Theology in the Raw - Does the Church Have a Crisis of Biblical Illiteracy? Jen Wilkin

Episode Date: July 15, 2024

Jen Wilkin is an author and Bible teacher from Dallas, Texas. She has organized and led studies for women in home, church, and parachurch contexts. An advocate for Bible literacy, her passion is to see others become articulate and committed followers of Christ, with a clear understanding of why they believe what they believe, grounded in the Word of God. Jen just released a bible study on the book of Revelation tittled: Revelation: Eternal King; Everlasting Kingdom. You can find more of Jen's work at JenWilkin.net. In this episode, I talk to Jen about the crisis of bilbical illiteracy in the church and how to address it.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Make your nights unforgettable with American Express. Unmissable show coming up? Good news. We've got access to pre-sale tickets so you don't miss it. Meeting with friends before the show? We can book your reservation. And when you get to the main event, skip to the good bit using the card member entrance. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit mx.ca slash ymx. Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash ymx.

Benefits vary by card, other conditions apply. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology and Iran. My guest today is Jen Wilkin, who is an author and Bible teacher from Dallas, Texas. She has organized and led studies for women in home, church, and parish church contexts. She's a major advocate for biblical literacy. And that becomes the main talking point for this entire conversation. We talk a lot about the problem of biblical illiteracy in the church and how to, how to fix that for lack of better terms. Jen has written tons of books, including her recently released study of the book of revelation

called revelation, the eternal king, everlasting kingdom. This is a really thoughtful, engaging conversation, really respect Jen and her teaching ministry. So please welcome to the shelf. The first time the one and only Jen. Jen, thanks for coming on Theology and Raw. This conversation, from my point of view, has been long overdue. Thanks for having me on. Thanks for coming on. I've had a lot of people ask me when I'm going to have you on, and it is shocking.

I look back, I'm like, gosh, I've never actually had you on. I think I tried to get you on last summer and it didn't work out. That sounds right. Avoidance is a major strategy of mine. Kidding. Exactly. Why don't we start, just tell us your story. How do you, I mean, you've become a very influential Bible teacher through speaking and writing. Where did you get the passion to what to encourage biblical literacy? Let's start there. Well, I grew up in a family of teachers and I had like a high literacy emphasis in the

home that I grew up in. My mom had an English degree, my dad had an English degree, and my mom taught English for years. And so I went off to college and studied English, but also wanted to be employable. That sounds terrible. I'm a huge fan of the liberal arts, but at the time I was like, man, I got to get a job on the other side of this. So I also got a business degree and never really pictured myself being in ministry, never pictured teaching the Bible at that stage. But my parents divorced when I was eight and so that meant that my mom, who was the believing spouse, she went through all of these different churches as a single woman in the church and that's a tough spot to be in. You don't always fit well. So by the time I got to college, I had been in about seven different denominations for fairly significant periods of time and

was deeply concerned that there was always someone standing behind a pulpit holding the same book, but not everybody was saying the same thing. And then my mom also had kind of wandered off at one point into some pretty dangerous false teaching. She got involved in the Word Faith Movement, and she had a chronic illness. And so when I talk about false teaching being dangerous, I mean, not just in a spiritual sense, it certainly is, but also in a very practical sense as well. So I think I had all of the pieces in place to care about literacy and then to connect literacy to the Bible itself. That

came a little bit later. And then to just hope that others would not find themselves in the place that I had been in where they had this book. They knew it was important, but they didn't know good tools for how to get into it themselves. Yeah. So, just started teaching seventh grade girls because I was too young to teach actual adults. And then over time ended up in the estrogen pond that is women's ministry and found that women were almost entirely being resourced at the feelings level, not at the thought level. And so the rest is kind of history. So that I get, so I've got several different questions here. The estrogen pot. So I mean, in terms of your ministry to women in particular, and I do want to raise the more controversial

question about your voice in terms of influencing men, at least it's controversial in some circles. From my vantage point, it does seem like women's ministries, they're very kind of narrowly focused on certain stereotypes of, of how to be a woman. And it's, you know, tons of stuff on promise 31 and being a good wife and all this stuff. But like, you're not typically women's ministries aren't doing like a conference on like debating predestination or like, or, you know, like just deeper theological themes. And this has been, so I have three, four women, well, I have three daughters and a wife, and they're often asking, like they ask some of the deepest theological questions about the problem of evil and why did God have to use Israel to commit a genocide on the Canaanites? Like, over and over and over and over. But they're

not, if they went to the women's event, they're not going to get those questions raised, let alone answered. You seem to be doing things a little bit differently. Would that be a right perception on my part? Yeah. I want to restore to women a thinking faith, a faith that involves the life of the mind. And I would say that when I started worrying about this, or I mean everything's always a justice issue for me, so when I started being angry about this back in the in the early 90s, it was something that was more specific to female circles. But honestly, in the intervening years, I

think that the feelings level or application-driven discussion over a portion of the texts that we haven't spent time in ourselves has become pervasive. I do know that there are some conferences out there that are geared toward men that are more theologically grounded, but if you go to any conference

that's supposed to be about men or masculinity, it's the same kind of stuff that you would find in a women's space. And so I think that all of us, men and women, need to remember that our faith is grounded in fact and that our feelings matter. But as others have said, our feelings are real, but they're not reliable,

and we need them to be informed by truth. So yeah, the literacy approach just means that basically I want to correct against what has become almost the entire approach that we take to reading the Bible, which is a devotional approach. In other words, I'm going to have my quiet time. You know, we've deified quiet time, and please hear me, I'm not bashing a daily practice of being in the Scriptures, but what we've turned quiet time into is I have 15 minutes, I got to do it at the beginning of the day because Jesus did, and it has to deliver a dose of emotional positivity to me before I head out into the world so that my day can be oriented properly.

If you've ever read the book of Leviticus, you know that no one's writing devotional content over Leviticus. The reality is that not every passage in Scripture is designed or intended to deliver this emotional dose to us. And so, you know, too often we've parsed the Bible into 365-day increments and asked each of those increments to deliver some uplift to us. So I'm trying to restore to people a literacy approach, which means that you take entire books of the Bible from start to finish and you ask the basic questions about them that you would ask of any book that you read to treat it with

the respect that it deserves. What does that look like in your... Yeah, can you expand on that a bit to taking a literacy approach? Like what does that look like in your 15 minute quiet time, or would you challenge the very notion of a 15 minute quiet time? Well, I would challenge the notion a little bit. I do think it's good to have a daily practice for those who are helped by that. That's not been me.

My experience has been that having longer portions of time, maybe less frequently, has been what I have needed. But some of that is related to my ministry calling. I just can't do what I need to do in 15 minutes. And I also want to be clear, I am not bashing devotional reading. It's just that when devotional reading becomes the lion's share or the entirety of our approach to Scripture, we're not growing in our understanding of the Bible as a whole. We're getting little spot knowledge pieces that have been curated for us by someone else. So if you do have a daily practice, I would argue the most underutilized tool of building Bible literacy is repetitive reading.

