Theology in the Raw - Culture, the Election, and Rethinking Christian Community in a Digital Age: Paul VanderKlay

Episode Date: January 9, 2025

Paul is a Failed Calvinist Minister. He actually is a very faithful and thoughtful CRC pastor, who is a theological cultural critic who brings to bear loads of pastoral and theological wisdom to his ongoing analysis of our cultural moment. This conversation is very wide ranging, as we discuss the post-election period and how the church can navigate our very unique--and in many ways, groundbreaking--historical situation.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Logos. Logos is the premier Bible study software. I use Logos almost every single day. I have for many years. In fact, I've been a huge fan of Logos long before they started sponsoring Theology in the Raw. Logos not only gives you a massive theological library right at your fingertips,

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who are already using Logos. And okay, so they just released a new version and it's more affordable than ever. And here's the thing. You can try it for free for 30 days. And if you go to Logos.com forward slash theology, you can take advantage of an exclusive theology in the raw extended two month free trial. So go try it, try it out. It's risk-free. Go check it out. Logos.com forward slash theology. Hello friends. Welcome back to another episode of theology to Rob. My guest today is my friend, a pastor, Paul VanderKlaay. If you're not familiar with Paul VanderKlaay's work, then

I would highly recommend going over to YouTube and punching in Paul VanderKlaay. It'll take you to his YouTube channel that has just a slew of long form conversations, monologues, dialogues. And he, how do I describe Paul VanderKlay? When I, you know, whatever my guests sign up to, you know, be on the podcast, I always ask for a bio. They usually give me, you know, a decent paragraph. Paul's his self-proclaimed bio simply read failed Calvinist minister. So I'll let you do with that what you want. Paul is just such a thoughtful person when it comes to bridging the gap between culture, philosophy, theology, and ecclesiology. And in this conversation, we're all over the map. We begin by talking about kind of how should we as Christians

think about our post-election season that we're living in? It's, you know, coming to an end in one sense. And also, what is the situation of the church in our very unique and one might say cataclysmic cultural moments. So I'll leave it at that. I think you'll enjoy this conversation. Buckle up folks. This is going to be a ride. So please welcome back to the show. The one and only Paul Vanderklay. My friend, Paul Vanderclay. Welcome back to theology in the raw. It's great to be here. Preston. It's been a few years. Several things have happened since we, I think I had you on maybe two or three years ago. And I think we talked a lot about Jordan Peterson intersection between culture, church politics. So why don't we start there? So we, we are living in this interesting stage post-election Trump 2.0

about to descend on us. And very, very, very mixed opinions about our cultural moment, whether we are headed into a good time politically, a bad time, you know, is democracy at stake or is it being restored? Blah, blah, blah. Depending on what's news outlet you're listening to, you might get different opinions, but yeah, we'd love to hear your thoughts on how have you processed our cultural moment in this post-election season? And that's an open-ended question. It's designed to be that way because you and I could banter around about all kinds of different stuff for probably the rest of the day. I think Trump winning an election after losing an election has the potential of teaching

people that thought they knew what history was going to bring them that they really don't. And I tweeted, and you caught that, I tweeted yesterday too, I think we are entering into an era where I'm just frustrated with Christian YouTube, I get frustrated with my own profession. I'm a pastor, I'm an active pastor at Pastoral Local Church. Because I think both sides of the Christian conversation that has sort of been accentuated with the election of Trump are missing the bigger picture and the bigger conversation that we are currently in a sea change moment, perhaps, of the scale of what we saw during the Protestant Reformation. Now, the Reformation is what most Protestants

will sort of key in on, but it's important to remember that right before Luther pounds those 95 theses in Latin on a door of the church, Columbus discovered America. Tons of things. In fact, Carlos Heir, one of the better recent books on the Reformation, called Reformations, that I've read, you know, notes that this whole generation, I mean, we tend to pay attention to Gen X, Boomers, et cetera, et cetera. This whole generation of Luthers was marked by this discovery of America, and that fundamentally changed

their worldview. It would be as if, in some ways, Elon Musk went to Mars, and we found little green men. I mean, because there in America, it's a whole different world and it's a world that wasn't quite calibrated with the rest of the world. And so they had to figure out who are these people? They're clearly human beings. I mean, sailors are having sex with them. They eat and they drink, they kill, they can be killed,

but they're not like us. And where do they fit into the Christian story? And, you know, those narratives flung around, you know, those narratives flung around, you know, even until the beginning of the Latter-day Saints Church that says, well, they're the ten lost tribes. And so, we're in a time of enormous sea change. And I think one of the ways I describe it is if you talk to the Orthodox, they'll say the essential element of church is the liturgy, the liturgy, the liturgy, the liturgy. If you talk to Catholics, they'll say it's the Eucharist, the Eucharist, the Eucharist. If you talk to Protestants, they'll say it's the preaching of the Word. And I think we're

probably entering into another phase where all institutions are going to be disrupted. We're seeing the disruption of government as we know it right now, but the church is also being disrupted. And I think this next segment is going to be the communion of the saints and figuring out what that looks like. Because the preaching of the word was deeply tied, I think, to the printing press. And it doesn't mean that any of the other things go away. All churches have liturgy, all churches have Eucharist, all churches have preaching or proclamation of some sort, and all churches have communion. But I think right now the struggle is going to be for people who can online source preaching. I mean, many people today, if they go to church, the one thing they can't get

online from their church is Eucharist and personal attention. And I think this is why we see a renewal of consciousness of sacraments, and I think it's why we see a deep hunger for community. And I think the disruption of the, roughly speaking, Jordan Hall called sort of the establishment of, let's say, the division of the Democratic Party since Clinton, he called, tend to call that Blue Church, the Democratic Party institutions. And when Trump won his first term, Aaron Sorkin writes this letter that gets picked up, I think, in Vanity Fair. And it's, you know, this is an abnormality of what is happening.

