The Carey Nieuwhof Leadership Podcast
CNLP 082 – David Kinnaman on How Christians are Increasingly Perceived by the Unchurched as Irrelevant and Extreme
(upbeat music) - Welcome to the Carrie Newhoff Leadership Podcast, a podcast all about leadership, change, and personal growth. The goal? To help you lead like never before, in your church or in your business. And now your host, Carrie Newhoff. - Well, hey everybody, and welcome to episode 82 of the podcast. My name is Carrie Newhoff. I hope our time together today helps you lead like never before. Man, I'm so thrilled to have David Kyneman back on the podcast. David's become a friend over the last few years. Those of you who are longtime listeners or subscribers, which is free by the way, just go subscribe right now. You can jump right back to episode 24 where David and I sat down and had a fascinating conversation about why people are attending church less often. And we kind of pick it up today because we are talking about his brand new book that he just released with Gabe Lyons and the ideas and it's called Good Faith. Being a Christian when society thinks you're irrelevant and extreme. And I mean, I talk about those with David at the beginning of the interview, but my goodness, even in the last year, I feel like the cultural attitude toward the church in North America has shifted. And it's become maybe a little more hostile, a little more irrelevant. It's just fascinating. And David, of course, with research puts words to it. So I think you're gonna love this today. We'll jump into that in just a minute. Thank you to everybody who continues to listen, share, subscribe, get the good news out. For all of you who are leaving ratings and reviews, thank you so much for that. If you haven't done that, you can do that on iTunes and make sure you spread the love, too. If you go into the show notes and this is just carrynewhop.com/episode82, there's always some great quotes in there that you can share on social media. It's just a way of helping some of the ideas that maybe help you help others. So whatever you can do to spread the love is awesome. And I'd love to know what you're up to. I know a lot of you tell me, hey, you listen when you run or in the car on the way to or from work, or you listen around the house or on your bike or et cetera, et cetera. So I would love to hear from you about what's going on at your church, what are the struggles you're facing, what are the good things you're doing, what are you having success with. You can always leave a comment in the show notes. Just go to carrynewhop.com/episode82. I just love reading this stuff and love hearing from you. In terms of what's new in my life at Connexes Church, where I serve, we're pretty pumped because we just launched our online campus. It launched Easter Sunday. We are so excited to finally be able to do that. Worked really hard over the last few months with Chris Lemma from San Diego. Great guy. You can read him chrislemma.com, L-E-M-A. Great guy, helped us totally redesign our website from scratch. It's finally, finally, finally. Not just mobile-friendly, it's mobile-optimal. It's basically a mobile site with an actual desktop version as well. It's so much better than our old site. And we're just hoping we can really use it to reach into our community in ways that we haven't before. Not only is it mobile-friendly, not only is there an online campus, but we're super excited because everybody who wasn't in church on Sunday was online. And it's a chance for us to go to them even if they're not ready quite yet to come to us. So we're working really hard on SEO optimization and we're working really hard to try to build bridges to the community. So you'll wanna check out some of that. You can do that at connexeschurch.com. You can just go there, C-O-N-N-E-X-U-S, church.com. That's where I serve. That's where I teach. And it has been just a lot of fun. And I just think that there's gonna be an awful lot in the future of going out to where people are rather than expecting them to come to you always. And so that's a little bit of a prequel to my conversation with David Kinemann because I think our online presence makes a really big statement as to who we are to the community and about how we interact with them long before they ever enter our door. And maybe, maybe one of the reasons that a growing number of people don't wanna enter our door is because of the way we interact with them online. So anyway, that's what I've been up to. I've been heavily involved in that website redesign in terms of the messaging on it and then in terms of the online campus. So it's been a lot of fun and would love your feedback on that too. You can just go to connexeschurch.com. But in the meantime, let us jump right into my conversation with David Kinemann. Well, I am so excited to have David Kinemann back on the podcast. Welcome back, David. - Thanks for having me, Kerry. Hey, so things continue to change. You were on just over a year ago where we talked about some of the latest Barna research about declining church attendance and why millennials weren't engaging. And I kind of feel like it could have been five years ago. Did you ever get that opinion? I mean, you and I talked from time to time, but like it just feels like a lot has actually changed. - Yeah, no doubt. I mean, the world seems to be accelerating. Obviously the election here in North America and in the United States is huge on our minds. - Oh, yeah. - But things, global terrorism, economic, this uncertainty to the start of the year. Sort of just so many different questions that are coming up. And that's just the broader spectrum, not to mention what's happening within the Christian community and the pressures that we're facing. So it's a fun time, but it's definitely, it feels like a month is a year. - Yeah, yeah. So you would agree the culture seems to be changing more rapidly than it did even a few years ago? - Well, I think it is. It's part of our kind of globalized interconnected world where information obviously moves very quickly and the digital revolution is part of that. But this larger acceleration and frenetic pace that the idol of our age feels like you've got to be up to speed. I was driving home a neighbor. She's a young Jewish woman from her college. And there was a Kelly Clarkson song on the radio and I hadn't heard it before. And so I said, "Oh, is this a brand new song? Have you heard this?" And she's like, "Oh, no, this came out earlier this summer. Like, where were you?" And it's like, that's how things are. It's like, you know, if you're not up to speed, somehow, you know, there's something wrong with you. - David, wait till you hit my age. I pride myself on being like somewhat up to date. But like when I look at the top of the iTunes charts, I'm like, "What? This is music? What? What? What?" Anyway, downloaded a bunch of stuff yesterday just