It's the simplest, and it's one that we're like, what? I read it once. I'm good, right? But no, the answer is no. We're probably not. In the same way that if you've ever read one of Shakespeare But no, the answer is no, we're probably not. In the same way that if you've ever read one of Shakespeare's plays, the first time you're reading it through, you're like, this is straight garbage. And then the more you read it, the more you start

to realize why he has the reputation he has for being such a literary giant, but it takes time. And that's the same thing for us with the Scriptures. The Holy Spirit does inspire the Scriptures and the Holy Spirit works through us to grow our understanding. But there are literary rules that each of the books of the Bible abides by and that is also given to us by the Spirit. And so part of learning the Scriptures is asking who wrote this and how did they write it and why did they write it that way so that we can enter into the truths that it contains. I took a class on Ephesians in seminary and one of the assignments before day one, so before the class even started, we had to read the book 30 times in English. And I remember the first 10 times, like I was like every, every time I was getting more

stuff, more stuff, then it started to get a little bit like, I felt like I was kind of going through the motions. And then after the 20, like 20 to 30, I started seeing more fresh stuff, more new stuff. Although like the last, I mean, 30th time in like 30 days, you know, I'm like seeing something like, how did I not see this before? That was before. And then we started to work through it, you know, in the Greek, like really slowly. And then just all kinds of stuff came up that we didn't see before. So I'm a huge, huge fan of what you said, repetition reading. And if you think about that, that's a short book, you know, something, six chapters. You think about if you did that with every book of the Bible, that's going to take a lot more than 15 minutes a day.

Well, and you bring up an important point, an important contributor to the Bible literacy crisis that the church finds itself in, and that's just the reality of scheduling. So like in a course like you took, yeah, I wouldn't expect that they would have done that exercise with a book that is 50 chapters long, like Genesis. But there needs to be a time where we do that with a book that's 50 chapters long. And so many churches today, their preaching calendars are dictated by shorter cycles, which means that, and honestly, I'll do this sometimes when I'm teaching, I'll say, how many of you have studied the book of Ephesians? And everybody, Ephesians has been my punching bag, frankly,

people will raise their hand. I'll say, how many of you studied more than once? And they raise their hands again, how many of you studied it three times? And then you do the same thing with a longer book or in particular an Old Testament longer book that's a little bit more opaque and the hands stop going up. And so I think we have to ask the question, when are we going to spend the time in these books that in many cases our churches are not inviting us into them because they feel the tyranny of a schedule constriction or, or and this is the thing that really drives me nuts. They don't think we will study longer books. They think we have our attention spans are too eroded.

I mean, it depends. It depends too on how it's presented. The teacher, is it engaged? I mean, you could going back to Leviticus, you know, I know Rob Bell's name is, you know, people have different, different opinions on him and he's shifted and changing whatever. But back in the day, back in the new mid days, the new video, when he planted his church, you know, his on day one, I think that like a thousand people was church plant. And he, I think he preached through Leviticus that first year now. And it grew, it grew to like 10,000 people or whatever. But I mean, you know, he, he, and I think I didn't listen to the whole series, whatever, but I mean, um, I, you know, a few points here and there where he was drawing out stuff that was actually

really resonating with the underlying theology of the book. He was helping people understand a lot of the just profound weirdness, you know, of the book. He was making it very, not making it, but releasing the power and meaningfulness of the book itself, you know, all about God's holiness and how to approach Him. And especially if you keep bouncing that off of, you know, Jesus and the gospel and the New Testament, you get some really profound stuff there. So yeah, I don't think we need to make the Bible interesting. I think it is very interesting. I think we just need to release how interesting and meaningful the whole thing is. Dr. Julie Kinn Oh, I totally agree. And that, you know, what he did is so fascinating. I read Velvet Elvis back in the day, and parts of it I was like,

that's really good. And parts of it I was like, I hate this so much. And I'd say that's probably my relationship. The Numa videos, I had a couple of colleagues who were super into them and I'm like, I don't like these. And so, you know, and whatever you think of Rob Bell, the thing that I think he touched on was he introduced people to biblical theology categories that no one else was talking about and should have been. And so, you know, that's one of the big things that I try to do with Bible literature. I think that's what Bible literacy does. It helps you read thematically the entire Bible to see the cohesiveness of the story. And so I think, actually, I think Rob Bell was doing

something that sometimes people in the sort of Bible church tradition would do where they would give you sort of the bells and whistles of a passage. And that has some value, but it can also make people think that there's a decoder ring that they're missing. You know, like if I just knew this one little historical thing, it would bring the whole thing alive for me. If I just knew the meaning of this one Greek word.

And I think that then ends us back in the same place that keeps us from growing in literacy. And that is the idea that there are experts who stand on platforms and tell us how to read the Bible, and then we're the amateurs who sit in the seats. And so what I wanted to do with the Bible literacy approach that I'm taking through my studies and other places is to say, no, actually, we're all supposed to be utilizing these tools. And so it's invitational instead of just instructional. And it's not just, hey, I'm going to download information to you because I'm smarter than

you and I care more about this than you do. It's no, actually, to borrow from Howard Hendricks, I'm never going to do for my student what my student can do for themselves. And so it's inviting them into utilizing the tools. Most of us, our interactions with teaching in the scriptures are that we come and we sit and we hear teaching over passage of the Bible that we haven't spent any time in prior to hearing that message. And that means we're passive learners. We're not active learners. So, I think what we need is a restoration of the active learning process. I really resonate with what you said early on about doing your morning devotion. Now,

I'll say it, you said it already, you were not knocking morning devotions. We should all be in the text. Morning is a good time. If anybody's doing 50 minutes a day, you're probably better than 95% of the even-born population. So hats off to you. But that idea that we're kind of hunting for that spiritual jab to kind of get us, like to positively motivate us through the day, that aspiration, is, is not bad, but it can force, I think, or encourage a really poor hermeneutics. So like, I feel like this happens a lot in the prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, cause, cause there are those like one liners that, that, if you just rip them out of the passage, they can be encouraging. You can slap them

on the refrigerator and it's like, Oh, this is, you know, but most, I would say almost, I don't think this is an overstatement, almost every average reader reading the prophetic books has zero knowledge of the context, the literary context, the theological context, the historical context, what's going on. And I, you know, even, you know, I've been studying the Bible my whole life and everything, but it wasn't until I, like, taught, I taught a class on Isaiah, like it was an upper level class. So I had read the book several times before and you know, I heard sermons on it, but until I really went through and I spent hours, you know, like the background and tracing the kind of literary argument, looking at the background,

why doesn't he want them to go down to Egypt to buy horses? You know, why was he condemning that? Just when he understand the, the, the, the chunks, the context and how 40 to 55 fits into one to 39 and, and, and why the new Testament draws so much on Isaiah 40 to 55, 40 to 66. And, and like now I go back and I read these, you know, refrigerator verses, I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, but there's so much going on around it. It's so much more meaningful. So anyway, I guess it can sound daunting though, like people like, okay, so I can't even read Isaiah unless I do a deep, deep, nice study. How do you, how do you balance that?