We just had the, you know, we just had the Jesus president in Barack Obama and Donald Trump won and somehow it's an abnormality, but this isn't the flow of history. We're gonna make sure that this never happens again. And then of course Biden wins. And then, of course, Biden wins. And then it's like, oh, OK, return to normalcy. But this time, it's even worse because he

wins the popular vote. His margin with racial minorities has increased. And so what you're seeing is an undoing of a political eschatology, which means that roughly half our country has been operating with a religious vision of the future that they didn't fundamentally identify as religious, and now they don't know what to do.

And we're gonna continue to see that be disrupted. That's interesting. So many questions, Paul. I'm curious, were you shocked at the election results? Was that surprising to you? No. I wasn't either, the least bit. No.

You and I both live in places where we've watched the transition of people who were reliable democratic voters disgusted with their own party. Maybe or maybe not disgusted enough to vote Republican or third party. I mean, Andy Crouch is out there on YouTube talking about his vote for the Solidarity Party. The old blue church, which was the remnants of what happened to the main line through the Civil Rights Movement into the Liberationist Movement,

Civil Rights, Women's Liberation, Gay Liberation, we're watching that coalition deconstruct and come apart. And Trump, I think, will always be a transitional figure. He's sort of a chaos creature. But what will come out of this, I don't think any of us quite know. I'm curious, and it'd be good for people to know where you're coming from. Do you have a political leaning affiliation, identity? How would you describe yourself? I'm not going to ask you who you voted for or whatever, but like where are you coming from when we even think about these political things?

So I grew up, I'm a third generation minister in the Christian Reformed Church. The Christian Reformed Church, I would say for all of my lifetime, a solidly Republican party, of my lifetime, a solidly Republican party, a conservative reform denomination that over the last number of years probably had grown, elements grew more democratic. I think especially on the heels of the civil rights movement, my father pastored a racial reconciliation church in Patterson, New Jersey. Most of the people, the vast majority of the people I went to church with were African-Americans. So my politics is pretty much always aligned

with African-Americans because of where and how I grew up, which made me a little bit of anomaly in the CRC because I was never a conservative in that sense. But I also sort of, over the last 10 years, in some ways I sort of continue to track with whatever we mean by the IDW, Jordan Peterson, Brett Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, where people who had been previously very much Blue Church, very much

down the line Democratic, beginning to have doubts about this political pathway. Part of what convinced me of that was watching the rise of the woke and understanding, despite all of the talk about desiring to advantage the marginalized, racial minorities, et cetera, et cetera, not having understood that the African American community has long, despite the fact that they've tended to vote democratic, been a fairly conservative community. And so, especially when they're talking about

defunding the police, I grew up listening to African American women complain about the lack of policing in their neighborhoods. And so, I didn't sort of buy the white woke ideology that was coming down the line. And so I have basically been in a political exile for the last number of elections. Okay. That's fair.

Yeah. I mean, I'm in the same spot. And what's fun about discussing politics from, I guess we on either team. So I could say, wow, that was a great pass. I'm not, I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not on either team. I'm not, you know, I, I, I'm watching the 49ers play the

green Bay Packers and I'm not, I'm not on either team. So I could say, wow, that was a great pass. Gosh. You see that? That guy's amazing. Man, this guy on the other side, that was a great tackle. And it's like, I, I can, I can almost from, from a, from a remove, I'm not participating. I'm not part of either team. I don't even like you either team, but I can still enjoy the game and it does. I don't know. Like for people that listen and watch broadly, they're not stuck in an echo chamber. They're not overly invested in one side of the other. There is largely a game element to it. I don't want to say the whole thing's rigged or politics don't matter. Of course, policies matter and everything, but

there is a large game element to it. Isn't there? I mean, there's actors, there's people that switch sides if it's going to benefit them. I'm pretty convinced that these politicians that seem like they hate each other. I think they're having drinks at night and some of them are some of them really hate each other. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, you have to remember that the once and future president is a member of the Worldwide Wrestling Hall of Fame. And his politics, if you take basically the politics of Bill Clinton in the 1990s, that's sort of where

a lot of his politics is. Less internationalism, more nationalism nationalism and a good bit more chaos But that's that's where his politics really is and so what we've seen over the last number of years is the destruction of the traditional Republican Party the Republican Party of Bob Dole and John McCain of of the bushes and We've seen John McCain of the Bushes. And we've seen the destruction of the Democratic Party. It's self-destruction. And so we've got two new political parties

with two old names, because that's how our system works. And well, we don't really know what's coming down the line. And it's really hard to know what exactly either party stands for right now And we're gonna continue to see those two parties Mix around a lot and change a lot over the next number of years until things settle down But the settling could take you know, at least a generation Yeah, one of our fascinating changes and I guess if you take a wide-angle lens at history This should be that shocking political parties change drastically over the years. But like the switch from the