to stay somewhat on trend. So you got a brand new book out called Good Faith, which I would encourage people to pick up. It is a helpful contribution to a situation that we find ourselves in, where we really don't know how to speak into the culture anymore. And so you and Gabe got back together years after "UnChristian" nine years now, you were saying before we sort of went live and started recording, why did you and Gabe decide it was time to sit down and write not just another book, but this book? - Well, I think part of the story is a fun one, which is our friendship. And so Gabe's one of my best mates in the world. So with the story of "UnChristian" was we were working on a private research study that Gabe had commissioned around what we called the brand of Christianity. And so we decided at that time, back in, we actually did the research in 2004, 2005, that we wanted to take that conversation, that set of data public. And again, it was never designed to be a book. It just turned into one because we felt like it was a fun and important conversation for the church to have. And the same thing actually happened with this project where we were working on a private study just together on a task force, essentially looking at issues of how institutions, Christian colleges and universities and churches and other kinds of organizations, how they can flourish in this very complicated, sort of aggressively hostile context. And as we were doing this research, we started to see some things. And Gabe and I kind of looked at each other and said, "You know, I think this is time for us "to bring this information public again." And so we didn't think of doing a book again together. It wasn't really part of the plan, but it's been almost a decade and it's been a pleasure to work with Gabe again. - Yeah. - So give us the big idea behind good faith. What are you writing? The subtitle Being a Christian when society thinks you're irrelevant and extreme. - Well, the big idea behind it is that we have pretty clear indications from the research that it's harder to be a Christian and harder to be a Christian leader in our culture today than it was even 10 years ago. Some of what we were beginning to see with non-Christian 16 to 29 year olds, their perceptions of being anti-homosexual and judgmental that now those were becoming very established in a broader culture that the church was irrelevant is one problem. It means that the church is, people can be indifferent to the church. You don't have to worry about going to church on Sunday. It's like, it just doesn't, it's out of sight, out of mind. Extremism is another problem, which is that religion is part of the problem. And 46% of Americans believe that religion is part of the problem. 42% believe that people of faith are part of the problem. And so we began to see that there was this sort of rising tide of hostility, this perception that Christianity is actually extremist. And so the culture is saying Christianity needs to be actually actively removed. If you're extremist, we need to control you so that you don't let your extremism hurt the rest of us. Okay, that's the new dimension of this. Right, so let's talk about that because you spend an awful lot of time, particularly at the beginning of the book, talking about the perception and you've got research to back this up, right? It's not just opinion that Christians have become extremist. Now, you and I are recording this the day after the Belgium attacks, the attacks in Belgium and the airport and on the trains. I think everybody would agree that's extremist. I mean, when you blow yourself up or other people up and you kill people in the name of religion, that's extreme. And we have seen some Christians get violent, right? We've seen that on the streets, but this is not what you're talking about. It's not just like extremist now has become this broad label where it's actually what? Like a belief system that people are seeing as extreme? Yeah, it's a great question. So let me break this down. So if you think about violent extremism, 93% of Americans agree that if you were to use violence and justify that through your religion, that is extremist. And so that qualifies as violent extremism. What we really try to unpack in this research is that there's another type of extremism, which is social extremism. And if you do any kind of looking at some of the new writing and some of the sort of the language here in North America, at least, around how people are describing religion and people of faith, I mean, just yesterday I saw an article that talked about Franklin Graham, the religious extremist, and because he's purporting to view the world in a certain way. And this is an important shift that our leaders need to understand. So he's not like... He hasn't got banners. He's not assaulting people. This is for what he thinks and what he believes. Right, and how he talks about the world. And so what we found in the research was that 60% of adults believe that if you were to try to convert somebody else to your faith, that is a type of social extremism. So three, three, three, five... And we have all the creatures to hear that, okay? So what I'm trying to do every Sunday is seen as extremist, by who? By non-religious people, religious people, Christians, non-Christians? This was a study done among U.S. adults. And 60% of all adults say it's extremist if you were to try to convert somebody to your faith. If you try to pray for a stranger in public, 52% believe that's extremist. If you were to leave a good paying job to go pursue mission work, 42% say that's extremist. If you were to wait till sex to have marriage, a quarter of Americans believe that that's extremist. And what's interesting is, so that's just all adults. If you look at the non-religious segments of adults, so the skeptics and atheists, they're even higher in their perceptions of these things, these things being socially extreme. - Wow. So basically, David, what you're saying is what most of us, 'cause there's a lot of church leaders and even the marketplace leaders, most of you who listen, you're involved in a local church. Most of what we're trying to do week in and week out is now increasingly seen as extremist. - It is, and I think it's important to understand, for a lot of people, some of this is like, it's no big deal in that people like to see things that are extreme. There's a certain side to our culture that wants to imagine that there are ways that Christians or people of other faiths can be extreme, and that part of the challenge we have in our culture is how do we make room for people who are different? Like, Muslims are gonna practice their faith in a different way than Mormons, than evangelicals, than Catholics. And so on one level, people are saying, if you wanna practice your faith, if you wanna do it in your church, if you wanna like, if you wanna believe those