Like not trying to overwhelm people with maybe an expectation that they're probably not going to meet versus truly, yeah, but yeah, we should take the Bible seriously and not just read it flippantly, you know? Yeah, well, Isaiah's a terrible example. Thanks for bringing it up, Preston. I mean, it's 66 chapters, right? And it's prophecy. And so, I honestly wouldn't start there. And I think what a lot of us are missing is the beginning of the story. I think we're missing the end of the story too, which I'm sure we're going to get to talk about in a little bit. But, you know, we don't recognize that the Bible, like all

of our favorite stories, is a full circle story. So you think about The Hobbit, like let's just throw out the most cliche Christian author example next to C.S. Lewis, because I know everybody's probably read it. And what's the subtitle of The Hobbit? It's There and Back Again. It's a full story circle. It starts in one place and it ends in the same place, only the same place is not the same place anymore.

And so, I think that when we think about the scriptures, we should think about them the same way. They start in a particular place and then we go through many travels and then they end in the same place. And if we don't have the beginning nailed down, like imagine if you just read the last few chapters of The Hobbit or what if you read, you know, two or three chapters from the middle and said, how should this change my life today? You know, that's not the way that we read any book.

And so why would we think that reading the Bible would be different? So there is something to be said, there is a lot to be said for knowing the story of scripture, the big story of the Bible from start to finish. That's a piece that a lot of us are missing. We might know a little of it. We certainly couldn't turn to someone else and tell them, like walk them through the whole Bible in say five minutes. But that's what someone can do who loves the Hobbit.

I got a lot of people in my family who could do that in just a few seconds. Actually, the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy, and my husband could tell you about the Silmarillion too. So he's a weirdo, but he's great. But when you think about the scriptures, can we do the same thing? And in particular, Genesis and Exodus, if you're looking for a decoder ring to the scriptures, Genesis and Exodus are a really good place to start. They are the seed plot of the Bible. Genesis 1 through 11, huge importance in understanding the rest of scripture. But all of the seeds of redemptive history are planted there that are going to grow and thrive and come to full flower through the rest of the Bible. But many of us, those are long books, Genesis and Exodus, those are long books. And we also have seen movies about

them or heard the stories pulled out in isolation, the story of Noah and the ark and the story of Joseph's many-colored coat. And so we feel like we know them, but actually we have sort of an over-familiar familiarity with only portions of them. I've often told my students, back when I used to teach college, pay special. I don't like prioritizing parts of scripture over the other one. I want to pound into them. It's all important. At the same time, there is something about really getting to know the narrative of scripture. So like if you spend a lot of time in Jen, you know, Genesis one through Exodus 19, once you get to 20, not now you've got, you know, the red, the rest of the second half of Exodus, again, just as important, super important. You

got 10 commandments in there. You got all kinds of, you got the tabernacle and there's a reason why the tab, but like, um, you know, reading four chapters on how to build a tabernacle, uh, like I, I think it's important to understand. I beg to differ my friend. We're about to have a throw down. No, no, no, no. Here we are. Here we are. I think understanding the theological significance of that is absolutely crucial. Knowing the details of the measurements of the tabernacle versus the details of the narrative, I'm going to probably prioritize the details of the narrative. Would you, would you agree with that? Or, uh, cause I, I get the feeling

that the significance of the tabernacle is part of the gospel. I mean, Jesus tabernacle among us. And there's a reason why God dwelling among us is, you know, essential to the story. So I'm not, I'm not discounting at all, uh, the latter parts of Exodus. Well, maybe a little bit, but you're not alone. I have this argument all the time with my podcast co-hosts. They were like, boring second half of Exodus. And I'm like, I'm going to hurt you right now. But I do think what we need to bear in mind

is that the way that these stories were received originally is they were received auditorily. They were read aloud. So all of my audiobook people out there, give yourselves a high five. You're actually engaging in the most ancient way of reading books that there is known to man. And so when you think about the way that those chapters on the Tabernacle would have washed over the people who were listening to them, and what we can miss is, so it's this idea of recapitulation. If you have paid attention to the first 11 chapters and you know the rhythm of the creation

account of, and God said, let there be, and it was so, then when you get to the chapters where God says this is what the tabernacle should be like, then you hear, and God said, let there be. And then in the chapters where we're told that everything is done exactly according to the pattern, we hear, and it was so. And you even have the language of it is finished in there in several places. And then you begin to realize as you're looking at the tabernacle, you're like, man, a lot of the stuff in the tabernacle and the stuff about the tabernacle sounds an awful lot like Eden. And those are the connections that the original hearers would have been making that

we don't because we zoom through Genesis 1 through 11 because we're at the beginning of the year doing our reading plan and we're still fully invested. And we don't necessarily slow down and say, wait a minute, where else might I see this in the rest of the Bible? No, that's good. It's fine if you hate the second half of Exodus, you can answer to the Lord for that. Let me clarify again. I think there is, so I'll even, so you have Exodus. And the law. You also said you hated the law. So I wrote a book on the 10 commandments, so that hit me just fine.

I did do my dissertation at Paul and Paul, it was actually Paul and the law. I think it's misunderstood. See, this is where the problem is. Yeah. Yeah. So 20 access 20, 21 to 30, 31 is how to build a tabernacle. Right? It's like, all right, here's all the instructions. You have all this Edenic imagery and everything. This is kind of like where, you know, God, God created the world. He wants to dwell among us. You guys screwed it up, but Hey, God still, he wants to dwell among you. It's like, Oh man. But then he had 32 to 34 and it's like Israel's having an affair like on their wedding night. Like it's like in the, in the covenant ceremony of being

married to God and they're all sleeping, you know, sleeping around with foreign deities. You would expect this deity to say, screw you. I'm not going to marry you now. You just had an affair, but what do you have in 35 to 40? They build the tabernacle. And the last chapter of the glory of God dwells among his people because he wants to dwell among not just good people, but he wants to dwell among really sinful people so that he can redeem them. So there's the, so again, I do like the story. I love. You like the golden calf. They rose up to play. Oh my word.

So there's a deep, rich theological significance there. But I do fear that the average, if they just read... Okay, so if they just read without some kind of guidance, do we need guidance? Can they just sit down and read without any kind of guidance? I mean, again, I'm getting this stuff because I've read other books, I've read other people. I miss all the Edenic imagery in the Tabernacle. Somebody pointed it out, I'm like, oh my gosh, I went back and read Genesis. I'm like, yeah, that's, what do we do with that? Do we, do people, I mean, do they need extra books to read in order

to understand the Bible? Is that what we're saying? Well, they need, yeah, they need teachers. I think the question is at what point in the process do they need teachers? I mean, we know that God gifts people to be teachers. I've devoted my life to teaching. Obviously, I think it's important. And one of the things that I'm always telling people, because my studies are, the teachings are video driven, is if you buy this study and you just watch the videos, you have not followed the learning outcome. And I think that some of the language that we're missing in Christian discipleship circles

is the language of learning outcomes. We ask the wrong question when we want to teach people things. We ask, what do people want to learn instead of how are disciples formed? Those are two very different questions. And the forming of disciples means I'm going to walk you through a process so that you can have the most sticky outcome in terms of what it is that I want you to learn. And that involves, I referenced this earlier, active learning. In other words, the student has to do some work on their own before they hear teaching

