Theology in the Raw - S9 Ep912: Vaccines, Pandemics, and the Future of the World: Mark Sayers

Episode Date: October 21, 2021

Yup, we go there. Vaccines. I didn’t even intend to go here, but our conversation sort of spilled over into a conversations about the efficacy of vaccines, why there’s “vaccine hesitancy,” and how the unvaccinated are potentially enabling the creation of new variants that could be more deadly. We also talk about what the advent of the Covid pandemic means for the future world. Basically, our future will look vastly different and the church will need to make some serious changes. Mark is the senior leader of Red Church in Melbourne, Australia. He is passionate about spiritual renewal and the future of the church. Mark is the author of a number of books including Strange Days and Reappearing Church.  Mark lives in Melbourne with his wife, Trudi, his daughter, Grace, and twin boys, Hudson and Billy. Theology in the Raw Conference - Exiles in Babylon At the Theology in the Raw conference, we will be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation care, American politics, and what it means to love your democratic or republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. No question is off limits. No political party will be praised. Everyone will be challenged to think. And Jesus will be upheld as supreme. Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Venmo: @Preston-Sprinkle-1 Connect with Preston Twitter | @PrestonSprinkle Instagram | @preston.sprinkle Youtube | Preston Sprinkle Check out Dr. Sprinkle’s website prestonsprinkle.com Stay Up to Date with the Podcast Twitter | @RawTheology Instagram | @TheologyintheRaw If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I'm here with my friend Mark Sayers. Mark is a senior leader of Red Church in Melbourne, Australia. He's passionate about spiritual renewal and the future of the church. He's written a ton of books, including Strange Days, The Disappearing Church, and Reappearing Church, and he's working on another book at the moment that should be out next year. In this episode, we talk about vaccines and stuff. Okay. I didn't even plan on going here. I didn't plan. I didn't have him on to talk about the vaccine, but I just, we started talking about the pandemic and the different responses between like Australia and America. And this dude has, is so well read. He's so thoughtful. He's so level-headed in so many ways and so once he

started talking about the pandemic and vaccines and stuff i just kept asking more and more questions because i was like this guy is um just yeah he's super smart and um some of you might not like this episode well let me be specific if you're anti-vaccine or express significant vaccine hesitancy you probably will not like or agree with what Mark says, which is all the more reason why you should listen to it. You don't need to agree. You need to absorb, listen, process, push back, do your own fact checking and so on. I enjoyed the conversation. And then we ended up getting into what's the church supposed to look like?

What's the role of the church on the other side of pandemic? Is there another, is there another side of the pandemic or are we entering into the new norm? And again, Mark has lots of interesting, well thought out thoughts on that question. So welcome back to the show for the second time, D1 and over, Mark Sayers. Thank you.

All right. Hey, friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I'm here with Mark Sayers, backed by popular demand. I've had a lot of people reach out to me and say, Hey, can we get Mark back on? Especially since Mark, the last time we talked was pre-pandemic. And so a lot has happened in the last couple of years. So thanks so much for being willing to come back on the podcast. My absolute pleasure. And I'm just going to go ahead and say it just for my audience,

because they're not going to have a clue, but we've been talking for about 20 minutes. I guess I didn't hit record. So I had to stop Mark mid thought. And he's, so yeah, we've already had this discussion, but we're not to have it over again for the audience. Cause it's, yeah, it was just everything you're saying was so enlightening so let's start go back to um tell us about the pandemic in australia and kind of the different governmental response to that um i know you know we see stuff on the news and our news outlets are so just tailored to what people want to see and they've become such an echo chamber. So people have probably an idea of what is going on in Australia that's probably more tailored to what the news outlet wants you to see

versus what's actually going on. So can you give us a snapshot to how Australia, or in particular Melbourne where you live, has handled the pandemic? Yeah. Well, I think you have this issue that sometimes there's this fantasy view of Australia where you had the Cro the pandemic. Yeah. Well, I think, yeah, you have this issue that sometimes there's this fantasy view of Australia where you had the Crocodile Dundee, Crocodile Hunter, you know, wilderness, you know, Australia, people who sort of live

out in the bush somewhere and, you know, wrestle snakes or something. So I think that's now changed and now Australia is the great totalitarian, you know, communist pandemic land in some viewers' minds. But yeah, so Australia took, in some ways, you could say more of an Asian approach. Obviously, there's a lot of diversity in Asia responses, but even how China and some of those countries have responded, Vietnam, to the pandemic. And so we cut off from the rest of the world, and we pursued, particularly probably the first half of the pandemic, a COVID zero. So if there were cases, lock everything down until

it gets to zero, open up, go about things as normal, but with the borders shut. So it's really hard to get in and out of Australia. You've got to quarantine. And then when there was an outbreak, you'd have quite sort of strict measures in terms of curfews and stuff like this to get the numbers right down. And that worked well for a lot of the time. But then when Delta came just in the last few months, that's been a bit more difficult, but we're at a rapid vaccination sort of rate at the moment. I think we're the fastest vaccinating jurisdiction in the world currently, and we're going to sort of hit the 90s and stuff like that so melbourne's been in the world's longest lockdown um but other parts of australia have actually been open for a lot of it um and uh the big difference i think with australia the new zealand is the measurement we were looking at is deaths so one way to put it i would explain

to people overseas is australia and island are very pro-life when it comes to the pandemic where other countries in the US have been more pro-choice. You're deliberately using those categories. That's so funny. I had somebody tell me recently who was this person was on the very pro-vaccine side

and was very frustrated at mainly people on the right that were not for the vaccine. And so he started calling it the Trump vaccine. He's like, wow, you don't want to get the Trump vaccine? He's like trying to mess with their categories. He's like – anyway, I don't – I'm so nervous. You start touching the political bear and the pandemic,

and you might as well be touching an actual bear. So, I mean, would you say, and this might make some people upset, would you say that pushing the vaccine really hard, like high vaccination rates combined with strict lockdown has been effective in leveling, not just leveling the curve, but actually getting down to close to zero. I mean, that's pretty remarkable.