Republicans used to be the neo cons, the war hawks, let's go enter a war. If we don't have a war to enter, we'll create one because it's very, very good for the economy. That's almost completely shifted. Now you listen to people on the right, people like Tucker Carlson or RFK or even Trump to some extent, he can never really trust, you know, what he says fully. But I mean, there are the more like, let's stop funding these wars. Let's get out of these wars. That's whatever. And now you have, you know, the Cheney's endorsing Kamala Harris, which was so funny. This is where all the stands I'm just slamming my popcorn, just cracking up where she thought that was a good thing going around the list, Cheney. And then they said, Bill Clinton, they go

address the Arab population in Michigan. When it's like, do you realize like policies were not very good for anyway. It's just it, there is, I mean, I don't mean to be belittled. These are serious things to some extent, but it's like, Oh my word. Like I feel like they should hire. I feel like the democratic party hired me. I would, I would crush it in terms of their PR because they're just so unaware of, of, of stuff. So all that to say, like, w w w like, of course Trump was going to win by a landslide. I mean, he was running up against a candidate, Kamala Harris, who in the, I mean, it wasn't that long ago in the 2019 primary, she was the worst candidate by their own. Like nobody

liked her. Like she was like, got like 1% or something of the primary votes of the eight candidates. Tulsi Gabbard kind of destroyed her that, you know, whatever she dropped out. And then she gets chosen for VP. So it's not an electric position. And as far as I could tell one of the least liked VPs. And then once the democratic party realized that they can't hide Biden's mental deterioration any longer, you know, get given that famous debate with, with Donald Trump, they're like, Oh my gosh, we've got to stop gaslighting people. He really is not mentally there. And it's like, yeah, people have an internet connection. We've been watching this

for four or five years. Like, like we didn't believe you in Joe Scarborough three weeks before that debate was like, he is the, on top of his mental game. He's the sharpest guy I've ever met. We're like, we have an internet connection, dude. Like, so all that they say, and it's like, all right, they shifted, you know, I, you know, Obama and Hillary make a couple of calls. So we need to get by, by not, you know, we're not going to win with this guy. Let's put Kamala there. And then you have this whole like papered over propaganda piece to make it look like she's just great person. It's like, no people, like you can't

just create somebody out of thin air and think people are going to buy it. So I don't, I don't know where all the polls that were like, Oh, it's 50, 50. I'm like, I just don't, I'm like, yeah, come on. Like're like, so yeah, all that to say leading up to it, I'm like, I don't know why people were shocked, but then maybe people are so wrapped up in some certain media ecosystem that they actually believe what their favorite media outlet's saying.

Like, that's still, I guess, shocking to me that people believe that stuff, but. Well, everything is kind of you know to me I've always said that I'm a I'm a religious believer in a political skeptic I don't Even though again I first with this first arose because you had a tweet about some alignment of church and politics and all right Yeah, and I always I always try to tell people that Politics is now religion as always

trying to tell people that politics is now, religion is always. Religion is dollars, politics is cents. And that your religion and your politics are always connected in some deep way. But what we've been seeing is a disruption of institutions. And we've been watching the disruption of church institutions, you know, really for the last 500 years, and new institutions rising. I mean, one of the things that Protestants are able to do is cycle through their institutions more rapidly than obviously Catholics or Orthodox, although I'm still not sure about the Orthodox. Now that the Orthodox are really coming to America and I'm getting a closer and closer look at them, I really don't quite know what to think of them. And I really don't know what America is going to do to Orthodoxy. I suspect, not just America, but the Americanization of the West as America continues to transform the countries in its orbit, sort of in America's

likeness. Because remember, America is sort of the first great post-religious state, even though it's also deeply Protestant. And up until the Civil Rights Movement, there was sort of a, you know, in a very Protestant way, America was, the State Church of America was itself an invisible church of implicit agreements between mostly white Anglo-Saxon Protestants. That was the state church in America. And as that church, the Civil Rights Movement created an incredible confidence crisis for that church. Because what the Civil Rights Movement exposed

was a deep injustice at the heart of their implicit agreements, and then that, I think, set in the wave of liberation movements. But of course, those liberation movements in the context of a religion, especially Protestantism, that's deeply tied to this book, this library we call the Bible, where you're going to have to figure out what's the relationship between those liberation movements and this book. And, you know, a lot of your ministry has, in fact, been trying to synthesize that, and a lot of your ministry has been trying to help institutions walk through that. And, you know, some of what has happened in the Christian Reformed Church, you know, part of what has happened in the Christian Reformed