over it. Otherwise they're going to hear it differently. I'll give you just a real life example of this. I have spent much of my adult life spending vacation time in Santa Fe, New Mexico. That's where my parents lived for about 15 years and we love it there. I'll often give recommendations to friends of where you can go eat or the hikes that you can do or best places to stay. And I was traveling on a flight to somewhere and the travel magazine in the back seat in

front of me was about Santa Fe. And so I was like, oh, this is so great. I can't wait to hear what they've said about where to eat in Santa Fe and where to stay and everything. And so I open up this travel mag article and I read it and I'm like, I would not go eat at any of these. These are terrible recommendations. And then I begin to realize, oh, because this is just one big advertisement, like someone has paid to have their place referenced in here. Well,

the only way that I know what's really the right place to go in Santa Fe is because I've been on the ground in Santa Fe. Spend time there, I know the neighborhood. And so when we go to commentaries or when we listen to teaching, what we've often done is just read the article in the travel magazine without having spent time in the neighborhood. And so we don't pick up on where something might be off

because we're missing just a basic firsthand knowledge of what the text says. And we downplay the what the text says piece because we've been told that what it means and how it changes me, that's the sweet spot. That's what you've got to get to. But we can't possibly go through the steps of what does it mean and how does it change me in the way that we're supposed to if we don't know what it says. It's why those refrigerator verses that you were talking about get pulled out the way that they do, because we are generally disinterested in what the Bible says beyond the point of wanting to get to the sweet sauce of like, oh, but what would I do with it?

So we're so pragmatic in the way that we read the scriptures that we don't take a long-term approach. And again, we're in an instant gratification society. I just want you to tell me the punchline. But people will, they'll tell you lots of punchlines and you won't know whether they are faithful to what the text actually says if you don't know what the text actually says. I love what you said about taking a long-term approach. So tell me if you resonate with this. Going back to the kind of like your 15-minute looking for that spiritual jab, because I talk to people who will spend the 15 minutes, they don't get the spiritual jab. You know, they're going through the Bible in the year

and they just read Leviticus 7 to 10 and they're like, what do I do with this? And they feel guilty, or they feel like maybe the Bible is not that meaningful, you know? Rather than if your perspective is, I am slowly chipping away at just absorbing the overarching storyline of Scripture. And some days, I might go a week and not get any spiritual jabs from my Bible reading, but I'm still, if my perspective is, I am slowly absorbing myself in the narrative, then your fruit will be more absorb myself in the narrative, then your fruit will be more long-term. You will have a two-year spiritual jab because now you have, you know how Leviticus 7-10 fits into the cross and all these things. Would that, do you resonate with that kind of perspective? I just... Absolutely. We have a debit card mentality to the Bible. We want to put in our debit

card and withdraw our little daily dose of mm-mm-mm. And instead, we should have a savings account mentality. We should be faithfully placing deposits in day after day after day, trusting that in the Lord's timing, He will yield a return. I don't know about you, but if you've ever been through a dark night of the soul, what you're not going to do is sit down and study line by line and draw great observations. In many cases, when you're in that dark night of the soul, other friends are bringing you what you need from the scriptures during that time, or the Lord is bringing to mind the things that you've been storing in the storehouse with a clarity that they didn't have before.

And I think that's what we're often missing. And you've touched on something that's really important, Preston. It's that idea that I sit down and I obey the method that has been given to me. And then I get to the end of my 15 minutes and I didn't have the magic moment. And then the verdict either falls on the Bible is terrible or meaningless, or, and this is what I find happens

more often in Christian circles is, I'm not good, like maybe the Holy Spirit doesn't speak to me like he speaks to other people, because I hear other people talking about these great insights they're getting and why isn't that happening for me? What's wrong with me? And I would just encourage the people listening, if that is you, it's not something wrong with you. It's wrong about the way that you're thinking about the way Scripture speaks to us. And to be patient with yourself. When I talk about repetitive reading, I don't mean sit down and read a few verses and try to gain an insight. I mean, just read. Just read it and trust that over time, the Lord will yield a harvest on His Word. He says that He will.

That's good. That's good. Yeah, just read, like, what does the Bible say? What does it mean? How does it apply to us? You know, those kind of three stages, like being okay with really concentrating on what does it say? Read 1 Corinthians, I'm reading 1 Corinthians right now. That's a complicated book. I've read that several times now and I'm just like, why does he begin this argument? Go here, what about head covering all this? But just you will never get to the V, what does it mean? How does it apply if you don't really have a firm understanding of what does it actually say and how does it fit together? Can you, what are some, to understand the overarching storyline of scripture, what are some helps you recommend?

Do you have any kind of go-to resources? You feel like anybody who really wants to understand how everything fits in that they should go to? I mean, maybe you've written some of them. I'm going to look at your book. No, I haven't. I haven't, but there are a couple of good ones. The one that we used, both Jeff and I used just for our own help, and then also when we were trying to teach it to our children, is a book called What's in the Bible by R.C. Sproul and Robert Wolgemuth. That was a really good one to utilize for just our own, because you're like, shoot,

I got to teach this to my kids. I don't even think I know it myself. Then one that's recently come out that I really like by Courtney Docter is called From Garden to Glory. And it's basically the same thing. I really like the way that she laid it all out. And Courtney is really great with biblical theology and with tracing the covenants and all of that. So that would be another place that you could go.

And there's no shame in doing that. That is a good example of a tool that can help us with the Bible as a whole is to lean on the insights of others. And again, like both of the things that I just recommended, they're going to draw on sources that are historically reliable, like they're time-tested that they're going to draw on. They're both Presbyterians, so I don't know how you feel about Presbyterians, but I got a lot of friends over there and those are good, helpful places you might start. You talked about a biblical literacy crisis.

Yeah. Is that, is it a crisis? What has caused it? Is it worse than it has been in the past? And how do we get out of it? I don't know what order you want to go in there. I'm reaching for a book because I want to read you some statistics. So we have a Bible theology. I'm sorry, we have a Bible literacy crisis for sure. One of the things I'll do when I teach on this is I give just a simple pop quiz of 20 questions. They're fact-based. They're not about interpretation or application. They're things like who were the sons of Zebedee? What disciple found a coin in the mouth of a fish? And so we bounce around and I ask

these and people just fail it. And these are, a lot of times, you know, I'm talking to people who are ministry leaders and you get that feeling in the pit of your stomach, like, I don't like this. This doesn't feel good. And what I always want to say to ministry leaders is that feeling, that's the feeling that the people in the pews are having on a regular basis, and they think they have to keep it a secret. And so a big piece of saying, hey, we don't know what it says, is to just start saying it out loud together. We don't, but let's see if we can get better at it. But a big symptom of the Bible literacy crisis is the theological literacy crisis. And you could argue that they inform each other. But Lifeway and Ligonier Ministries did a survey recently. They do it every two years, I believe,

on the state of theology in the church. Let me just read to you a few of the results. Evangelicals, that fraught word that we all love. So those who would say, I believe in the gospel, okay? In response to the statement, God learns and adapts to different circumstances, 48% of evangelicals agreed. So in other words, don't have a basic understanding of the immutability of God. In response to the statement, everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God, 65% of evangelicals agreed. In other words, they don't have a basic understanding of the doctrine

of original sin. In response to the statement, God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, 56% of evangelicals agreed. And then this is the one that blows my mind. In response to the statement, Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God. Okay, so the doctrine of the dual nature of Christ. 43% of evangelicals agreed that Jesus was a great teacher, but was not God. And that was up from 30% just two years earlier. So the problem is not getting better. The problem is getting worse. And again, like most people, when you hear that, he was a good teacher, but he was not God, I would hope that a lot of verses are queuing up in your head of like

where Jesus himself actually said something different than that in the gospel accounts. But as you can see, when we're taking someone else's word for what the scriptures say, because we're just passively consuming, and think about how many opportunities we have for passive consumption right now, you know, with the internet. When we're passively consuming what other people have said about the Bible and we're not actually spending time reading large portions of it at a time, then our theology begins to slip necessarily. Yeah. Part of the problem there has to do with the definition of evangelical, right? Because isn't that, I mean, so many... Well, sure. It's the mushiest word ever.