That's a huge debate, right? In America, at least. Yeah. So for a lot of it, like the first part before we fully got vaccines out, you know, Australia didn't have cases for a long time. So Australia and New Zealand, New Zealand's thing, they had about a six week lockdown at the beginning, which was really intense. And then they lived pandemic free. You know, there's whole football games and concerts and everything until Delta came back recently.

And even still, there's large parts of Australia and New Zealand living without the virus currently. So Perth, our most western city, has lived without the virus. They just have a football championship over there and it just is totally normal. So you've had large parts of the country which have been able to operate with an unimpeded economy. So, yeah, so that was effective. And then what we're seeing around the world, you know,

you look at something like Portugal at the moment, which has got really high vaccination, Denmark, that's the key out, high vaccination. But that's going to be the key out for the world. So basically, the threat that we have coming down the road is that the less vaccinated populations you have, the higher chance you have of variants developing. So we have a sort of thing where either you have, it could sort of burn out, but then there's a really significant chance that we're going to a vaccine escaping variant um come um which is highly transmissible like like delta which will be a disaster for the world okay oh wow okay so

let me and i know you know you're not a scientist or claiming to be a scientist but everything you say is always so incredibly well thought out very balanced and everything so i would love to get your thought on this because there's there's that there's kind of two arguments. One would be, at least in America, one would be, and I hate adding to the politicalization, but I think this might come from the right more. And it would say, look, anybody can get vaccinated. It's all there. If you choose not to, that's your choice. If you're vaccinated, you're more or less protected. I mean, things can happen. There's breakthrough cases, whatever. But hospitalization and death are way, way, way, way, way dropped.

So let's just live life. Like, you don't want to get vaccinated. It's on you. It's available. So it's like, let's just, like, let's move on. It's done in the sense of what are you going to do? The other argument on the other side of saying no we all need to get vaccinated is i think just what you said right like until we all

get vaccinated or all have t-cell immunity i think these variants well actually no i don't i don't even know that the variants will keep reproducing and spreading but if we were all vaccinated that wouldn't happen is that an accurate summary of I guess, at least the second side especially? Yes. And just again to, you know, maybe I can get away with more here because I'm a foreigner. So speaking from my kind, I'm actually speaking in Australia. Yeah, so if you talk to epidemiologists around the world,

the argument you just said, on one side there'd be people who make that in a political sense. The second argument you made around everyone getting vaccinated is what every epidemiologist would would argue um so so effectively a really interesting way to frame this is that a lot of our political understanding comes from a western political tradition which felt that it had conquered nature so once conquering nature it then worked on the problems of human nature so some of the ways of that was political science in the west and you know so you look at this idea of a hobbesian you know universe where everything was like dangerous in in nature and we felt that

we'd conquered nature so modernity was based on this foundation we've conquered nature so then we work on things like human freedom equality these. These are the problems of human nature. What's happening with the pandemic, and I believe what's also going to be, this is where the pandemic is a portal into the next world, is that the environment too, is that we have now the return of nature. And nature does not care less about your human freedom. So we're moving back into what humans have struggled with throughout history, which is the return of nature. So for example, yeah, when you've got, so just to look at say coronaviruses,

we know that coronavirus is sort of originated in bats and somewhere in Hubei province there were bats. There's a whole bunch of arguments whether that was, you know, gain of function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but thei province there were bats. There's a whole bunch of arguments whether that was, you know, gain-of-function research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, but the original thing came from bats. So that's called a virus reservoir. So a virus reservoir is where the virus can circulate

and then can jump across. So a lot of the pandemics we have in the world come from an animal reservoir and then jump across into humans. So Ebola and stuff like this was, you know, people in Africa eating bushmeat and stuff like that and jumps across into humans. So Ebola and stuff like this was, you know, people in Africa eating bushmeat and stuff like that and jumps across to humans. So you have human reservoirs. So basically what happens is you have, the virus is continually trying to infect everyone and it's evolving and

adapting the whole time. Now, sometimes it will burn out. But for example, what happened with Delta is in India, it was like continually trying. And then a new, better variant came, which was more transmissible, and began to affect more people. And we saw that instantly the effects in the world as Delta happened. And so there's different things in a virus.

There's things like transmissibility, there's severity, and then there's vaccine escape. Delta is maybe a little bit severe. We're not more sure. It could be the same, but it was more transmissible. The nightmare scenario is we get a more transmissible, a more deadly, and a vaccine escape. And there is a significant chance of that happening.

So when you've got a large group of unvaccinated people, so things like smallpox and so on, we vaccinated that sort of almost out of existence, polio and stuff like this, because the world was slowly vaccinated and that disappears. So part of the argument of you do your thing, I'll do mine, that's an argument that's not coming from epidemiology. That's coming from people looking at a political framework of, we'll deal with this as a problem of human nature. That's your belief, that's mine. But what we're entering into now is this world where reality is returning in the form of nature, where there's consequential decisions that we just can't agree to disagree on. Hello, friends. I want to invite you to come join us for our first ever Theology

in the Raw Exiles in Babylon conference, March 31st to April 2nd. At this conference, we're going to be challenged to think like exiles about race, sexuality, gender, critical race theory, hell, transgender identities, climate change, creation, care, American politics, and what it means to love, love, love your Democratic and Republican neighbor as yourself. Different views will be presented. Everyone will be challenged to think critically, compassionately, and Christianly through all kinds of different topics. We've got loads of awesome speakers that are going to be there. Thabiti Anubhawale, Chris Date, Derwin Gray, Ellie Bonilla, Jackie Hill Perry, Evan Wickham, John Tyson, Tony Scarcello, Sandy Richter, Kimika Titi, Heather Scriba, Street Hams, and many others

will be joining us for the first ever Theology in the RAW Conference. All the information is in the show notes, or you can just go to PressAndSprinkle.com to register. And I would recommend registering sooner than later. Space is limited. You can come and join us in person in Boise, or you can stream it online. Again, PressAndSprinkle.com for all the info. Decisions that we just can't agree to disagree on. So you're saying as long as there's a significant number of people who aren't vaccinated you're just opening up many more doors for more variants to be created possibly a very deadly variant not just a more contagious one like yeah the delta is more contagious hasn't yet seemed to be more deadly i don't think but you're saying we can have another variant that could be way worse.