Church is not disconnected with what has been happening in politics. And even though I think a lot of the conversation in evangelicalism right now, which is sort of poorly framed as a fight about Christian nationalism is really a much deeper conversation that goes not only back to Constantine, but all through the Scriptures in terms of what are the mediating institutions that we need to sort of house and make sense of the relationship between a personal God who is the creator God and all the administrations all the way down the line? And so where you have, let's say, in places like the UK or the old world where you have state churches, you know, even I was just in Italy this summer, and so I was reading up on a lot of Italian history,

and then I start reading about the relationship between the Pope and Mussolini. And that was just a fascinating history. And now with Orthodoxy coming to America, where we have some Orthodox who are, you know, make Constantinople great again, we know how to do Christian civilization, give us the keys and the Catholics are like, no, we're here first, our Christian, our United Christian civilization was way better than your Orthodox one. And the Protestants are like, well, we sort of think this separation of church and state is kind of a good thing. I mean, these are all the massive conversations

that we're starting to creep into now, and as we usually do, creeping into them poorly. You mentioned earlier, and I'd love to come back to this, the, and I forget how you worded it, but just the, the distrust in institutions or the crumbling of institutions. And you kind of alluded to both the church and in politics, just institutions as a whole. First of all, my word in that, I don't want to put words in your mouth is that, is that you, you've made that observation. And so what's the cause of that? Is it the internet or is it, why is that?

And is this a unique, well, unique sense in the last 500 years? Is this, are we on that kind of like 500 year cycle where there's just going to be a complete dismantling of institutions and a rebuilding of, you know, who knows what that's gonna look like. So I look at my...so I'm old enough to remember my grandparents well, and I'm older enough to remember their lives. So my grandfather was a Christian foreign minister who spent a lot of his time in rural or agricultural communities. Most of the people in the church were formed by, many of the people were farmers, so they listened to the sermon, they read the denominational magazine, they did

devotions in the denominational pamphlet, they were educated at Christian Reformed day schools. The Christian Reformed church as a denomination had a capacity to shape a narrative in a world that would form a community with a degree of isolation from many of the other narratives going through. Now, you can easily look at the concerns of the Christian Reformed church before the Second World War and see alignments with other denominations similar to them, specifically immigrant denominations. But before the Second

World War, before television, before cable news, before the internet, church structures had at least a fighting chance of doing the shaping and forming of its people in terms of not just what people would consciously profess to but how they saw their world at a level much deeper. Today, most of the formation that is happening, well, first of all, it's stratified by it's stratified by age to a degree that it never was before. You I don't know how old you are, but I grew up 48. Okay, so I was already a well formed adult when the internet came about, especially when social media came about. But my children have never known a world

without this interconnection. And so institutions are products of people's need to form communities with agendas. And so much of what has been happening is so global that, okay, what are the differences between American evangelicals? The big divide that's happening in American evangelicalism has everything to do with Obergefell and the Supreme Court, what the Supreme Court decided. Because now suddenly the definition of marriage has changed. And it's not just changed at the conscious level, it's changed at a much deeper level, and that's going to impact churches. So now, churches line up, not along the things that divided Methodists and Presbyterians

and Mormons and Catholics and Orthodox. Churches line up along tribal and fighting lines that have very little to do with their inherited doctrinal commitments. And so, churches don't quite know what to do with all of this. And all of the churches are in the same boat. What does it say? You know, I remember a decade ago, at least a decade ago, maybe more than that, when I just did a conversation with Aliyah Marsan on my channel, who now is a minister at one of our former daughter churches in Davis, California.

And she was a blogger. She was part of that first wave of women blogging when the women's blogosphere sort of took off. And then people start paying a lot of attention to Beth Moore. It's like Beth Moore has way more influence than almost all male local church pastors in terms of formation of many of the women in their churches. What does that mean? To what degree could Beth Moore's authority and influence rival that of a pope? I mean, the Roman Catholic Church is so large and massive, but we don't know how our spiritual communities are being formed. But we do know that they're being formed in

ways that the institutions that were developed for prior generations simply cannot conceive of. Is that, is that a bad thing? Cause I agree with you. I mean, the,cial, whatever mental influences in your average church goer is absolutely extends far beyond its local church context for the most part. Is that a good thing or bad thing or is it not a, is that not the right question? I don't know that that's the right question. It simply is, and it's going to be inescapable. You know, Drears, probably Rod Drears' most important book was The Benedict Option. And I remember when that book came out, it seemed like, yeah, the Christian Reformed Church,

the Benedict Option was sort of its default option until sort of the Second World War, which sort of pulled young men out of all of their little siloed church insular bubbles into this massive thing called the Second World War, where suddenly they begin to discover, well, how different are the Christian Reformed youth from the Presbyterians and the Methodists and the Episcopalians and the Baptists and, and, and, and. And okay, what does that mean? So then we have the United States having this global empire that basically works on lowering borders and interconnectedness. And so what does that mean in terms of our basic assumptions about, do we believe in God?

Do we pray? What does faith look like? All of these things have been disrupted. Okay, so then what does the local church do then? We've had a season in the seeker movement of, is Hillsong the most influential liturgical movement of the 20th century? Or is Hillsong just a representation of technological disruption that has moved through? And that's only looking at the Protestant Church. Looking at the other churches, we're able to see forces moving through the church in ways that in modernity we couldn't see as easily.