things, that's all fine. Just don't let those beliefs affect the broader culture. In fact, 79% of adults said, you can believe whatever you want, just don't let those beliefs affect society, which is logically impossible. See, this is the thing for us as evangelicals, we approach this as a research company, as a distinctively evangelical company. And what I would say about evangelicals is we're the public persuaders, obviously about Jesus, - Part of the way we live our lives, is we actually think people should be persuaded to follow Christ. And more than that, we think that following Christ has a certain sort of set of beliefs and ideas, about sex, about sexuality, about race being, and racism being essentially a sin problem that we're all born with sin, that education is part of the solution, but you can't just educate people out of their racist behaviors and tendencies, because it's fundamentally a sin problem in our hearts. And so these are very counter-cultural deep ways of thinking that the culture says, that's fine if you believe that in your church on Sundays, but just don't bring that into your workplaces or your neighborhoods, because that might actually be a trigger warning, you might offend somebody in the way they think. And that's I think why this new idea of social extremism is a rising challenge for the church to deal with. - Yeah, so you've got research behind it, but I mean, is some of this a little bit alarmist? Like, is it really that bad? Or are you seeing this anecdotally as well? - Well, it's a great question. Part of what we do as researchers is try to help anticipate the future. And I feel like through this research, we've been able to sort of peel back and peer into the future in a way that in 10 years, it's going to be more difficult. And I could talk about this both in terms of the research. If you're an institutional leader, if you lead a Christian college or university or school, if you're a pastor, and by the way, I think Christian education institutions are at the front lines of this, because there is a very, like, it's not alarmist to say that for us, we're in California, there are specific ways in which legislatively, legally, there is an active effort to disempower, if not see Christian universities and colleges sort of, you know, go away. And so, I mean, like, the rumors are true about how significant the threats are to Christian institutions. Obviously, the Christian community can continue to do many of the things that it has done for many years, but as a researcher, it's a very interesting moment. And then here's a personal story. You know, my daughter, we go to it, my daughter goes to public school, went to Christian school through eighth grade and then went to public high school. And, you know, one of the local high schools will do, you know, kind of what color is your rainbow? They're encouraging students as freshmen, sophomores, juniors and seniors, you know, 13 to 18 years old, 14 to 18 years old to choose what sort of sexuality they believe they are. And we can have a whole conversation about that, but that's, and that's, by the way, that's clearly the direction of our culture that people are more and more accepting of same-sex relationships so much so that that's who you are in your identity. So if my daughter who's on the journalism program were to write a story about how maybe her color in the rainbow is a more traditional point of view on sexuality that, in fact, trying to find our identity, you know, in our sexuality is not the right way of doing it. You know, she was sort of reprimanded in her journalism course from even expressing that opinion. That's the social extremism place that we're at, that there is such a powerful movement, particularly on sexual sexuality, but also on issues of life and death and disability and racism here in California. We now have assisted, you know, death. You know, you take a few kills. - Yeah, we're debating that in Canada as well, introducing assisted dying. He used to be called, interestingly enough, look at this, he used to be called assisted suicide. I don't know what was called in California. And then in the last year, the whole public debate has shifted, it's not assisted suicide, which carries a stigma to it, it's assisted death. - Yeah, you see this on so many different levels, the language that we use, even at the Oscars, they were talking about gender confirmation surgery for the transgender community, not gender reassignment, not sex change, as the, you know, sort of the surgeries, gender confirmation, we want to confirm who you really are inside. And this, I think, was one of the most shocking things about our research and the thing that just literally left my jaw gaping open as I saw the early returns from our polling, was the degree to which our culture and the Christian community believes that the best way to find yourself is to look within yourself. 91% of Americans now, and we haven't done the polling in Canada and other contexts, but we're doing that actually in the UK and Australia, we're gonna be getting that results back in the next few months. But the vast majority of the developed world now believes that you should look within yourself, to find yourself, you should think, you should have the things you desire most in the world. And we think that one of the fundamental shifts we're trying to describe in this new research and in the book is this larger shift from an external source of authority, the Bible, the church, institutions, society, to an internal source of authority, which is that you yourself as a human being, know yourself best and you can figure out your own path and sort of manner of success. And that's actually a very fundamental shift. We can actually see it in really simple and kind of funny ways, like when you get on an airplane, you know, do you follow the rules that you should put one bag up on top and one under the sea? - Not if I don't get caught. - Don't go there, don't go there David, come on. - I mean, listen, there's all sorts of ways that we as humans think the rules apply to everybody else, but not too well. - Yeah, I got a ticket yesterday, my first speeding ticket in a long, long time and I completely deserved it. Not really. - But it's hard, but it's hard, yeah, exactly. We have this very fundamental human problem which is that we don't think we're guilty, but what we think is really happening again at Barna, we're trying to help you understand the spirit of the age and what's happening and how this is being like, you know, the sort of underlying trends that are happening and what we would say that was so remarkable from this, like the pure number of people who are believing it, 76% of practicing Christians, 91% of Americans believe that the best way to find yourself is to look within yourself. You shouldn't criticize someone else's life choices. You should get the things that you really desire