It's become so political. I mean, people that have been in church in 10 years, but will march on the Capitol and, you know, would call themselves evangelical. I don't think I have a good working definition for it right now, other than that I know for the purposes of this study, they meant people who would say, yes, I'm a Christian. So it's people who confess, and not just Christian, but like, yeah, if you say you're evangelical, even if you say you're, I'm an evangelical Christian, yeah, you're making a specific statement there, but that's, I mean, the last one, that's, it's a scorcher. Yeah, that's kind of a big deal. So, okay. Do you, do you feel like, I would say anecdotally, every single college professor I talk, like Christian college professor I talk to, like Christian college professor I talk to,

that's been teaching for more than 10, 15 years, will say there's been a radical change in the level of knowledge that students are coming in with. They're like, I can't assume they know any, like Adam and Eve, I have to assume they don't know anything. Whereas 10 years ago, 15 years ago, I assume most of my students that, especially at a Christian college, you have to be a Christian coming in or whatever, they do the basic stories. And my job is kind of assume that base knowledge and try to help go deeper into the text. But now it's like, I kind of assume it. I can't just say Adam and Eve or Abraham and think they have the basic understanding of who those people are. Well, and my argument would be, first of all, that that discipleship function belongs in the local church, right? They should come in with a basic understanding of Christian

doctrine and of the Scriptures. And that the failure of the local church to do that has been in large part driven by a devotional reading of Scripture that we've catechized people into and an expert amateur divide. That you know what, you don't actually need, I will tell you, I will tell you what the passage means. You just sit and listen. And if you're listening to how that sounds, it actually sounds very Catholic,

which is fascinating to me that in Protestantism, we have found ourselves back in a place where we need someone to mediate the scriptures for us. And again, I'm not saying that teaching is not, obviously, I think teaching matters, but when we don't have our firsthand knowledge of the text and a commitment to understanding just the basic closed-handed truths of orthodoxy, then this is where we find ourselves. And what you find is in a lot of churches today, people can tell you what their church believes on secondary matters.

They can tell you, oh, we baptize infants or, oh, we don't baptize infants. They can tell you those kinds of things or they can tell you what they believe about the end times. But they can't tell you a basic Trinitarian understanding of the Godhead. And they can't tell you about what it means to be made in the image of God. And these are such more important issues, but they fall into the wayside because it's not, because the assumption is that people do already know those things, and in fact, they don't. So, I want to go back to the source of this biblical illiteracy. You said the church would be the primary. But like, so I think of like,

let's go the, your denomination, quote unquote, that SBC, I'm going to imagine whether my audience agrees- It's fine. Everything's fine. Whether my audience agrees with where they land on their theological conclusions, whatever. But like most SBC churches are teaching the Bible, right? More than ever. I mean, they're not just... What would that be? What's that? You'd say that? I would not say that. I think there's biblical preaching happening. However, you want to define that. I think the Bible is being preached, but I think if you look at like,

the movement that's happened in... It's not just in SPBC churches, but I have seen it in a lot of SBC churches toward a simple church model, which means we offloaded Sunday school. And we said, you know where your primary vehicle for discipleship is gonna be? It's gonna be in your home group, community group, grow group, whatever your church happens to call it. And that is an organic ministry model, which means maybe your group meets on Tuesday nights and someone else meets on Thursday nights. And then, oops, somebody had a baby,

so we move it to another night of the week than it was before. So you've got this bouncing ball, moving target of when that discipleship space is going to happen. And then it's led by whoever the willing victim is who said, I'll lead the discussion tonight. And the discussion is probably an application-driven discussion that's based loosely lead the discussion tonight. And the discussion is probably an application-driven discussion that's based loosely on the sermon series. So is it any wonder that people can't articulate the dual nature of Christ or can't tell you the story of Scripture? Because what happens is anyone who's been a part of one, and listen, I don't want to go to a church that doesn't have a home group function. But when that's your primary or your sole place you think

discipleship is happening, what you're not recognizing is they make terrible learning environments. They're good for having discussions and getting to know one another, which is community matters. We should be looking to build community, but I would argue that community has been the highest stated goal of every gathering space in the local church for about the last 30 years. At the expense of learning. Yeah. Because I've been a part of several church environments, let's just say, where there was, I would say, a reaction against Bible studies. Like you said, this is a Bible study. This is a missional group. And I think they did identify a problem that in the past, like say the generation

above me, they went to Bible studies while their marriages were a train wreck. They weren't, you know, they're still telling racist jokes. They were not reaching their neighbors. They were embezzling money, you know, they're just, and no one knew about it. They're all lonely and you know, like, so the, the, they were, they were missing an essential part of community. So the overreaction in my opinion was this isn't a Bible study. And that's, that's do the community group to the point to where if you start saying like, it almost like, can we open a Bible though? Like, is it okay? Like, or especially, you know, if you do open the Bible, it's like, well, don't just give us content. Cause that, that's produced all these bad disciples, you know, whatever. So I've sensed almost like an allergic reaction

against do going back, like actually still studying the Bible and learning its content. So you're so, so part of the, I'm hearing you say that. And then also no more like Sunday school in most churches has kind of gone to where there was a time outside the Sunday morning service. It was devoted to active learning. Active learning, yes. Whereas preaching, even if it's biblical preaching, there's such a focus on application that sometimes you don't really, it's not like you walk away saying, I understood Romans 5, 1 to 11 better. It's like, I got my spiritual jab maybe on how to be motivated to live as a Christian this week,

which again, isn't in itself bad. And also church participation too, doesn't that play a role? I mean, even if there was biblical preaching happening, I mean, now what's the average participation? One, maybe two days a week of committed churchgoers. I'm not talking like the once every few months kind of attendance. Like, isn't church attendance just gone down drastically? Yeah. Yeah. And also, I mean, preaching, preaching matters, you know, but preaching is only one

way that we receive the Word. It is an important way, but it's a passive learning environment that is sitting and receiving something. And preaching itself assumes that you have some understanding of the text before you get there. And what I'm trying to point out to people is that we can't assume that. And so, I've spent my life in the discipleship spaces that happen outside of the preaching space. It's one of the great ironies to me of my own denomination is that I'm supposed to be grieved that I don't get to be in the preaching space as a woman. And my reality is I just don't really care about that space. And that's probably too strong of a statement to say, because it sounds like I devalue preaching and I don't.