It sounds, this is really hard to, I mean, I've got thousands of hours of video on this, all this stuff. Yeah, yeah. thousands of hours of video on this, all this stuff. But again, about the easiest way to, well, Donald Trump has his own version of the Bible. Think about that. Now he uses the King James, and he throws like the Declaration of Independence or some of these other things in there. But for $60, he'll sell you a book that's in public domain with a bunch of other articles in public domain. And again, just apart from the political aspect of it, what does this say? I mean, do you know who the first American president, the

first divorced American president was? No. Ronald Reagan. Are you serious? Yeah. It was that big of a deal. The first Catholic president, of course, was John F. Kennedy. And that was a big deal. Now, the shape of Biden's Catholicism has been a big deal for some, but of course, Biden and Pelosi, both Roman Catholics. Right.

but of course, Biden and Pelosi, both Roman Catholics. Right. These religious tags do not mean what they used to mean. Other tags have been substituted, and we don't know how to process any of this. So we're living in a period of disruption disruption politically, ecclesiologically, culturally. What is the church going to look like five, 10, 25 years? Or maybe a better question is, what are some ecclesiological changes, tweaks, edits, or edits or just things we should revisit so that we as a church can emerge in a more healthy state given the cultural upheaval. How can we look better in 20 years than we did 20 years ago?

What are our metrics of health going to look like? That's the better question. Yeah, what do you think? So I think- Can't be just numbers. It can't be growth. It can't be size of buildings and stuff. I mean, these are so obvious.

But those won't be completely, those will be signs of things. And it's helpful to look back, let's say. So again, I was in Italy this last summer, and of course, when you go to Italy, you begin seeing these cathedrals. And so I was at the cathedral in Milan, which is just a jaw-dropping building. I mean, just an astounding building, and many of these cathedrals were, and still are. But to try to get your head around what is this, you know, people go to the Vatican and

are just amazed at this at St. Peter's. Okay. And then when I say, well, I'll ask sometimes, well, what did it cost? And they're like, you're thinking about million, I said, it cost them the Protestant Reformation. Oh, wow. And you just try to think about what does that, how do you do the math with that? And so, I think churches are increasingly going to evaluate their success on the formation of their membership. And its size isn't going to be irrelevant.

Networks isn't going to be irrelevant. But, you know, before we started recording, we were talking about the fact that we now have, you know, someone like me, I have thousands of people listening to me throughout the week, some of whom, I have thousands of people listening to me throughout the week, some of whom, probably half of whom go to church and they go to Orthodox Catholic Protestant churches of various stripes. And I have 40 or 50 people actually in a room with me on Sunday morning. Right.

Yeah. What does that mean? What does that mean, Paul? This is, Paul? I'm in a similar, I'm not even a pastor. I just attend a church and just sit there and try to talk to people if I can and go home and have lunch. I'm not justifying this or defending it. I, but my online, yeah, this is ecclesiologically, I would say, I think it's wrong. I think this is a question I'd love for you to pass from you. My online community in my anecdotal experience is richer than my embodied community. Now that might just be my certain situation, my social location, my ecclesiological situation, whatever. But I so believe in the embodied ecclesiologically, my theology tells me the embodied gathering is irreplaceable. It's essential. That's what my theology tells me. My experience is telling me

the exact opposite. And I don't know if I am sin, am I at fault? Is that the social situation we're in? Is this the wave of the future? Are online communities going to be more meaningful than embodied communities? And is that just the way it is, or is that a bad thing that we should rectify? The Christian Reformed Church was held together before the Second World War by its weekly magazine called The Banner. And I think partly because we didn't have this kind of conversation, people didn't realize that H.J. Kuyper, who in the Christian Reformed Church was banner editor from the 1920s into the 1960s. He was the most influential person

in the Christian Reformed Church during that period of time. And even up until the 90s, I would see Christian Reformed Churches shorting local ministry in order to support their denomination. And so, before sort of the rise of the nation state, people didn't fundamentally identify as let's say French or British or something like that. They identified along the lines of Catholic and then later Protestant, I mean Christian, Protestant, Islam. And so I don't think the fact that the carriers of our network has changed shouldn't disrupt

us to the fact that we as human beings have always dealt deeply in broad identities that go beyond nuclear family, particular local church, etc., etc. So I don't think, I would say it would probably be true that in the 1930s, my grandfather might have been able to say something similar to what you just said. He'd feel more at home in the Christian Reformed Church than necessarily in any one of the local churches he was pastoring. Of course, for pastors, that's always different, because back in those days, you'd stay in a local church four to six years.

And so in that sense, you were part of this other network, this other body that was the Christian Reformed Church, whereas many of the local people, their local church was their body. And so now that people spend hours a day connected to networks that aren't ostensibly religious, here's another thing to keep in mind, that this definition of religion also changed radically in the last few hundred years. Tom Holland has been one of the good guys to sort of point this out. If you were to time travel back into ancient Greece and look around, you would say, sort of like the Apostle Paul, you're a very religious people.

But what did religion for them was, okay, if I want to get my army to Troy, I might come at the sacrifice of my daughter. So I'm going to, you know, I'm Agamemnon, I'm going to sacrifice my daughter to get fair wins to appease Poseidon. Then we did this, we had this change in secularism and what is religion. So when the British, when the British went to India, the British looked around and thought, oh, these are very religious people.