most in life. You should, you should, you have a right, you have an obligation to pursue those things. So this is what we call the new moral code and we think that the church, at its best, should be aware of and living counter-culturally to that new moral code and maybe the most heartbreaking part of this research is the degree to which the church really is not all that counter-cultural on these points. However, we believe that the church can and will rise to the occasion to see those things and then articulate a better and different way. - Well, I think one of the things you're doing, David, you and Gabe, are articulating something that a number of us in leadership have felt. And if you want to call it, you know, the cultural values are shifting. You look within yourself, you know, sex is fine as long as it's consenting. There doesn't have to be any kind of a relationship as long as it's consensual, it's irrelevant to marriage. There are no rules when it comes to gender other than, you know, sexuality, same sex attraction other than consent, which seems to be a cultural thing. Values drive belief, don't they? And so one of the things I think a lot of churches or church leaders are struggling with and I'll speak for a moment to the preachers like me is it feels we did a series last September at Kinexis Church called Rubber Soul and it was basically trying to talk about the new morality and I spent the entire first week basically just trying to explain to people that everybody's got a moral standard. And can we just bring this out on the table and look at it rather than trying to say this is what you should believe? I guess what I'm trying to say is if your value system is significantly different than a previous generations or a biblical worldview, then your belief system is gonna follow your value system. Is that something, a trend that you see or can you comment on that? - It absolutely conforms to the things we're finding in the research and that is that they're these underlying values that we don't even know how to articulate but we see them in our films, we read them in our papers and our books, we hear them in our music, which is really about, you know, you ought to have the things that you really want most in life and it's about experience and about, you know, sort of living a full and complete life and there's all these things that are in some ways, just like I heard this great podcast recently where, you know, Satan doesn't create anything, he just distorts things. And so so much of what we believe is actually a not, not it's a distortion of what the Christian idea, the the theologically rich way of thinking, which is that yes, life is to be enjoyed. It's Jesus came for us to have life and life to the full, but it's not about ourselves, you know, Rick Warren's classic line for purpose driven life, it's not about you. And so that counter cultural narrative, especially in the screen age, in an era of digital technology and Instagram and, you know, selfies and, you know, it's like, those are all, it's all cool except that it creates a certain sensibility that I should be the one at the center of all of this. And listen, we talked about this a year ago, which is that the challenge for preaching in that context then is that people are actually coming only like 1.7 times a month, even if they're really regular churchgoers. So your whole effort to create a real counter cultural way of thinking about life and morality and how to confront these sort of idols of our age of a God of self, which is really what's happening now, is that we're, you know, we're putting the self at the center of our spiritual journey is very difficult to train and educate and disciple people to a different way of thinking because they're just not in the building often enough for you to build that kind of counter cultural mindset. So preaching is very important. It's just never been less sufficient to bring about the kind of discipled lives that we hope to bring. - It kind of feels you could easily get to the point where you think, oh my goodness, is this just a losing battle? Like, are we just gonna lose this one? And why don't we just throw in the towel or will be this little fringe movement? How do you respond to that? - Well, I think the most important way I could describe this is I could not be more hopeful and optimistic about the way the Christian community can and I believe will respond to a lot of this sort of thing and is responding. First, it's to recognize that there's a ton of kingdom things that are already happening in our churches and in our communities through Christians and to recognize those and do more of them. So Hebrews 1024 says we should look for ways to motivate one another's to acts of love and good works. - Yes. - And I just wanna encourage the listeners today that your churches are already doing really incredible things as people of good faith in the world and we should encourage that to acknowledge, we should bring it on the stage and on Sundays and in our newsletters and in our tweets and Facebook posts and many other places that hey, what this couple is doing when they adopted this person, when they visited that refugee family, when they gave generously, when they prayed for their public school, when they volunteered to be on the school board, when they did this program, like those, do you see how that's creating a bubble of good faith? It's creating a moment of a countercultural narrative when they gave up their own desires to serve this greater good because of their love for Jesus. I mean, those are things we have to acknowledge and they're already happening. The second thing is to realize, Gabe and I are really convinced through this research that the conditions in our culture to sort of zoom out, the conditions in our culture in North America, some work we're doing in the UK, I would think this is true in Canada as well, they're actually really ripe for the church to be revived. There is a certain sort of dead end, there's a certain sort of hopelessness in our culture, there's a certain sort of way in which we think all this is gonna play out that over the next two or four years, the people are gonna come to the end of themselves over the next number of years and that the church can be a countercultural response, like we have this refugee crisis within Syria, we think there's a refugee crisis when it comes to sex and sexuality, we think there's a refugee crisis when it comes to how we think about human flourishing and the need for living as people of integrity and character and love for one another. And so we think the church, what happens in cultures isn't that revival sweeps over the population, that the revivals begin within the church, they happen because the people of God are revived to his purposes in their lives and they live counter-culturally to the spirit of the age and we think that there is a