Yes. And let's just snap our fingers and say the whole world's vaccinated tomorrow, then does that mean COVID would pretty much fizzle out really shortly? Yeah, so it's got nowhere to go. There is always the slight danger that it could go into an animal reservoir. This is a bizarre thing. They did testing on deer in Michigan recently, and

deers are raging with coronavirus. So it is jumping into animal reservoirs, but it would pretty much disappear in the world if everyone was vaccinated. What about when they get natural immunity? They get it, they live through it, they have T-cell immunity. Is that the same as being

vaccinated in terms of what we're talking about here of contracting it and spreading it there is elements the problem we have with with um natural immunity is that it wavers so there are people who are getting covered more than once and it's different on different individuals so there could be a thing where if we didn't have anything and it went around for years so we could go let's let's just go let it rip and get herd immunity right but you're going to see millions and millions of people die like so already it's interesting the economist um magazine just did a big study on looking at excess deaths in the world so currently the last i looked and i looked a few weeks ago but you're looking around the official who is that there's around 4.5 million people die in the world.

But when you look at excess deaths, and you look particularly in the developing world, that's up around 15 to 20 million. Now, you look at that with, you know, you look at the US, which is, I think, around over 700,000 deaths now, you take away any contagion, you take away any measurements to stop, and you take away how many people have been protected by vaccines. You know, so if no one in the world locked down, there were no vaccines, we would be looking at millions and millions of deaths already. Now, imagine if that went up in severity. So SARS, which was, you know, broke out before, that was less transmissible, but higher death rate. Right, right.

So COVID was not as high death rate as SARS but higher transmissibility. But if those two line up, and particularly with vaccine escape, and also vaccine escape would also get past natural immunity where we would be in real trouble. And that's a possibility. People don't realise how COVID's going. I just read a thing recently by one of the sort of a few leading epidemiologists. They're saying in the next year, we're going to generate a new variant.

Highly likely. So yeah, this thing may be over. It may not be. This could be. So Larry Brilliant, who's one of the world's leading epidemiologists, he said, this is the start. We're still in the start phase of the pandemic. Oh my word. Not good news, mate.

Well, I mean, it sounds like there is the possibility possibility if what you're saying is correct i'm in australia especially being an island and being strict about keeping other people out as long as there's you guys are looking like you're in pretty good shape right i mean close to an 80 vaccine so yeah so you know i think, yeah, so like Portugal is, I think, probably the leading thing to look at at the moment. And they're running out of people to vaccinate. And, you know, life's returned to normal, you know, effectively. We've got some contagion measurements. So, you know, really where a country is going to have to get to. And I think you'll see most of the developing world, I think, will effectively get to around 90.

But when you've got a population who hasn't, you've just got this continual sort of punishment that's happening. So again, you probably already said this. I just want to get clarity in my own mind. So you're saying natural like herd immunity isn't going to do the same thing because you're still giving time for the virus to mutate and spread and different variants to develop. Yeah, because I've heard people say, well, yeah, you have 50%, 60% have been vaccinated. The other, whatever, have already had it. And after six months to a year from now, two years, it's going to be gone. You're saying with natural immunity or whatever, that's not the case.

Yeah. So it's because the game changer is variants. So for example, there was talk that you need 50%, 60% herd immunity in the population of vaccinations or natural immunity. When Delta came along, people put that up to 80. There's even people saying it needs to be higher now. So if we get another variant, that could go even higher again. Wow.

You must do a ton of reading on this because I have friends who are experts in this area. This is what they do. They're scientists and everything. You sound just like them, but you're not. I just realized early on, what I saw, there was an invitation for us to move, you know, we've been in a complicated world. A complicated world gives us problems in a linear idea. We're now moving to a complex world,

which is a network decentralized world, which operates according to the rules of complexity, which is very different. It's nonlinear. And I realized that the pandemic was an invitation to learn the ways of complexity so that's one thing i've really sort of tried to work on in the last sort of year you know years so there's very similar patterns do you think so what i mean i want to i'm sorry i didn't mean to talk about vaccine i didn't plan on this but i mean no no no

happy more than happy to um well i so um what are the arguments against or arguments for vaccine hesitancy that you see? And another question is, what about people who are young and healthy? Like I have four kids or other people that have like teenagers or whatever. And there's, you know, this is a new technology and there's no long-term testing. Obviously, it can't be long-term testing because it's new technology but um what i know some other people on the other side they're super smart well read and and they they have vaccine hesitancy i've been vaccinated by the way because my audience is trying to pin me somewhere and i've been vaccinated my wife you know so um but i'm just i'm always interested in like what's the other side say like are they all a bunch of idiots or are there

is there anything to the other side you know that are people who are nervous about the vaccine well i mean you've got you've got you know sort of a lot of the technology that's used in the vaccine was already being used in cancer treatments so it's not necessarily that it's um okay uh it hasn't been used for a long time. The second thing is another way to think of it is like an Amish barn raising. So, for example, if you and I were going to build a house, it might take us a year or something, you know, whereas if like a thousand builders joined us, it may take, you know, I mean, China built a hospital in like a week or something at the beginning of the pandemic because they just had so many people. And there's a video online in China where they built a train station in 24 hours.

So what people need to realize is that the world saw this. And it's interesting, just to frame it another way, people often say it's politicized. I've asked people, what issue has the world more agreed on than a response to coronavirus in history? Everything from Islamic republics to North Korea were shooting people who were trying to get in, you know, killing them because they were so afraid of coronavirus. So you've had everything from socialist regimes to highly capitalist regimes to Islamic regimes to, you know, every political model. If you listen to all the scientists, they're almost all saying the exact same thing. Every political model, if you listen to all the scientists, they're almost all saying the exact same thing.