And the Indians looked at them like, what do you mean? We don't have a religion. No, you do have a religion. It's called Hinduism. Because Hindu basically is the same as India. That's your religion. It's your operating system for the world. So now we have networks where we don't

necessarily tag our ultimate commitments or ultimate frames of how the world work as religious necessarily, but for people like you and I that are formally religious in this one sense of the word, now suddenly, well, do I trust more in Jesus, or in the Federal Reserve, or in the US Army, or in the state of the climate, 1950 instead of 2024. Where really is my hope? Religious people have a formation, a set of practices that there may or may not work in order to connect us with, you know, this Jesus of Nazareth and the declaration that he somehow rules over climate and over second comings and over change in governments. But everybody's got some kind of religious code they're running. And so on one hand, I think the impulse that you have, the nervousness that you have, is very worth investigating.

But I don't think the answer is quite so simple as, turn off the internet and read your Bible. Obviously, I wouldn't, you know, that this weird space we're living in has been made possible by the internet that simply, right? I mean, I think it is just an intrinsic part of human civilization for the foreseeable future. It is what it is. Kind of like post printing press, right? It's now rather than 10% of the people being literate, 90% are gonna be literate

and they're going to have historically unprecedented access to information that disrupted the institutions at that day. No longer could people that know Latin say, this is what the Bible means. I got people reading it for themselves. Like, that was a, you cannot go back to a pre-internet age, and that just disrupted the ecclesiological structures. Um, for good or for ill, it just is what it is. And we're in a similar situation times a thousand with the internet. So yeah, I CCL I a denomination. Can you answer that question?

Can you explain what that is? I mean, I know what it is, but just CCL, I is this licensing organization that churches all over the English language world, especially in the United States, because that's where the licensing is, because it's a legal framework. You know, the top five or 10 CCLI songs dominate liturgy in a massive number of churches in North America. CCLI is probably more formative of these churches than whatever denominational tradition they have or don't have. That's insane. But yet nobody asks the question, is CCLI a denomination? But they function like what? Or at least like denominations used to call it.

I love, I love how you can just take such a quick turn with something that seems completely unrelated within seconds. It's just like, Oh, this is intrinsically what we're talking about. Actually. What would, I think this is true that either Chris Tomlin, maybe it's Chris Tomlin is the most song music artist in the history of the world or something like that. Like, like more people sing. I mean, cause people aren't gathering every Sunday morning and singing Taylor Swift. Well, not everybody, you know, like, but would that exist without CCL? I probably not.

And talk, and here you want to talk about, you know, we have this language of excommunication. Okay. Which churches would serve Donald Trump communion and which churches wouldn't? Now the irony is many of the churches that wouldn't serve him communion have open tables. And many of the churches that would serve him communion

don't. I mean, look at this disruption. And then there's this question, is Donald Trump would ever actually bother going into a church or a church service, not a fundraising or political event. If it would not help him politically, would he do that?

And where is communion? How does Donald Trump and the Eucharist, how do these two things relate in the world? Do we ever put these things next to each other and say, hmm, what about Donald? Donald Trump walks into your church on a Sunday morning. Is he welcome at the table? And a whole bunch of churches that want to say, everyone is welcome. If Donald Trump walked in, they'd be like, no. So you have to ask, okay. You think of more like progressive open table churches? I mean, all means all.

Except if you're repugnant. All means all. You have all the flags out in front. Donald Trump walks in. What do they do? Do they welcome him at the table or is he the one that is denied? So suddenly, you know, we have centuries of formation around issues like this and just throw someone like Donald Trump, you know, and, you know, other people were arguing that Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi shouldn't have been served the Eucharist at their Roman Catholic Church. So, okay, so what does it mean to be Catholic? Isn't the whole business of, so we had an event in Thunder Bay

where a bunch of people from my sort of post-liberal progressive and the pastor served communion, I thought, oh boy, what a, so the Orthodox can't take communion from anybody but what a... So the Orthodox can't take communion from anybody but an Orthodox, and the Catholics can't take communion from anybody but Catholics, and the post-Christians are just going to look at this and not quite know what to do, and the Protestants are like, communion? Sure. So exactly, what does the Eucharist mean today? So, so exactly what does the Eucharist mean today? And we have all of these issues around us, most of which we don't bump up against too readily, but they're all out there.

I kind of want to come back to this whole, the nature of online community. Can you have genuine biblical coinonia with a disembodied or at least two dimensional relationship with people that you may never see in person? Is that going to replace embodied community? And is that necessarily a bad thing? thing. Were Augustine and Jerome part of the same church? What do you mean by Koinonia? Okay. Were it got that Augustine and Jerome, Ernie? Let's just take a bunch of church fathers and say, were they in communion with each other? They were connected by a network. They weren't connected in a face-to-face relationship. Okay. So you're hinting at there have been forms of this question throughout the ages. Yes. Yes. And in fact, I would say Christianity is in many ways responsible for this and also hosts it. I mean, we often talk about a great cloud of witnesses, and at least in Roman Catholic and Orthodox

traditions, they continue to, in some senses, commune and communicate with saints that have gone. Protestants are a little bit more hesitant with that, but they do it in their own way generally. When Luther talks about the invisible church, what does he mean? So, you know, what is the communion that ties you and I together? So, so I guess I'm okay. So that's, that's good. I guess I am asking more of the, whatever you want to call it, the practical, um, relational bonding, building that kind, not, not the spiritual community of all the

saints are on the globe in the sense that I have coinonia with my Indian brothers and sisters that I have never met, never will meet, don't know the names or family, but actual relationship, maybe, maybe just relationship is a better term. Um, well, let's put it this way. Okay. so let's say, you know, heaven forbid some disaster befalls you may or may not be of your own making. Who can you call upon to feed you, to put you up, to support you? Now, the irony might be a lot of those people might come from online, but how well do they really know you?