tremendous opportunity that that's the conditions for revival and then renewal to break out are actually really, really right here before us, that should be pretty exciting, it also means there's some dark days, it's pretty challenging, we can see some of the very sort of depressing realities that make those conditions so capable of possibly creating revival and again, that's up to God and to his work in the world but what a privilege to see some of that possibly come about in the next number of years. - We're gonna get to some of the ways that you can respond to this toward the end of the conversation today, David, but what you're saying reminds me an awful lot of what Ravi Zacharyus has had to say, he probably will have already been a return guest on this podcast by the time this airs and I was asking him in a recent conversation about the state of the church and different parts of the world and he said, in the West it's very tough right now but you should go to the former Eastern Bloc where they took God out of the culture for 70 years, he said, we fill stadiums with tens of thousands of young adults there. He said, you should go to the rest of the world like when you remove God from the culture, he says, eventually they do exactly what you said, they run to the edge of it and they go, this is horrible. And he said, so the children of the West now who grew up in a Christian era are rebelling against it but give that a generation and he's confident they will come back. I just don't want to wait a generation, not in my country, not in your country so I'd like to get going sooner or later. Frank Bueller, we got some listener questions, he wanted to know what's the most frustrating finding for you personally based on your research and who is doing the best job of solving it if anyone? - Well, I think there's a lot of things that are frustrating, I mean being a researcher is a constant exercise of trying to find the internal source of what God might be saying 'cause it can be a little depressing and discouraging seeing the way people respond to questions, the vanity, the vanity, the selfishness, the lack of biblical thinking and that's even when we're interviewing Christians, right? That's even when we're interviewing pastors, we have a big study coming out next year called the State of Pastors in January of 2017 and my dad's a pastor, I think I would be a pastor if I weren't doing Barna, in fact I sometimes think about my role as being a public pastor, using research as my tool for communication, but there's a lot of reasons to be frustrated and I guess part of my, this is just a bit of a personal story but I spend a lot of time in Ecclesiastes because for me as a leader, it helps me deal with my moments where I'm frustrated or discouraged or I feel like I'm at the end of myself when my ambition to see the world changed or my hope to see the church change in a certain way, God reminds me that it's all vanity, that it's like chasing the wind and that it's his church and he cares and it's the fear of God that it's the beginning of wisdom. And so that's one response is that people I think that are really rooted in scripture can see God's heart for his people and our own, even the best of us as pastors and spiritual leaders our own brokenness. So that's one thing, I think we had a really fun experience in Scotland last year doing some research in that very post-Christian context and it was amazing to see just as you're sort of alluding to Kerry that in these very post-Christian contexts like Scotland that millennials were actually very interested in what the Bible had to say about finances and dating and relationships and sex and sexuality and all sorts of different like very practical questions. It was almost as if, well, we're trying everything else, maybe the Bible actually has something meaningful to say. And I think there's a real, again, this is why I think I'm very hopeful about where the culture could go and the speed of cultural change is one in which, hey, maybe we don't have to wait many generations because if we could have a response, if the spirit would work in such a way that would allow us to be ready for those refugees, for these people that are waiting for deeper answers, the church, I think, could be part of the solution, the community of saints could actually be part of what this culture is so desperately needing. - Hmm, that's good. A couple of other questions for you. Anything else that just before we leave this and start to dig into solutions that would be shocking to those of us who lead and those of us who are listening as being viewed as extremist? I mean, you mentioned even trying to invite someone to become a Christian can be seen that way. Talking publicly about your views that sex belongs within marriage or certainly opinions about the role of marriage can be seen as extremist in these days. Anything else that might be surprising? - Well, I think one of the things we haven't talked about yet that was a big shock to me was the fact that we asked about whether you could have a natural and normal conversation with people of a particular group and we went through five different categories of individuals who are sort of in the states and in many different contexts, they would be sort of minority groups. They're less than 10% of the population. So Muslims, Mormons, atheists, evangelicals, the LGBT community. So we talked about these five different groups and we asked people what groups do you think would be difficult for you to have a natural and normal conversation with? 73% of Americans said it would be difficult for them to have a natural and normal conversation with a Muslim, 60% with a Mormon, 56% with an atheist, 55% with an evangelical and then 52% with someone in the LGBT community. So listen, part of what we conclude is that we have a conversational crisis. We have the difficulty. We're all very tribalized. We're living within our own small kind of sort of faction and tribe and segment and we have a hard time talking with people who are different from us and added to that, we found that evangelicals were some of the most significantly challenged when it came to conversation. So 87% of evangelicals said they would have a difficult time having a natural and normal conversation with a Muslim, 67% said they'd have a difficult time having a natural and normal conversation with a Mormon, 85% of evangelicals said they'd have a difficult time with an atheist and 87% would have a difficult time with someone who's part of the LGBT community. To me, this just is like a massive alarm bell for spiritual leaders that we need better spiritual practices when it comes to conversations. We need to dial down the fear and we need to help people understand you are called to be salt and light. This is going to happen through natural and normal conversations. Those are gonna be difficult conversations. We need to