You've got some countries which are pushed back politically, but the scientific consensus is pretty much agreed on these things. So you had literally the world's best scientists using the internet to work on these things at a rapid rate. So in many ways, it was an Amish barn race. Oh, wait. Can I add? Yeah, go ahead. No, you go ahead. I actually think one of the reasons that this is, and again, it's really interesting if you

look at the world at the moment, virtually no one in the developing world is like, oh, I don't know. They're just like, give us the vaccines, please, Western world people. And I've thought about that a lot. There's a writer on, he writes on, he's an academic who writes on conspiracy theories, Timothy Malley. And he talked about a thing he called an agency panic. He says that conspiracy theories are actually birthed by a sense that modern people in the West have been told that they have heaps of autonomy, freedom, they're individual, they have the ability to self-create. But the reality is in a complex world, you don't have as much autonomy as you think. And I think a lot of what around vaccine hesitancy is is we're being

told you work it out for yourself you do you do the the science etc etc um we don't have as much autonomy as we think yeah and so a pandemic is short-circuiting you know i i don't know how to fly a um a380 i i've i've i've gotten in a380 planes and flown to london and america i have no idea how to fly them and even if i did a five-year course i probably still wouldn't know how to how they worked um and that's what the vaccine's like there's an element it's like you do not understand this you have to trust the experts. And that goes against our egalitarian human autonomy myth of the West. That's why I think that's more at the heart of this. It's not a scientific argument.

These are actually political arguments, and they're undermining particularly, I think, some of the political ideology that we have. What about the argument that, like, I've heard some people say, yeah, if you're older you know, older, you have comorbidities, you're severely, you know, obese or whatever other underlying health conditions, obviously, this population has been highly more targeted. But if you're young, healthy, 18 years old, you're super healthy, obviously, there's a risk of anything. But there's also

there are some, you know, unknowns with the with the vaccine, what's the trade of anything, but there are some unknowns with the vaccine. What's the trade-off? So I've heard people say like, well, I'm going to take my chances with this because I'm not really in an at-risk kind of situation. Is there any truth to that? Or are there some – could they – I mean, I guess – It's still seeing it. Well, I would just say it's – I think the counterargument might be – well, did I just let you say it i would just say it's i think the counter argument might be well i just let you say it or i'll say like the counter argument be say well as long as you're not

vaccinated you're still part of the global problem of keeping this thing going and variant spreading and number two we don't know if the next variant is going to target young people kind of like like another virus might. Is that? Yes. Yeah, exactly. So interesting, the Spanish flu, which came in 1918, 1919, affected younger people more. Right. So there's potential for rise to come and affect younger people more.

Secondly, two things. So number one, increasingly we're seeing the long-term effects of COVID. So there's things like long COVID. Increasingly we're seeing the neurological effects of someone having COVID plus the effects on the effects of COVID. So there's things like long COVID. Increasingly, we're seeing the neurological effects of someone having COVID plus the effects on the organs of the body. So sort of health scientists are predicting that down the road, you know, there's going to be significant damage to heart, all these viruses.

So you might be sort of think you're fine, but there's stuff that's going to get you in trouble and that's going to put a burden on it. And so we don't know all that stuff. That's a more frightening unknown than you know the effects of the vaccine necessarily the second thing is people are still thinking about this through an individualist lens yeah like again in complexity um yeah you may be fine you may be young and fit but you may give it to your grandmother right um who who um and what we know is that the

vaccine is probably going to have to have boosters in six months because they do whine with efficacy um that um you um just as you know there's a new flu jab every year um or flu shot uh so yeah you may be fine but your actions will affect others and this is where it gets the it undermines the individualist thing so so you're not just taking it for yourself so it's not just an individual choice. It's actually a communal choice. Yeah. We don't do choices like that in America. We don't do communal choices. I mean, yeah. I got

friends on both sides. And some are not thinking. They're just kind of going off anecdotal. I heard of an aunt somewhere that got the virus and died, and maybe she did, you know. But what about that? I've heard someone say that people are dying from the vaccine. Is that – I've heard that from a few different people. I've never seen the studies or anything, but is that – has there been cases of that?

I mean – They have. people i've never seen studies or anything but is that has there been cases of that i mean they have some people who have passed away but it's your one in millions um just as people pass away from tylenol high numbers um so so the people pass away from peanut butter um and um so there's a tiny tiny percentage some of that's been overplayed um but the amount the death rate compared to the to the to the actual um you know deaths it's utterly incomparable so there's there's chances in a million but you got more chance there was a great graphic someone did here you know basically going to get your shot and you know you are thousands of times more likely to fall out of bed and die that morning on your way to the shot and get hit by lightning and get struck by falling plane than you were to die with the vax yeah and what about somebody i heard somewhere like with younger girls like teenage girls affecting future pregnancies or anything like

that making them infertile are these just all kind of myths swirling around or again there might be yeah so a lot a lot of that is myths. Okay. All right. Well, let's move on and I'll forward you all the emails I'm going to get for this. Yes, sir. All right. Church. Let's talk about the church.

You made a comment. I actually wrote it down. Let me see if I got it right, that this pandemic is a portal into the next world, that life on the other side of this, if there is even another side, is going to be vastly different than before. And you kind of unpacked that a little bit. Can you kind of dive deeper? And when you say portal to the next world, I'm thinking like on the eve of the invention of the internet, on the eve of the invention of the printing press, on the eve of the invention of the internet, on the eve of the invention of the printing press, on the eve of the conversion of Constantine,

or some of these just major changes in society that left the church looking different, sometimes vastly different than before. Or not just a church, but society. Are you saying that we're on another eve of something? Which would be interesting, because the internet was just a couple, that's a of decades ago.

