oh what manner of love the father has lavished on us that we should be called children of god and this is what we are like you need to sit under you need to sit in the place and marinate that the father is lavishing love on you you ever seen a young couple and laugh and he's just lavishing love that's god's disposition towards you a lavishing of love so we've got to receive that we've got to live in that we've got that's what i'm trying to do in the mornings in my morning time i'm receiving the father's love in many ways it's hard for my personality i'm letting god love me and loving him in return there's a deep daily work of accessing and living out of the love of god and then i'm leaning into christian community i'm not advocating in this book that like it's one heroic dad doing all the work i'm actually advocating for like cohorts of dads and communities of dads and the tribe of the christian tribe and community rallying around our sons and daughters to help raise them up and i believe because of the breakdown of society and all of the normal ways that we used to have community we are at a tremendous advantage this is a gift we can invite the world into so yeah receive the father's love lean into the christian community and uh anticipate eternity let the spirit groan within you let the abba cry rise abba father pay attention to it and respond to it well thank you john i mean gosh there's so much wisdom in what you just said i feel like i i'm thinking right now i need to go back and listen to this podcast next week when it comes out and uh so thank you for being with us we've been talking about john's two most recent books he has a few others but beautiful resistance and then most recently the intentional father i can't recommend them enough they are both just phenomenal john thank you for your heart thank you for saying yes to god's wiring of you and god's how god made you and what god's put you on the earth to do and in new york to do and on the internet to do so thank you so much where can people find more about you your work follow along with what you're up to i think i've just got i probably need to get a website at some point soon but right now it's just on social media john tyson j-o-n t-y-s-o-n and our church is church.nyc church.nyc beautiful thank you for being with us mate what a joy so good to chat thanks so much for listening to today's conversation if you want to go deeper this is just scratching the surface feel free to pick up a copy of my new book live no lies available wherever books are sold there's a link in the video notes also make sure you subscribe to this youtube channel to just stay up to date on new material coming from me with this podcast and more in the future and finally i just want to say thank you this entire podcast and video series was brought to you by our partners at world vision who are doing great work all around the world in particular with the most vulnerable but have just started to kind of move into the arena of caring for pastors pastors are man just facing a lot in the last year or two in particular with a global pandemic but so much more a lot are feeling beat up and burned out and world vision partnered with danielle strickland who's a friend of mine and a great teacher and writer and thinker to put together a new resource called soul care prayer rhythms which is kind of an intro to how do you keep your body and your soul alive in a time like the one we're living into you can follow the link in the video notes for more information to access this resource for yourself and again thank you so much to our partners at world vision who made this possible all right have a wonderful day and peace to you all [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: John Mark Comer

Views: 23,769

Keywords: John Mark Comer, Jon Tyson, John Mark Comer Podcast, John Mark Comer Interview, Live No Lies Podcast, Live No Lies, Beautiful Resistance, The Intentional Father, Parenting, Spiritual Formation, Church of the City, Church of the City NY, God Has A Name, Loveology, Garden City, My Name is Hope, Bridgetown Church, JMC Interview, JMC

Id: OnIdsISj36Y

Length: 72min 11sec (4331 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021