Church! What's it good for? (The Religion Issue)
Episode 54 · August 13th, 2020 · 51 mins 16 secs
About this Episode
In this Very Special Episode, rachel, Kendall, and Luke talk about:
- Coming from different evangelical backgrounds
- The shaping of our respective authority issues as related to religious upbringing
- Luke's birth /literally/ in a baptismal font :)
- What we mean when we say "religion"
- Tech salary as a way to fund a church planting career
- Leaving the church behind but bringing the leadership lessons along
- Good and bad authority structures represented by the church
- Detoxing from evangelicisim, finding a new purpose
- Choosing between being right or being good
Switching to rachel's background:
- Moving to the US at 11, with no real religious upbringing before that
- Trying hard to buy into the fundamentalist Baptist faith
- Leaving for college and never returning
- Atheism vs agnosticism
- Whether your beliefs are a choice
- The value of faith in one's own community and whether humanity deserves the asteroid treatment
And on to Kendall's Christian upbringing:
- Dad fasting and actually praying on his knees for guidance
- The weird incentives and blame structures of fundamentalism
- Noticing the tendency to open the Bible more often to curse than to bless
- Working for a religious organization in China for 10 years
- Realizing that much of evangelical Christianity as it is practiced in the US is very much culturally a White American thing
- Not needing to understand how praying works
- Does it matter if you're wrong about faith? Nah. What matters is being willing to be wrong.
- Servant leadership and how it works for both sacred and commercial applications if done well
Back to Luke:
- Was the "walk to remember" a kind of psychic break, or prayer?
- Realizing all you really need is validation
- Only needing a loose grip on the framework to get the benefit
- Not wanting to tell people what to do, and all the insecurities that represents
- Not being able to follow instructions if the goal isn't clear
- How an aversion to certainty can get in the way of leading
- What is justice, if not love at scale?
You can accost Luke with ideas for scaling love on Twitter at @saintlukas :)
Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3