Are we really facing yet another back-to-back kind of world change? How should Christians think of that? Yeah, so I think we're coming to the end of what I would call the American century, and there's two parts to that. So the first part of that was probably, you look at 1945 to perhaps the 1970s,

and that was about America being at the top of the world as the world's leading industrial economy and if you think about that time there's lots of centralization as a great energy uh power is centralized into the united states power is centralized into hollywood into los angeles power was centralized into det Detroit for the car industry. You know, there was this great power centralised and that then shaped institutions. So institutions centralised power to themselves, that hierarchy that had often a very powerful leader at the top of that hierarchy. But then things began to sort of come awry a little bit

in the 1970s and there was this rethinking of. And there was this model of really, well, how do we sort of then have almost an American led globalization. And so the world slowly moved to this idea where there was this, you know, some of it was also done after World War Two, you know, an international based rules order, but with America leading it. So institutions like the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, all in a sense were heavily influenced by the US and created by the US. And the idea of creating a global market where goods and trade could be flowed.

Now, obviously, part of the sort of thing that made that difficult was the Cold War. There was two competing models in the world. There was the competing sort of communist, Soviet, Eastern Bloc model, and there was the Western uh world and those two clashed in a cold war now in 1989 the billion wall falls and there's this incredible moment of elation and uh not long afterwards apartheid ended in south africa and both felt like this sense we're heading to this new world which is slowly just gliding towards a utopia. Also around that time, jet travel becomes cheaper.

People can move around the world. It becomes normal to take a holiday in another country. That's not out of the reach of a lot of middle-class people. You have the internet. It begins with a great utopian fanfare with the belief that if we can just talk to people horizontally without politicians and institutions and elites being in the way that the world will move to a wonderful place and um uh really we had sort of 30 years there i think of

euphoria annihilation uh you had people like alan greenspan the chairman of the fed saying that we're in now a sort of new zone of continual just growth um and the economy and you know the washington census sort of free market ideology uh was you know the world was moving towards it Francis Fikiyama the political scientist wrote an article called an article at the end of history which became a book which was that history's come to an end the great struggles are over the world is all going to move towards a liberal democracy Russia will become a liberal democracy China will eventually um and that was what has shaped our thinking that shaped not just the geopolitical realm it shaped the individual realm and what that said is your life

the world's a playground the world's gonna get smoother you can just go and do your thing without impediment and live your best life and we're going to live in this sort of apolitical seinfeld world where nothing really matters but you can self-create. And I think we've come to the end of that. And it was already coming to an end. It was a series of shocks. September 11th's a shock. The global financial crisis was a shock.

The political upheaval we've seen were unexpected populism results, which went against what elites thought, everything brexit to um the election of dole trump and and i think the pandemic saw an acceleration of those things in so many countries so the portal language is actually from the indian novelist the rindhati roy who said that in the financial times at the beginning of the pandemic the the pandemics are portals to a new kind of world so it's not just that this is a hiccup and we had a pandemic and our life's going to get back to normal. We've entered into a complex world and in complex systems like the virus, things bounce off each other.

So one thing we're finding with corona is that people who live in cities with high smog levels are being hit worse because the problem of smog and how the effect on the lungs with a respiratory illness means that those two crises come together. One of the things we're experiencing in the world at the moment is a supply chain crisis because when large parts of the world got locked down, people started, instead of going on a holiday to Cancun,

I'm going to spend that money building something in my backyard. Timber. Everyone needs timber. Everyone started buying stuff online. And you had then China, southern China, which makes all this stuff, had a resurgent outbreak in its factories. And all these crises begin to bounce into each other. So what we're going to have is we had a coronavirus crisis, but that's intersecting with a potential economic crisis, which is connecting with supply chain crises,

which is now connecting with a new geopolitical crisis and an environmental crisis. So we're moving into this stage of an interconnected world. So the more connected the world is, the more chaotic things tend to get. i'm saying that a period we're coming to the end of a period um but we're not necessarily entering into a new period instead we're entering into the liminal space that i call i use the term gray zone where two eras overlap and that's a really confusing time so it's not like we end and we're like it's not like someone ended like oh the dark ages ended on wed on Wednesday and on Thursday the meeting period began. There's always overlap.

And I think we're in a confusing overlap where you can see the new world coming, but it's not fully formed. And you can see elements of the old world, it's disappearing and it's really confusing. So all the markers you look to for meaning and sense and purpose are there, confused, upside down. And that's what the church is currently finding itself in that context. Hey friends, hope you're enjoying the conversation so far.

And if you are enjoying this conversation and others like it, would you consider supporting the Theology in the Raw ministry by going to patreon.com forward slash theology in the raw. You can support the show for as little as five bucks a month and get access to lots of different kinds

of premium content like monthly patreon only podcasts and blogs and q a sessions again you can go to patreon.com forward slash theology nara or all the info is in the show notes she's currently finding herself in that context wow golly i've um i read a book at the early stages of the pandemic. It was by an epidemiologist. How do you say it? Epidemiologist. Epidemiologist. Pretty high up guy. He's been – he was an expert in like SARS, the first SARS and then Ebola and other.

Just guys super qualified. And that book – I forgot the name of it. He wrote it probably three years ago. And he even has a chapter in there predicting another outbreak that will probably start in China. He wrote it in 2017. So fascinating. A lot of people are like, well, this is weird. But he's like, it's just high-density population, intersection between the markets and animals and people and everything.

And he even created a fictitious scenario in that book. I'm blanking on his name. Where he kind of said, imagine that something like this might happen. And it wasn't, I mean, to the T what happened, but there was about 70% overlap. It was fascinating. But one of the things he said in that book, something that might be old news to scientists, whatever,

that I never even realized is that um antibiotics how that has revolutionized humanity the development of antibiotics but apparently they're becoming less and less and less effective because they've been i guess overused over prescribed so that are so that these diseases are now fighting their way back in and we don't really know like our memory is so short that we don't remember life before antibiotics but he was saying almost casually like like it's just an obvious fact that we're going to be entering into probably if something doesn't happen a world that was similar to, you know, pre 19th or 20th century when, yeah, you, I mean, you can die from getting a cut and get infected like the rest of humanity for the rest of human history.