And so, you begin to see that these questions aren't easily answered because we just don't know enough about them. But they're not in kind dissimilar, let's say, between, let's say, a family and a local church. Yeah. Huh. You know, let's imagine we didn't have the internet, but you're still writing books. Yeah. Okay?

How has the internet changed what used to be book communities? And you know, every publisher knows this. Because if I decide one day I want to write a book, I could probably get a, find an agent and find a book deal pretty easily. Why? He's already got an online following. Right.

Yeah. And so what we have are these different modes that have changed. And we're still not – these new modes are so new, we just don't know how they fit. But this isn't, again, when you think about – you think about the Roman Empire and what Christianity did. Let's say Christianity starts as a mode of, you know, religions are sort of segmented by ethnic groups, except in the empire, you begin to have some of these other cults sort of creeping up. You have the cult of the emperor. And in some ways,

you know, Christianity is a lot like the cult of the emperor. There's sort of these two fast growing religions in the early centuries, and they compete and that's why Jesus is Lord, and you know, they're sort of fighting in that sense. But if you look at so much of what the apostle Paul has to deal with, he's really dealing with a lot of the questions that the experience of diaspora has forced onto Jews living in a cosmopolitan world. And it isn't incidental that in the book of Acts, for example, when this persecution arises, the disciples stay in town and it's Paul, Stephen, Philip, the deacons who are from the diaspora, they have to flee. So you can see right there another sort of dislocation and disruption that the empires had affected. And we're just

in the middle of another one. So I do think my ecclesiology is pretty flexible. In fact, I think a New Testament ecclesiology is designed to be multi-ethnic, multinational, not on this mountain, not on that mountain, but wherever people are gathered sort of thing. And it is designed to not be like the quote unquote, ecclesiology of ancient Israel, which was mono-ethnic, which was geographically here, not there. The church is completely different. So I do think it has a built in malleability, flexibility, it can morph and switch and change.

So I wonder if, I've never thought about this in terms of like post-internet, pre-internet, but I do wonder if it is designed to be okay absorbing and flourishing in a post internet world. And it, so it may look quite different. Um, can you love one another if you haven't met in person? Do people love Taylor Swift? What would they do for Taylor Swift? I love how you keep doing these curve balls. You should be a Major League pitcher. People worship Taylor Swift.

Yes, they do. I mean, going back, I mean, pre-in pre internet, we were taking a lot of spiritual nourishment from people we've never met, namely books. And so it is, but that's not a relationship. You don't have a relationship with this author, nor would you claim it. Although this author is you do have a sort of endearment, a love or respect for this author. You know, I even often think, especially early on in my Christian journey, you know, the, the, the level of influence that like John Piper had over my spiritual formation. The fact that I was nearly going to buy a one-way ticket to the hardest country in Africa because I read, let the nations be glad, you know, like

that, that, that is a profound effect on my life from a person that I've never met and provided. I have barely now met him once, but I have profound effect on my life from a person that I've never met in per why I have barely now met him once, but, um, sorry, just to kind of in a similar spot now with, with, with relationships. I was, I mean, I think I can share this publicly. I was in a, uh, people that support the podcast. We have a, um, a monthly zoom chat. Okay. Maybe 15, uh, 20 people show up. The last one we had, I'm not, I can names or anything, but like there was probably, this one is kind of small, maybe 13 people. And we were just, we don't have any agenda. We just, we just hang out for an hour and a half. And early on in our hangout session, uh, one of the persons said, you know, she, you know, one of their children were transgender and, you

know, navigating that, you know, you know, you're not going to be able to do that. So we were just, we were just, we were just, we were just, we were just, we were just, And then the other one said, I have a trans kid too. Another one said, I had a trans kid too. Another one said, my sister's trans. So about 40% of the group are Christian parents with trans kids. I don't think any of them have any kind of social, like, embedded, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know,

like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, like, you know, So about 40% of the group are Christian parents with trans kids. I don't think any of them have any kind of social like embodied network at church where they can just say, Oh yeah, my kid's trans and it's in the, you know, they're free to say so. Cause there's so much judgmentalism people understand they don't. So they just kind of, you know, there's a famous saying when Mike, when your kid comes out of the closet, the parents go into the closet. They often feel isolated. So here they are just experiencing just instant like camaraderie in a real in-depth way. And then one of the younger people there says, well, actually I don't identify as trans, but I experienced gender dysphoria. Um, and my parents, I would never be able to have a conversation with my parents about

this at all. Like in one of the moms says, what would you want from your parents? And she goes, I would give anything for them to sit down and simply listen to me. And then he had moms jumping in saying, Hey, I'm not your mom, but I want you to know that I, I respect you so much for sharing. If you need anything, reach out to me. I mean, it was Paul, it was one of the richest relational hour and a half that I've experienced in probably 10 years of any kind of community group church experience. Like I've now, I don't, I don't think I've ever had a Sunday morning gathering where I had that kind of level of just raw in depth intimacy and genuine like one another stuff going on.