It's just that the thing that I feel a calling to is active learning environments. In other words, where I'm partnering with students. It's like what you would do in a seminary classroom or in a college classroom. And one of the ways that I have tried to illustrate this for people is to say, my daughter has a chemistry degree. And when she decided that she wanted to learn chemistry,

she recognized that there were very real consequences for getting that wrong or getting that right. Like if you don't understand how chemicals interact with one another, anybody who uses just bathroom cleaning products knows it's important to understand how chemicals interact. And so if she was going to have a profession that was based on understanding chemistry, she needed to have

really good instruction so that the consequences of getting it right were good and the consequences of getting it wrong, bad. Well, what she didn't do is gather with a group of her peers and have a feelings level discussion about a chemistry textbook. She went to somewhere where they think about how to teach people chemistry all the time. And guess what? It was an active learning environment.

There was study she did on her own. There were things she did in groups. And then she sat under teaching. And the same is true about the Bible. The consequences for getting it right or getting it wrong are huge. And we ought to treat it with the solemnity that it deserves. And I'm familiar with all the narratives as someone who's been trying to get people to re-engage with the life of the mind, that we don't want to be Pharisees. And I agree with that 100%, but I would ask everyone, look around you. We are in far less danger of biblical and theological arrogance today than we are of biblical and theological ignorance.

The thing about deconstruction, right? I feel a ton of compassion for people who are deconstructing. This is, I don't mean to give a clinical assessment of why it's happening, but we would be crazy not to think that some of what's going on is that people are leaving a faith that was never transmitted to them in the first place with any kind of cohesion. Yeah, no, I told it. I absolutely agree. And I mean, almost every person who has deconstructed and I use a term, I use a term more neutral. I think we all should deconstruct from non-biblical views, which we're all born with and nurtured it on some level, you know, we're not Jesus. So, but those who have deconstructed and not reconstructed in a healthy way in my, in my anecdotal experience, 100% of the time, they were raised in a very

unhealthy, I would say fundamentalist environment where they weren't allowed to ask hard questions. It was typically extremely political. There was usually some abuse or abuse of power or sexual abuse, some like they weren't given a good picture of humble, godly leadership. I'm still yet to meet somebody who deconstructed, well, I'm sure they exist, but like, no, I was raised in an environment where people encouraged me to ask hard questions. If they didn't know the answer, they said, I don't know, but let's study this together. And they were like, yeah, old earth, new earth. You know what?

We can debate that, but you're not a Christian if you believe in old earth, you know? Right. Anyway, this is maybe a tangent, but going back to the, it's such a massive problem. I do want to identify the problem correctly. What about family? Christian parents raising kids and not passing on biblical literacy to the kids? Does that play a role? I mean, or is it, it can't all just be the church, right? I mean... Well, but how can a parent pass along what hasn't been given to them? And so, if you think about what the church was doing 30, 40 years ago to train people, you're moving towards seeker-sensitive models of church. It's all

about a tractional ministry. And so then you get a wave of parents who actually weren't given what they needed to be able to train their kids. And so, yeah, there's, and then there's, you know, is the, is what's happening on a Sunday with the children, does it in any way connect to what's happening during the week with families in the home? And some, some churches aren't necessarily thinking in those terms. But I know for many years at my own church, we were teaching children the attributes of God in children's church, and the adults didn't know them. We started weaving that into our adult discipleship spaces because parents were learning from

the sheets that their kids were bringing home from children's church. And so, I do think someone who's thinking about, and here's just something for those local church leaders who might be listening. When you think about the discipleship spaces you're going to offer, are you thinking again about what you think people want or are you thinking in terms of a scope and a sequence? What does a disciple need and how do I train them into that? So for children, what are they going to learn when they're in kindergarten? What are they going to learn when they're in kindergarten? What are they going to learn when they're in third grade? Think about your local public school.

They don't teach your child multiplication before they teach them addition. When we think about training adults and children into the basic beliefs of Christianity and into an understanding of the storyline of the Bible, are we thinking about the order in which we do that, the methods we use to get there, or do we think we'll just throw some stuff out there and see how it all turns out, because we're seeing how it all turns out? How do you explain the access, the profound access we have to really legit biblical learning tools? I'm thinking of like the Bible project, completely free. And I know, yeah, whether they agree with all their conclusions or whatever, like they do a fantastic

job of getting people into the text of scripture, understanding the overarching picture background and so on. You have, there's Bill Mounts, a Greek professor. He's got a whole online seminar, free online seminary with like some of the top evangelical scholars teaching these classes. A lot of people don't even know about it. It's called, I think, biblicalstudies.org or something. And you've got the You version of your Bible app, like, and these, and you could say, well, yeah, there's access to all these resources, but people aren't using them. Like, I don't know. Like, I know loads of people that go through

the Bible project and other, you know, they're constantly on, you know, you version on their phones and stuff. So how do you explain the profound access we have to loads of free tools with the biblical illiteracy rate still plummet, biblical literacy rate plummeting? Is it that people aren't, yeah, sure, some people may be accessing these, but the overall majority aren't or? Well, no, I think for a lot of people, it's such a massive hill of content that they don't know where to start. But also, I think that again, these are passive learning spaces and what they're missing is a dialogic environment. There's no conversation happening. And when you think

about the most meaningful insights that you've had, they're almost always in conversation. I mean, you know, it's Yoda talking to Luke, right? And so I'm just appealing to this, you know, base of people who like the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars like crazy, man. But that's what it is. It's having a dialogue partner or partners. And this is what the local church is designed to do in a way that these online resources aren't. It doesn't mean they don't have value. I create resources like that, but they belong somewhere where you're having embodied conversations with other people. Otherwise, to borrow Jonathan Height's language, these are asynchronous events. It's just me staring at a screen or

listening to something. We need synchronous events. We need synchronous events where we are discussing things together, where we're gaining insights together, and where the shared recognition of what we're seeing pulls us forward to the next thing. We live in such an individualistic age that we actually think that the most meaningful moments we can have with God are our quiet time and the most meaningful learning moments we can have are just me staring at a screen. And that's profoundly not true. To be saved into Christ is to be saved into relationship with the church. And we need the doctrine of the church more than ever in an individualistic

age. You are not meant to read Revelation and understand it on your own. You're not meant to. And the most important time you spend will not be just you reading Revelation. It's when you begin to have dialogue with others about what you're reading. And when one of those others is someone who's a little further down the learning curve than you are, then you can grow in your insight as they lead you toward deepening understanding. So the church can provide avenues for people to do that. But you can't force people to come. Are there other ways in which the church can foster communal learning environments that maybe

it hasn't explored yet? I don't know if that's a, does that make sense? Because I like, so like the church I go to probably 20, maybe 2000, 2500 people. So a house church in Texas, you know, terms. They have a history of Wednesday night to study. They go through a book on Wednesday nights and they still do it. And they have, I would say, the best teacher at the church or whatever, but like he's a, he's a, he's a faith. He's an incredible teacher. He's, he does it every, every Wednesday. And I would say maybe 5% of the church goes. I would say maybe 10 years ago, I don't know, I wasn't at the church that long back then, but I would say it's probably a lot higher, you know, 10 years ago. So they're providing something.