Like you just, you know, uh, we've been living in this kind of bubble for the last hundred years with antibiotics, but the new world might not have that. Um, is that, is that my – have you thought about that? Is that old news to like scientists? It kind of – but it made me think what you're saying, this new world, this portal into this new world where we have controlled nature and we protected ourselves from kind of these things that the rest of human civilization

wasn't protected from. We might be going back into that. Yes. So it's the return of nature so yeah one is the antibiotic drop-off is a big one um also the more so you know you sort of have people say oh you get this pandemic every hundred years but what's interesting is what people don't realize as well is that the more you push into nature and more human environments overlap nature the more you overlap with the natural world and expose yourself to new viruses. Now, the more the world's connected. So like where I live here in Melbourne, in this particular part of town, lots of Chinese people. And when we first went into lockdown,

they were like, anyone who's been in China in the last three weeks has to at least spend a week at home. So school kids. Now, that was the end of china's new year there were schools nearby here where 50 of students weren't in class because they'd all been in china the last three weeks and i was like this is amazing like wow that many people are just going backwards and forwards to countries so you know i in a sense wasn't surprised by the pandemic because i've stood in dubai airport and just looked around and gone man like one virus gets out here it's going to go everywhere in the world in 24 hours and just looked around and gone, man, like one virus gets out here, it's going to go everywhere in the world in 24 hours. And that's what happened. So,

connecting ourselves to nature, the more the world is connected, the more fragile we are. And that's not just true of bacteria and viruses. That's also true of ideas. You know, like you think about the fact that, you know, someone in a troll farm in Russia can influence someone in another country or even things like just even ideas can be infectious in the world and bad ideas can be infectious in the world. connected world um and that means that um uh anthony giddens the philosopher said um globalization brings you know what was far near but also distances you from what is near so you might be open to a virus that's in hubei province in china and you might become radicalized by an isis video on the other side of the world, but you may not know that people threw houses down in your street, whereas 20 years ago, you wouldn't. Ah, it's kind of getting depressing. Given that, let's just assume that everything you're saying is correct, or more or less

correct. We're entering into a new portal that might reflect some of the things we thought we had eradicated in the past. How should the church think through this and what changes do Christians in the church need to make as we venture forward? Well, I think there's two things primarily happening. So, the first one is that if you look at the idea of secularization and secularization thesis is the idea that as the world becomes more developed and more industrialized and more modernized, the lesson that people need for God. And, you know, there's even research done about this. And he talks about the idea that countries where you are less worried about dying, the less religious you are. So in a sense, the less you have to deal with stuff lower down on Maslow's hierarchy, the more then politics becomes about really obscure elements of identity politics or this. If you just presume, I'm not going to get sick.

I'm not going to die. Every meal is going to be provided for, your idea is more like what store am I going to go to at the mall? That secularises culture. Now, what's happening is the Maslow's hierarchy is going down and I have a friend, she did some research here in Australia and said that what's happening is Generation Z is actually, they're going down on the hierarchy where the questions they're asking now on this side of

the pandemic are much more basic security stuff. I just want to be able to afford a house one day. I just want to live in a secure world. I think about my daughter at the beginning of the pandemic in that first sort of crazy six weeks, we went to the supermarket and it was when everyone was panic buying and there was empty shelves. Now, I never saw that growing up. I presumed the supermarket's always going to work. That's going to be in her mind. You know, in my kid's mind now is that school may shut down and you've got no choice in it. The world's a lot more unpredictable.

So I think that what's actually going to happen in the world, and I think it's already happening, is there's an evangelistic opportunity. think that what's actually going to happen in the world, and I think it's already happening, is there's an evangelistic opportunity. I sort of feel like a lot of the Western churches getting so frustrated and looking at it from a personal perspective, then like the idea that, hang on, individualism is being short-circuited by the pandemic and hello people, there are consequences and you're not your own mini God who can do what the heck you want. And you're part of a bigger connected thing. That's a brilliant evangelistic opportunity um and you know in the 90s i remember in the 90s there were books about the emergence of post-modernism and relativism was going to be so difficult for evangelism because people would be impenetrable because you explain the gospel and someone goes

well that's your truth that's mine yeah um that's falling apart um that entered our political sphere it's short circuit political sphere but the moment my concern and you know with love particularly in the u.s is at the moment when christians should say yes look exactly here's the myths falling down there is they've found themselves as equally wrapped up in the myths so that's number one the second one also i'm happy to happy to pause there. Well, I mean, no, every sentence you say, I've got five different thoughts in my head. I don't, it made me, I mean, I imagine the church in Acts, and I know we always go back to Acts and everything, but I mean, yeah, you had a world that was extremely unpredictable.

You know, 80 to 90% of the people lived below the poverty line. 20% of the Roman Empire were slaves. You had just, I mean, it was a lot more chaotic. People living hand to mouth, two meals a day. And then you had, you know, 10, 20% or maybe 10% that would be lower middle class by our standards. And then the upper elite, another 5%, 10% that were wealthy. And the church, it needed to be the community to survive. And so when you read Acts 2, Acts 4, and you have economic redistribution, we just don't have the lenses the categories to read that in

in the power you know like and and when you belong to the church like there's that sense of like economic social medical like benefits of having this tight-knit community especially when poor people are belonging and wealthy or Christians are being generous, opening up their homes and everything. Or in that passage in Mark 10, 1029, where Jesus says, nobody is left behind, fathers and mothers and brothers and fields,

which is in an agrarian context is a statement of economic security, who won't receive back in this present life, mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and fields, you know, along with, so, so you had this reward of community, not just, Hey, I might make a few friends or talk to people on Sunday, but it's a whole polis, right? It's a whole community in, in, in the,

in the capital C sense of the term community. And I'm just, just as you're talking, it made me think of all that, like the possibility and necessity of the church to embody that in a growing chaotic world. We just can't be attending church services as our raison d'etre of being a Christian anymore, it seems like. And I always have to add to foot, no, nothing wrong with attending church services, but in a chaotic world, we're going to need more than that. I don't know. Is that? Yes. Oh, totally. And it's perfect segue into, I guess my second point,

which is exactly what you're saying, that what we're seeing is the death of the cultural. So, okay. We're seeing the death of the consumer cultural Christian thing of coming to church. We're seeing the revivification of cultural Christianity, which we can talk about. So just at the moment, cultural Christianity is dying. It emerges in a new form or an older form. It's like a virus. Stopping at that point.