And I walked away from that saying, I don't know what to do with this. Of all those people I think I've met, I've been a couple in person. The others I didn't even know a couple of them. I didn't know who they were. The others, I didn't even know a couple of them. I didn't know who they were. Then you had other people listening in. Anyway, I'm going too long, but I just, do I say, okay, that is theologically problematic because we're not embodied. We're not part of the same local church. We're not taking community together. Or is it like, this is an example of just simply the way many relationships are going to be

in the post internet future? Have you, I mean, I'm sure, and I'm sure you've had tons of experiences like this. And so I, your group would probably be made better with the estuary protocol, which is, so those of you who know me know estuary. So there's two things that I've made in this world, there's five children I've made in this world, but there's two things

that I've made since I've been on the internet. One of them is called the little corner, this little corner of the internet, the TLC, and the second one is called estuary, which is an in-person thing, but it can be done online. I think two things come to mind. First, I said liturgy, Eucharist, preaching the Word, I think we're entering into a phase in Christian history where the primary concern is going to be the communion of the saints and figuring out what that means. The second thing is you have created a spiritual principality, Preston, and it's not just you, but that group has been formed. That group has a spiritual body. That is the exact right language for it. It's New Testament

language for it. And that spirit, in a sense, has a principality. There is a spirit of that group that you have your writing, your theological education, your concern, your pastoral ministry, all of that has formed. And the individuals that have participated in it, they have formed a spiritual body that is that group. And we can see that now in a way that we couldn't before, because if it were in a local church, you would look at the local church as that body. Now there is another spiritual body that is that group. Okay.

What do we think about that? We don't know. What do we call it? Yes. Yeah. We have New Testament language, and in many ways that's the best language for it, but we're not used to using that language in contexts like that.

And so then once we start using that language, then suddenly we have to begin to figure out how all the other pieces of theological machinery relate then to that group. And again, it isn't dissimilar to what happened when blogging sort of blew up and a bunch of women were writing blogs and pretty soon Beth Moore is, you know,

it might be rivaling Billy Graham in terms of influence, Christian influence in North America. Yeah, it's just another stage in that kind of, the church adapting to or participating in these serious social changes. For 2,000 years, we as a church have been having a conversation about what is Jesus. And so, of course, you have the kingdom of heaven and the kingdom of God, and then eternal life. And so, of course, you have the Kingdom of Heaven and the Kingdom of God, and then eternal life, and then Paul says they are in Christ.

And we've been having a conversation about that. And we've had orthodoxy and we've had Catholicism. Now we've had Protestantism. It could be that we're about to have something else, and we don't know how it's going to relate to orthodoxy or Catholicism or Protestantism. We don't know how it's going to relate to anything, but something is happening. And we don't know how to think about it yet, but it's helpful to just recognize the scale of this and to sort of have a posture of, you know, both, both wonder, but also critique and say, okay.

So, so how does this group serve and how doesn't it serve? And was it served for there? Is it, was it Phyllis tickle who made the observation of every 500 years or some major change of the church? You had the marriage between church and state in the wake of Constantine. Then you had the East West split in 1040. Then you had the reformation post printing press 500 years ago. And now we've had the internet and all these chains were in the eye of the storm right now. It is fat. And in the wake of each major change,

the church has looked very different. I'm eager, although a little nervous to see what will the church look like as it emerges on the other side of this, I had a storm or living I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. I think that's going to, going to last. And I don't, but I don't know what the alternative is.

I think, and I was just reading Mary Harrington's substack and she was looking at Mark at McLuhan and, and these disruptions mean newspapers haven't gone away. Magazines haven't gone away. Books haven't gone away. Right? The Orthodox haven't gone away. The Catholics haven't gone away. The Protestants aren't going away. So we're going to have all of these things. The amazing thing about the church is, at least you and I look at the Orthodox and say, that's church.

Catholics, they're church. Lots of different Protestants. We've got conversations with all of them, but we say that's church. And I think we're going to continue to see things that arise, and people are going to have exactly the same intuitions that you're having and saying, hey, wow, something just happened there. So two or three have gathered, and Jesus seemed to be in our midst. Okay. What does that mean? And when we talk about institutions, basically we're talking about rituals.

Okay, what does that mean for the next time we meet? And we'll see if it happens again. And then maybe we're gonna have some structure around it so that it seems to happen in a better blessing way. Paul, I know we're getting warmed up. Where can, this has been, I mean, I know we probably ask more questions than we answer, but that's the Algenerat.

And these are ongoing questions and conversations, and we need to think of new questions to ask as we keep continuing these kinds of conversations. Where can people find you and your work? Would love to have people check out. If you just type in Paul VanderKlay into YouTube, you'll find me. I'll be there. There's an audio podcast of it. And you know, this is, this is just the stuff I play with. And I

just basically think out loud and have conversations on my channel. Always, always very interesting stuff. So appreciate uh, appreciate you, Paul. Um, we'd love to hang out in person as we have actually once, uh, we'd love to do it again, maybe the next 10 years or so. Well, if someone starts an estuary group out in Boise, I'll probably, uh, I'll probably come out. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network. Hey, so I'm launching a new season on the podcast, The Doctor and the Nurse. World renowned brain coach, Dr. Daniel Lehmann joins me as a co-host as we dive deep into the mind and the brain of everything high performance. I've been fascinated for years as I've worked with top athletes, high powered CEOs,

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