help prepare you for those. God is asking us to help people have good conversations as part of our command to go into all the world and to make disciples. That doesn't just happen through pixie dust and PowerPoint or even great sermons. It has to happen through conversations. - So it's one thing to kind of look at the culture and I think it's good that you and Gabe are doing that and that you're doing great research on that. But let's look in the mirror for a second. To what extent have we made this worse? - I mean, one of the things that occurred to me and I've read most of the book, I don't know whether you specifically address it and if you do, forgive me. But 20 years ago, we didn't have social media. It was really the preachers who framed the dialogue, the conferences that framed the dialogue. But we think about the Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage from 2015 and you look at that and I remember the outcry on social media from literally millions of evangelical Christians, which frankly often was hateful. Do we make ourselves seem more extreme by the proliferation of the dialogue that we consume on social media and do you think that's part of the perception problem? - Absolutely. And I think this is where there's difficult conversations where it's exploding into all sorts of crazy perceptions and we're adding to the problem because we haven't learned how to express the spiritual fruit of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self-control on Facebook. And so to be people of good faith, we have to learn all these new disciplines. It's all age-old lessons about how to be human, how to be Christian, but we're having to play those things out in a totally new context of this digital commons. And so Christians are absolutely creating many of these negative perceptions. And the problem is, and this is the message of Galatians. I mean, this is not like, "Well, hey, if you just had social media coaching, you'd really do it better." The problem is that Jesus is just as concerned with self-righteousness in the church and in our Facebook posts as he is with unrighteousness in the world and in culture. And so until we can understand how Galatians is having begun our lives in the spirit, we now try to perfect it through a human effort. We try to, we believe in Jesus for our salvation, but we try to convert the world through our moralism. And that's inherently not the gospel. And so it's actually, it is an aesthetical to the message of grace and the gospel. - Yeah, and I think, you know, I see that a lot. We're basically, if we don't like the culture, we just yell at it. And I wonder why we do that. I wonder, and I wonder if that helps us. You know, Jeff Henderson at Gwynette Church has quite famously in the last few years talked about, we wanna be about it, we wanna be a church that's about what we're for and not what we're against. And I think often Christians just get to be seen as the crazy person that's angry about everything. And we've got it right, you've got it wrong. Listen to us and there's no love in the message. - I couldn't agree more. The big challenge I think that we talk through is how to lead with love. That love is the preeminent virtue, that love never fails, that we should be defined by the spiritual fruit in our lives, that being people of good faith means that love is just, it's just part of who we are in every way. And then how do we bring conviction and our beliefs and our orthodoxy to the way we live all that out to our love? And we see that, you know, this is a really broad brushstroke, but I think what I see as a researcher is that a lot of older and established and more kind of conventionally thinking Christians are really good at belief, but kind of anemic in their ability to be led by love. And then we see a lot of millennial Christians who are really, really good at love and understanding culture and being engaged with culture, but they're kind of anemic in their convictions and why a rich historic understanding of theology and why their beliefs actually matter. So we were trying to kind of right size that on both ends of the continuum, not that our project is any sort of solution, but we were sort of saying, listen, younger believers and those that tend to emphasize love only have to understand that your convictions matter, that your beliefs will matter to, you know, in a hundred years, if we were the same as everybody else, no one will see any difference in gospel oriented Christians and to those Christians that are really focused around belief and conviction and hammering the culture. Listen, if you're not led with love, if you don't understand the posture that is required now to be a Daniel in a digital battle, you're just not gonna make the difference that God's calling you to make. You're actually out of step with culture. By the way, the subtitle is being irrelevant and extreme. We're actually trying to give Christians permission to be irrelevant and extreme, like being extreme for the sake of the gospel is what we're called to be, being trying to pursue relevance for the sake of, you know, church attendance, you know, just the wrong reasons is actually part of the problem. So we want you to be irrelevant and extreme, but as Jesus calls you to be. - Right. Extremely loving, extremely different than the culture. Zach Berbracken was asking on that note. He had a question for you that came in on Twitter. You know, what are the differences between the generation, same millennials and boomers? So I love the way you characterize that. You said the millennials, to paraphrase you, are really good at loving, but maybe you don't have the theological framework to know why we should live differently as Christians. And then the older generation boomers are older, might be really good at saying, you know, this is the way it should be. And yet, not very good at loving. They just yell a lot. - Yeah, well, one quick way to answer that question from Zach is to say that we're seeing a huge difference in the questions about scripture. So part of the reason that millennial Christians are struggling in new ways than boomer Christians is that they are outnumbered in our culture by people who are skeptical of scripture. So with boomers, they're a small hand, they literally have the numbers I could show them to you on the PowerPoint side. But like with boomers, practicing Christians who people who are engaged with scripture are about one to one with the number of people in our culture of just boomers who say the book is, the Bible is just a book written by men. You shouldn't trust it. It's a book of, you know, like, you know, whatever. It's like, there's sort of a counterbalancing within the boomer generation between very active Bible-engaged Christians and those who think the Bible is just a story of mythology. Among millennials, the big shift that we're seeing, and this is an