It's like a variant. It's like a zombie. So, yeah. So I think what's happening is that if you think again to what I talked about, the American industrial century, the model was build a centralized institution that everyone are drawn to magnetically with a charismatic leader. And that's really been the model of the churches. But now in a decentralized world, the energy of the world is decentralizing. That means you can't just live in this, you know, here's so-and-so church, and it's our own little universe here, and we're disconnected from the outside world.

Like the idea of the church retreating from culture, there is no place in a decentralized, globalized world to retreat from culture. And so I think that model of attenders versus apprentices of Jesus, as my friend Terry Walling would say, that attenders model is currently being massively subverted. And that's going to be a huge change point that the contemporary church model is going to have to get their heads around. Wow. You're a pastor. You've been a pastor a number of years.

Does your church look different now than two years ago? Of course, sometimes you've got to turn a big ship. It takes a while. Does your church look different now than two years ago? Or what, of course, you know, sometimes you got to turn a big ship, you know, takes a while. But like, what are some things you're practically doing as a pastor in your church to start maybe preparing your people and discipling them through this? What I realized is that sometimes the environment is the best teaching tool. And the pandemic has been an incredible teaching tool um it's been terrible and people have died and i don't want to downplay that right um but so for example we had a long time not meeting so we didn't meet from really march until january we were able to come back for another bit and then we had to shut down again in june july and we haven't

met so we're going back online um and the church has been changed you know there were people who left you know and and what i've been amazed is you know my little statement is there was a virus before the virus and the virus before the virus was this thing that was slowly taking over the church where people were coming less and less people were making up their own theology and their own values uh and we're all a bit like laissez-faire about it or in denial because there was still sort of backsides on seats in some places um so the fact that we had people who left after six weeks not even because of polarization or this or that we're just like oh i'm not i don't really believe this after six weeks like that happened at churches across the

place um that that's a that's what were we doing wrong previously that those people kept coming for years? So I see that switch of moving from an attendance model, and I still want people to come and be part of it. Again, we'll do Sunday services when we return, but moving to an apprentice of Jesus model. So basically, if someone comes to your church, and it doesn't matter whether they're exploring faith for the first time, or they're a seasoned believer, if they're comfortable not growing, I know I'm doing something wrong. And, you know, I think that the model is that we need a devoted model of Christianity built around discipleship, where people are pushing into Jesus. Christianity built around discipleship where people are pushing into Jesus.

And I think this has been almost that sort of, you know, God is using this to show how much we were reliant on models that perhaps weren't delivering in the way that we thought. And I think for leaders as well, there was like a power that leaders had. We get everyone in the room, but what do you rely on once you can't do that? Alan Hirsch, you know, my friend, my friend he said you know it's like if you want to teach someone how to play chess take the queen off the board and he said what happened with the pandemic is sunday services were our queen and we had to take them off the board um so i've had that in my mind the whole time so i don't know what we look like when we we regather in a few weeks it's a profoundly

changed church um and i actually have been pushing into how do we be a remnant, not just a church that looks nice on a Sunday. So when you return, let's say you return full capacity or whatever, you could do, you know, at least in terms of gathering on Sundays, life is back to normal, quote unquote.

Will that look differently for you? Are you still kind of exploring ways in which you can help people to not be so addicted to the queen? I love that analogy, by the way. That's props to Alan there. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, one thing we noticed when we came back, there's less volunteerism. And at first we were like, oh, man, that's hard.

And, you know, we had a lot of volunteers on Sunday and, you you know staff are leading teams of volunteers and and we found that that didn't come back you know people were coming back slowly and that's happened everywhere um so the staff more ran things in terms of like you know on the door but then we realized you know we always had this thought like yeah like we could have someone who's coming to our church i'm part of that you know red church whatever and you know i move, you know, red church, whatever, and, you know, I move chairs. You know, like, would you rather someone actually was, people have got less and less time because it's a busy world. Would you rather that people spend their contribution to the church moving a chair or actually learning

how to be a better disciple or serving the community or whatever? And so I think that we're looking at how do we be more impactful with our discipleship. You know, we created this thing when we first went online of Huddle. So we put people into groups of three for mutual discipleship and accountability, and they're connected on Skype or Zoom or whatever. So I think we're going to move, you know, push deeper

into discipleship is something that we do. And then what Sunday becomes is, you know, I think a place of encountering the presence of God, of hearing the word, but it's not trying to do all things to all people. I think it's what Sundays was and less entertainment. Like I think Sundays is not, if we have to entertain people on a Sunday, in essence, they're coming for the wrong reasons. Yeah.

I've been thinking through, I don't know, I go back and forth on this. And the role as specifically a monological Sunday sermon in a post-internet, post-podcast, post-pandemic kind of world. On the one hand, I was just reading a book about this. It wasn't about this. It was about something completely different, but he kind of brought up, it was talking about education and the value of lectures, which is passive learning versus other things that cultivate active learning,

where the student is more involved in the learning process. And he said, statistically, students always prefer dynamic lectures, but in terms of learning outcomes, it's always active learning where they're involved, where they're part of the process, where they actually learn the most and to gain the most. And then of course, you know, he's just talking about knowledge and stuff and we're talking about something kind of different, but still like just, it made me think about the value and role of monological preaching. It kind of ties into why so many people are kind of not coming back to church anymore. If the main draw is a good, maybe, oration, it will never be as good as what they can find somebody else. So that's kind of, if,

if church, the church experience is reduced to passive reception of a good oration and I'm putting that, maybe that's too snarky to, you know, um, I just, I don't know. I just, and yet I know like you read, you read the speeches of Martin Luther King and whole movements have been, you know, fostered and thrive through monologues, you know, the great speeches of history. So I don't want to downplay that either. They have the power. In fact, there's sermons I listened to 25 years ago that will have forever shaped, you know, my Christianity. I still think about early sermons I heard, my conversion experience. I'm like, I can still almost quote some of the stuff I heard because they just had such an impact on my life.