It's high quality. It's going through the text. They, you know, it's not like they have some, because I've seen some churches say, how come you're not coming to Wednesday night? You know, Bible something like, yeah, cause he put a crappy teach up there that nobody understands. He's boring as heck. And like, you know, and you think he's the greatest person or whatever. Like, but no, this is not like everything matches up here. Why, what, what more could that in this case, a real tangible example, could the church be doing or are there other spaces, maybe podcasting or some online learning communal environments or something? I don't know. Well, there's what I call the three-legged stool of learning. And the first is that you're

doing work on your own. The second is that you're having conversations with other people about the work that you did on your own. And then the third leg is that you're hearing teaching over the work that you did on your own and discussed in your group. And I would argue that those three need to happen in that order. What's often the format is you come and you listen to teaching and then if there is a group element it happens after the teaching so that people will talk about what happened in the teaching. That's that's very different than having to sort of pool your ignorance on what you were learning before you got there.

In many cases, when we think about working through a curriculum, the curricula that are written, most of what you will find if you go to a Christian bookstore, it is lowering the bar on what we're asking a people. It is not written to create dissonance. It's not asking them to consider what they don't yet know. It will ask a question and then if they have trouble answering it, they know they can keep reading a little further down and it will give them the answer. And so I think that's dominant.

What we've seen in discipleship spaces is the church apologizing and lowering the bar, apologizing and lowering the bar. Hey, we know you're really busy. We know you only have so much time. So just show up. That's all you need to do and we'll do the rest. People are not motivated by small visions. They are motivated by big visions and they are motivated by raising the bar. And we actually know this is true. We're like, oh, people aren't disciplined today. I'm like, yeah, they are. They run marathons. They do Whole 30. They do all kinds of things. They're just not

disciplined for you. And the reason that they're not disciplined for us, church leaders, is because we have not compelled them. We have not given them a big vision and we have not invited them into it. We have apologized for inviting them into our spaces. And so, and I've seen this in my own local church and I've seen it, you know, we run a cohort where we help other churches start doing this through training the church. If you motivate people properly, if they see your own affection for what is happening and how you are not just learning, but you're growing doxologically to your growing in your ability to be a worshiper, that's contagious.

If you think about the person who has had the most dramatic impact on your walk spiritually, it was more about what you saw them living out than it was about the words that were coming from their mouths. And we need spaces that are doing that for us, but that are asking people to feel what they don't know and inviting them to grow toward what they can know. Just in my experience in the local church, that's usually not what we're doing. Except you know what? I can think of a local church down the street from me that does this really well. And they

even do it in student ministry, which you could argue is one of the most important places to do this. And before their kids graduate from high school, they will have learned Old Testament theology, New Testament theology, or Old Testament, New Testament, and Systematic theology. And that church is the Mormon church. Oh, no. So, tell me why the Mormons are better at discipleship than we are. Do they have a more compelling vision?

Yeah. So, to that point about the... So, they have... In most states, I think it's most states, at least in my state and I think in California, public school, like kids in public schools can have one hour of religious release time to study whatever. And so the Mormons have been doing this for years. They always have a, they call the seminary set up right next to every high school and all the students, Mormon or not, you know, can he now has a whole Christian version of this on basically every high school campus. You can come and learn, you know, that's fast.

Yeah. So, but if you think about it, right, right. At the point that kids are like, oh, I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college.

I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. I'm going to go to college. of this on basically every high school campus, you can come and learn, you know, that's fast. Yeah. So, but if you think about it, right, right at the point that kids are getting into learning in school where they're saying, Hey, learn a foreign language. Hey, learn physics. Hey, learn calculus. What most youth groups are doing is say, Hey, have a 10 minute quiet time with this devotional content a couple of times a week. And we're communicating a value, but we're not just doing it with kids,

we're doing it with adults as well. And you know, you said something earlier that's important for us to circle back to. You said, is there a new way we should be thinking about this? Or you said something to that effect. And the answer is no. The answer is there's an old way recently forgotten

that we should be thinking about. This is not what I'm suggesting in order to reclaim Bible literacy and theological literacy is not new. It's ancient. It's just something that in recent years we've said, our people won't do that. That's the phrase I hear again, your people might do that, our people won't do that. It's patently false. They need a big vision and they need us to call them into it. So do you think it's like going back to the example I gave of a really great meaningful environment that hardly anybody is going to relative to the size of the church.

Do you think it's part of its communication? Like maybe... So I don't know what your guys doing on Wednesday nights, but do they have work that they do before they get there that causes them to be like, shoot, I don't know what that means. I think it's more, I think, see, I don't even go to it. Yeah, it's the three-legged stool. Some leg is missing off of the stool. Why is that Howard Hinder? I mean, that's a basic being an education that was like, yeah, have them do the work

preparatory work ahead of time, discuss it in a small group and then discuss it in a larger group with a guided teacher. But then they're already having questions. They're already like anticipating certain tensions and questions and this, that. Whereas if you just feed them the questions ahead of time, it's just, it's not going to stick as well. And that's why I love it. Because when I stand up to teach over a passage and they've already spent time feeling dumb

Or having a couple of insights that have hit them They are on the edge of their seats and that is so different. Yeah, and then what I'm doing is I'm teaching toward Those questions because I wrote them I know exactly the tension that I meant to create and now I'm going to help resolve it for them And so it's a cohesive learning outcome because it's not, and what you'll often find happens is people will say, here, here's a curriculum, do some work before you come.

But then when they get to the teaching portion, well, I'm just gonna teach whatever I thought was most interesting. And it doesn't in any way relate to the work that the student did before they got there. So you know what that communicates? I gave you busy work to do on your own. And now I'm gonna share the insights that I think are.

I think a lot of people will say people won't do that. If we tell them, give them an assignment ahead of time, most people won't find the time to do it. I think that's what people will say. Yeah, they're wrong about that. And I've seen it, you know, I've been teaching in weekly spaces like this for now almost 30 years.

So I know they're wrong. And what people will say is, well, it's because the teaching is so kind of like what you said, you know, we put a good teacher in there. And I'm like, that's not true. If you have ever gone to something where your small group was terrible and the teaching was really good, you didn't come back because the small group was terrible. You know, I mean, it matters that you give good teaching, but you can have faithful week in week out teaching that is just a teaching to what they're learning. Like I think about some of the best

classes I took in college. It wasn't because the teacher was particularly charismatic in the way they delivered the content. It was because they understood how learning happened. Hmm. That's great. Yeah. A hundred percent. Okay. I know we're getting short on time here. I got a couple of big questions. I always want to ask you this. Like, do you teach men and what's your view on complimentarian versus egalitarian? Like how have you worked through that? Like do I teach men? So my church has done a ton of work around this and they have clearly defined roles and responsibilities. And so in my churches and you can read the paper, it's available online.