important one to realize, the size of the Bible-engaged millennial is slightly smaller than it would be with boomers, but their light is very bright. They're super Bible-engaged. They're very serious about the Bible. Churches that are growing with millennials are actually teaching the Bible very vividly, expositional kinds of teaching. They read the Bible in groups. Like, I couldn't emphasize enough that the churches that are doing good work with millennials are taking the Bible extremely seriously. However, what's interesting is that millennial practicing Christians, if you compare them the number of millennials who are skeptical of scripture, it's, there's more than twice as many millennials in our culture who actually say the Bible isn't just a book written by men. It's actually a book of oppression that has been used for centuries to marginalize, to hurt people, to oppress people. It's a repressive book. I mean, the language about the Bible, it's this idea of social extremism. If you really believe the literal truth of scripture, if you say it's authoritative in the way you should live, the level of skepticism that is happening for millennials is a tsunami of skepticism. - So it's more polarizing than in the millennial generation. In other words, people who deeply suspect the accuracy, utility or even inspiration or all of that of scripture. And then those who really accept the scripture as it's been historically understood are digging in their rolling up their sleeves and they love the scripture and their light shines bright. So. - Yeah. And it's almost like, you can almost see it, like think about it from a, almost like, let's use a geologic metaphor. The boomer generation, everything is kind of a big flap, floodplain and there's not a lot of geographic differences, even between the very Bible-engaged boomer and the skeptical boomer. Most people are sort of friendly or neutral towards scripture. It's just kind of one big flat plane. There's not a lot of differentiation. With millennials, when it comes to scripture, there is like, you know, the two big flood banks. And it's almost as though this very deep canyon and you have a much deeper polarization. The middle is all sort of eroded out. People are saying, listen, I'm either for scripture or I'm massively against scripture. I don't, I'm not like sitting on the banks on this one, waiting it out. I'm not, I'm not, I'm not sort of sitting in the middle on this, sort of waiting it out. Now that's a, that's, there's some scary realities to that because it says that these young millennials who are committed to scripture are going to have to work this out in a very complex, aggressively hostile, you know, you're, you're literally afraid to speak up. You're afraid to write that, that article for your school newspaper because it's so counter-cultural to have this point of view. And that's really, I think the big difference is generationally, and scripture, it turns out, is one of the strongest predictors of a person's faith. When we look at millennials, it's not whether you're attending church as a youth group, a tender, even whether your parents have religious faith. It's your views and activities and your engagement with scripture, your perception that it's authoritative. It's one of the strongest correlations with whether you're going to stick with your faith even through your college years and into your young adult years. - Wow, I didn't know that, that's good to know. So in the book, you use this metaphor 'cause I want to, I want to get to solutions. And you do offer, I mean, your whole book solves this, right? Completely solves this cultural dilemma. No, but you do have some helpful advice along the way. And you talk about melting pot versus pot luck. You mention a true tolerance and a false tolerance. And I think this is something that you articulate that helps a lot of us understand what we're feeling. And so there's this idea that Christians are intolerant. Our culture is very tolerant, but sometimes the tolerance our culture has is actually a false tolerance. Can you explain that? - I can't explain that. The difference between fake tolerance is where you're tolerating all the things that are politically correct to tolerate. And then things like social extremism or religion that seems like it might be a little bit bad or it might hurt people's around you, that that sort of socially hurt people. That's where it starts to get into, we don't want to tolerate that kind of Christian. And so the idea of a melting pot in North America, our cultures are very diverse, pluralistic, religiously pluralistic, generationally, ethnically diverse. And part of what we argue in the book is that there's a difference between assimilation and accommodation. And assimilation means you kind of go along to get along, you play by the fake tolerance rule book, you try to avoid topics that are really difficult to talk about. And then true tolerance is really more accommodation, which is we say, we want to try to make room, like when you check into hotel, you're checking into accommodations. There's room that is made for your living in that area for a period of time. And so the church needs to make accommodation. We think that Daniel is a classic example in scripture of what this would look like in a pluralistic culture. First he learns the language and literature of Babylon for three years, he becomes the secretary of state for three different rulers in that time. He advocates to keep all the pagan philosophers alive Daniel too, Nebuchadnezzar tries to have them all killed and Daniel actually says, hey, let's make accommodation, let's just not just assimilate and go with the trends, that would be fake tolerance. We want true tolerance, which says, hey, I'm gonna go in and rely on the power of Yahweh to interpret your dreams. We believe that this is the only true God and yet don't just kill all the pagan philosophers because you're angry, that's a fake tolerance. And so we think there's a way for us to live this out. And so teaching accommodation, teaching these difficult conversations, helping the Christian community understand that listen, pluralism isn't a dirty word. - Right. - Being in a community of diversity, being with Muslims is not antithetical to your faith and you should also try to pursue Jesus in their lives to see them transform for the sake of the gospel. Those true truths can exist at once and that's the way of accommodation. That's the way of Daniel. - Do you think true accommodation or pluralism is gonna be difficult for a lot of Christians? - I do and I think that's the big challenge that we're wrestling with, which reflected in the data, having these difficult conversations is hard. It's not that bad. - I don't wanna be in a room with a Muslim, I wanna be in a room with a whole bunch of Christians who agree with me. - Yeah, it feels like when we do, we sometimes use our