So on the other hand, I do like a, I don't know, like I don't want to downplay the power of a powerful monologue, but it just made me think like, what is there? Are we going to have to kind of rethink even the role of preaching in a church in light of everything we've been talking about? And I really don't have anything beyond that. Just a lot of questions. Have you thought through mean that in particular yeah i mean when when we first we were pretty experimental when we first sort of started so i like when we first started we just met in a cafe and i just would have a conversation with people like i'd sort of talk and be like backwards and forwards so we fully went down that road one thing i did learn was that people, it was very attractive to Christians. Ironically, doing that in a cafe was most attractive to Christians

and non-Christians found it totally weird and scary. And there was something even in Melbourne, which is pretty post-Christian, probably more post-Christian than a lot of contexts in the US, is that still people have this cultural memory of okay i'm going to try this christian anything i'm going to go and go to a church service so i think there still is is utility there and then and the other thing that happened is people say like it's great we're having this conversation but do you mind just i literally had people say this to me could you perhaps talk for a bit longer like for about 30 minutes so we can think about it more because other people's

questions are just bringing it down to this sort of level. Like, in a sense, like the person, you know, it sort of went down to the lowest common denominator was people's complaint, not our complaint, but that's what people were saying. So we ended up bringing that back. But I think there's still something of worth in what you're saying, that church where it's just the star preacher who's giving the great sermons every week, and that's what's going to draw people. So I see it as part of an overarching fabric of the church,

of many things that the church is doing, that preaching plays a part. And there'll be the Sunday sermon or a sermon somewhere, but then there's also people wrestling with it and asking questions over here and asking questions of the preacher perhaps afterwards or whatever. Yeah.

And also this might be, I don't think it's cynical. I think it's pretty honest. Well, it could be both, but I i mean we live in the world today of you know fact checkers and google and like in the past preachers could get away with all kinds of stuff right but now especially with gen z and younger millennials like and i'll do this dude i'll i'll fact check stuff when i'm when they're speaking i'm like yeah that's not right well there's four other views on that one and like no that's just flat out wrong you got the date wrong there and and and and i feel like as

preachers and i'll just as maybe my assumption it seems like preachers are getting more and more busy with many other things they're getting less and less studied they're not doing the you know 30 hours of research to put into a sermon it's like who have time who has time for that anymore and i just feel like you know i will speak to preachers now like how do you even know that people are actually even believing what you're saying and are you know they could be is there any space for you to even know like what, what questions do you have? What pushback? Have I gotten anything wrong? What do you think about this?

Are you going to live this out? Why not? Who's going to live it out? What are hindrances to live it out? Like, there's so many unknowns when you just speak on what's happening in the audience. And yet, there's so many opportunities to actually kind of find that out. Yeah. I just gave a talk the other day.

I think that there's stuff that happens. Yeah, I gave a talk the other day at a church on sexuality and stuff and i always do q a like half my talk is usually q a and it's text in q a where i have a platform where they can you know be anonymous and stuff and um that's fascinating yeah i mean i'm speaking it seems like everybody's amen and yawning yawning and everything all this stuff that you get into all these questions. Like, Oh wait, you're here. Like you really hate everything I'm saying,

you know, like, but church is that way. I think a lot of pastors would probably be scared to ask the question. What are people? And they may get the email. So they may actually say, no, I do know what some people are thinking,

you know, but I don't know. I, I just, I don't know. I always I just, I don't know. But anything you want to jump on there. Yeah. Like I still think there's a place where the spirit does stuff.

And like, I think it's different as well. Like I think in some ways, well, like what I preach on a Sunday is different and almost how we do is probably some days for us to become more of a spiritual growth in the sense of people who want to move together and how can we sort of grow together? And I would say that it's become less informational,

more transformational. Okay. So, you know, what I chat about here, I'm not necessarily saying that on a Sunday, you know, bring that sort of stuff up. And that's probably where we've gone as well. And you just notice these things that will happen in the room. It's so funny.

Like what I find weird is you'll say something, so you've got multiple services. You say something in one service and it's just nothing seems to happen to happen and you say in the next service and it just impacts people so i think there is this thing of the spirit at play as well yeah in in the midst of it which i think i still am drawn to yeah the mystery of all that yeah that's good well we're coming up on an hour here mark i i want to respect your time thank you so much for uh chiming in um Can you... Chiming in? I don't know. I was thinking about something else and that word came out of my mouth. I was like, that's a weird thing to say, chiming in.

Your most recent book, is it The Reappearing Church or have you written one since then? Yes. So I have written a book which is coming out next year, which is called A Non-Anxious Presence. But my last book was The Reappeering Church.

Can you give us a snapshot of Reapering Church and then the forthcoming one? I didn't realize you're working on another one. Yeah. So Reapering Church is really the idea

of how does God turn around moments? How do revival's awakenings happen? And I sort of posit like, and it's actually fascinating because one of the ideas of the book is that

crisis precedes renewal. Now I wrote that in 2018, 2019. And how does God reinvigorate his church? And so that's really what that book's about. How does that work through history? How does that happen? The next book is really about some of the stuff we've been talking about today. How do we, particularly leaders, equip ourselves for a complex world? And how do we live in this gray zone moment, this liminal in-between space? And how actually those sort of moments are sometimes the times where God actually forges a whole new cohort of leaders to be his ambassadors of the kingdom in the world. Oh, man. I can't wait for that one. And yeah, I probably said this at the beginning, um,

but I haven't recorded the intro yet from, but yeah, uh, you've written a reappearing church, strange, uh, strange days, disappearing church, facing Leviathan, uh, the road trip that changed the world, the vertical self and other books here. Um, so yeah, check out Mark mark sayers dot is it com or co oh dot co mark sayers dot co for uh information speaking blogs and so on are you still doing that podcast with john mark comer is that you guys moved on from that so finish that one but i'm now doing a podcast called rebuilders so you can just look up rebuilders rebuilders awesome well thank you so much mark for being on man i always learn like so much from

talking to you like i got a fire hose of great info process so all right take care i love chatting thank you so much Thank you.