So, they did all the exegesis, all the passages that everyone's always talking about. And their conviction would be that preaching is not tone of voice, it is not content, it is done by a particular person in a particular place. That is done by the pastor-elder in the church gathering, so Sundays. So that means that any space outside of that space can and should be filled by non-elders, whether male or female. And so we do allow for teaching of mixed groups outside of the Sunday gathering for either men or women because a non-elder male and a non-elder female are, there's no difference in the way they would participate in the life of the church from one

another. So you wouldn't preach a Sunday morning message, but you can lead a, you can teach like a Wednesday night. A mixed in a classroom setting. Yes, that's correct. Okay. And then last, okay. I don't do a ton of it because honestly, I feel like the women's space is my space, but it's not forbidden to use terrible language. So you personally prefer the women's only space. Well, I don't. So I grew up with four brothers and so I'm very comfortable, you know, in, and here's the deal. I grew up with a dad who thought my thinking mattered, four brothers who thought my thinking mattered. I married a guy who thought my thinking mattered. These men were not threatened by me. And so, my expectation is that anytime I walk into a

room, it's not that I'm going to be a threat. It's that I'm going to be an ally. And in my local church, that's been profoundly true. And so, I don't think that I feel one way or another about teaching mixed rooms. It's just that the majority of my experience and where I have felt a justice issue has been in female spaces because I believed that women were being resourced in ways that were infantilizing to them. I think raising the bar on theological education in women's only spaces, I think there's a huge need here. And if anybody says,

what, I could only just teach women, that's almost like, isn't that feel a little misogynistic? Like that's a lesser than, I don't know. I get the complaint. I get the, you know, I want the ability to be able to teach both, but I think there is such a need for, again, theological education in women's spaces. Well, I think the way that I would describe it, the way that my church has talked about it is that the overarching picture that we see for the church in the Bible is one of family. The church is the family of God. And if you think about just like a nuclear family in just the simplest terms, you think about a father, a mother, and children, right?

And so, when we talk about like a healthy nuclear family, that's a lot of times the language that people in church leadership will use, father, mother, and children. And when you look at the church as the family of God, you have to ask, do we see that in symbolic form in the church? Do we see churches that have fathers

and mothers and children? In the more theologically conservative strains of the church, what we can sometimes see are authoritarian fathers, children who toe the line, and absentee mothers. And so, if you saw that family, an actual family in your church that was operating that way, you would feel great concern for those children. And so, what my church has said is, we want there to be visible fathers and mothers in the church. Father's not a mother, mother's not a father. And we want children to receive nurture from both their fathers and their mother.

You think about the book of Proverbs, the whole structure of the book is a father's instruction to his son and a mother's instruction to her son. Opens with the father's instruction, closes with the mother's instruction. And so to say that my church says that I can teach rooms where there are sons and daughters is just not alarming because why wouldn't both sons and daughters need the influence of a spiritual mother? When you think about the estrogen pond, again, let's talk about the pink space for just a second. What happens when there are absentee mothers in the family of God? The daughters

in that church don't stop looking for mothers. It's like that P.D. Eastman children's book, Are You My Mother? But when they don't see her in the church, they go outside of the church and they find online presences to mother them. And that can be good and it can also be terrible because in my experience, most male leaders in the church have no idea who those voices are. And yet they may have inadvertently offloaded over half of their discipleship responsibility to someone whose theological positions they don't know because they don't even know that person exists.

One last question. Well, not question, but tell us about this new study released on the book of revelation. I mean, you're diving in here to the, to the deep end here. Is this a, is this a book you've been or a study you've been working on for a while? Or is this like a, have you studied the rebel, the book of revelation a lot in your life? Or is this like more of a fresh study for you? No, I grew up with all the scary films of the 80s and I was having full blown panic attacks about it by the time I got to college. So no, I have not had a lifelong love of the book of Revelation. And so when you say like, did you just start working on it? Well, in

one sense, I worked on it for a couple of years, but in another very real sense, I've been preparing to write this study for 25 years of teaching. I've spent a lot of time in the books of Genesis and Exodus. And it was the person who finally convinced me that I should write the study was like, hey, you've spent so much time on the beginning, you're in a position to write the end. And she was absolutely right. So I had to stuff down all of my fears, all of my inadequacy feelings, everything that everybody feels about the book. I felt all of that.

And so for those who do the study, just know I am you. Like the, and if I can get through it and have, and receive from it what it's intended to give, which is encouragement and a call to endurance, then you can too. It's such a practical book. It's such a shame that it's been misunderstood or just filled with controversy and stuff. It is such a, almost a magisterial book about the supremacy of Christ and following Christ in a world filled with chaos and persecution and the

beauty and joy of that. It's remarkable. Give us one insight. Do you have anything that stands out that prior to writing the study to now that you're like, man, this passage, this theme has really stuck with me? Yeah. Oh, for sure. So the book repeats the word throne over and over again. In fact, throne occurs something like 45 times in the book of Revelation, which is far more mentions than you find in the entirety of the rest of the New Testament combined. So, it's really just obsessively repeating about thrones and dominions and all of that. And, you know, you think about even the opening scenes, like I know not everyone is familiar with the entire book

of Revelation, but most people can tell you about the throne room scene in Revelation 4 and 5, the vision of God seated on the heavenly throne. And that vision repeats over and over again throughout the book. And so, we get these scenes of what's happening on the earth and then we get our vision turned heavenward these scenes of what's happening on the earth and then we get our vision turned heavenward again and what's happening on the earth and our vision turned heavenward again. And it's really, the entire book is an exercise in stealing us to continue to repeat the words of the Lord's prayer, thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven. And so we recognize that earthly thrones and dominions will not stand and that

even now, God is seated and reigning and ruling on His throne. And I think we don't always let the impact of Revelation 4 and 5 hit us the way that it should because what we don't recognize is that the original hearers are in the Roman Empire and with increasing pressure, they are being told that they must have on their lips a phrase relevant to the cult of emperor worship. In other words, they must confess Caesar is Lord. And what the book of Revelation says is Jesus Christ is Lord, period. And then how do we live if that's what we believe? And so, clearly we're in an election cycle. It's a relevant topic for us to be reminded not to say that we don't have any concern

for earthly political moments or for who is seated on earthly thrones, but that we always, always, always recognize where our true allegiance lies and that the one who was and is and is to come is going to survive November with no problems whatsoever. It's so funny, my grandfather, when he was 90, I was visiting him and we were in an election cycle. And I said, grandpa, who are you going to vote for in the fall? And he goes, they're all crooks. It's just a matter of which one's going to take your money. You could argue grandpa was a terrible cynic, but I'll tell you what else he was. He was someone who knew where his allegiance lay. And so while it mattered, it didn't matter. And I think it would be so great if nothing else, the book of Revelation, could help us remember that

our worship is only due to one throne and that our anxieties, whatever they may be, should be housed within the understanding. They should be submitted to the understanding that we don't believe in outcomes. We believe in the God of all outcomes and that He will do exactly what He has said He will do. I don't disagree, Jen, and I like your grandpa. So I encourage people to pick up your study, Revelation, Eternal King, Everlasting Kingdom. I assume it is available wherever books and studies are sold. Jen, thanks so much for being on the podcast. I really enjoyed this conversation and you give me a lot of

hope for a growing need for biblical literacy in the church. It's a big thing I'm passionate about as well. So thank you for your voice, your ministry, the books you write, and everything you do for the church. Thanks so much for having me on. This show is part of the Converge Podcast Network.