research in here in Los Angeles with entertainment companies or working on various film projects, trying to help them understand the Christian market or we work with various businesses that try to take and translate our market research for them. I actually love the process of trying to, it's almost like speaking in a different language 'cause I have to be careful and thoughtful and intentional in the language so that I can translate this into what's happening in the business meeting that we're having. And I think actually most of the people in our congregations are more used to that with then we realize they're looking for permission. I mean, they're doing that in their businesses, they're doing that in their neighborhoods, they're doing that with their kids, with their kids' friends who aren't the same faith. We're all comfortable, we want diversity, we just don't know how to live in that world. And so we think that churches can apply this sort of, again, it's a Galatians idea. It's like for freedom that you've been set free. You can pursue diverse relationships and friendships. You can pursue a godly vision of accommodating pluralism. It doesn't mean we say all these religions are the same. Pluralism is not universalism, right? To say we live in a culture that's plural and we accept and love you, we lead with our love. We want to make accommodations for people who are different is not the same to say we would elevate your theological understanding of the world to be equal to that of Christianity. And therefore, we universally accept you because we're just all, we're all just one humanity. That's not the way of Christ. What is the way of Jesus is like the Good Samaritan, where we break down social barriers, we find ways of loving people, we find ways of having these really incredibly difficult conversations, but that produce true spiritual fruit in our communities of love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self-control. That is how pluralism can be a gift to the church. And we, as the church, can be a gift to a very diverse nation and community and neighborhood. - So in many ways then, David, I mean, you kind of look at your own friendship circle and what I said earlier, I kind of meant sarcastically or facetiously, right? Like, you know, it's like I just want to be in a room with people who think what I think, believe what I believe and live the way I live, but a good challenge for us if we want to live in good faith moving forward would be, are you actually in personal dialogue with people who believe radically different things than you do? You know, do you have unchurched people in your social circle over for dinner? Do you have people of different faiths and different backgrounds and different worldviews that you're actually engaging with and you stay friends with and you learn how to engage with them in a loving, respectful way? Is that a good place to start? - Absolutely. And one of the topics we take on in the book is issues of racism. And this whole question of, you know, here's a practical example we give in the book is, if your speed dial on your cell phone, the last 10 calls are all people that are of the same ethnicity and possibly even of the same gender other than your family, you know, then we're doing this wrong because we haven't cultivated the kinds of diverse friendships, you know, we have an almost an implicit racial bias. And so, you know, these are very complicated and multi-layer things. We know a lot of leaders are dealing or struggling or thinking through this stuff. They're already doing, again, we said this earlier, we should acknowledge that a lot of good stuff is already happening, but there's more we can do and there's more ways and, you know, you talk about the solutions. Actually, about a third of the book goes through kind of our current cultural context and the problems we face. And then two thirds of it are the solutions, ways for Christians to think about these things. You know, for example, we go through, the solutions are part of it is we need to ask better, ask and answer better questions. And we say that we should teach our communities to ask and answer four questions. What's wrong? What's right? What's missing and what's confused? And so when we answer what's wrong about our culture, we can say, and that's, by the way, where most people's, most Christians begin and end with wrong. Yeah, like it's just, it's all wrong. But what's right about it is that we can find the good and when we answer like, what's good in the Muslim community? What's good in the Mormon community? What's good about the LGBT community? And then what would you ask that? Why would you ask that question? 'Cause there are some Christians who are like, the only good thing is in Christianity. The most important reason is because as Christians, we believe that every human being is created in the Amago day is created in the image of God. And that there is something, and when we only understand the fallenness of humanity, the brokenness, we're only understanding a partial description. So we, you know, we make this argument. Gated has a great job in the book, The Next Christians, of the full gospel, of creation, fall, redemption, restoration, and if we don't understand the creation, that God has created good in the world, that the rain falls on the just and the unjust, that there are many ways in which the Christian community can learn from others, that, you know, obviously the only truth is revealed through Jesus, but Jesus doesn't always show up in the ways that we expect him to do. And so we could, you know, sort of like a C.S. Lewis classic stories of Aslan, you know, like he's good, but he's not safe. And so when we're not willing to ask what is good about the world in which we're living, you know, my brother-in-law who was same sex attracted, who lived with many partners through his years, he ended up passing away of HIV/AIDS, what was good about the LGBT community during his final weeks was the way they rallied around him. Supported him, loved him. And for me, and we tell the story in the book, even as a committed Christian who was Brian's brother-in-law, my ability to love him was very stunted. I was, what was wrong and missing and confused was my response, what was right about that whole experience was the way the LGBT community responded to his health needs and to his final days on earth before he passed away. And so if we're not willing to ask and answer these really tough questions of what's right, what's wrong, what's missing and what's confused, we can often seem as one-dimensional as we often are, which is we just are kind of loud, angry critics of culture rather than hopeful gospel Christians trying to help this new generation understand what it means to be Christian. - So what is good faith? Walked us through in these last few minutes, just sort of, you know, your heart on where we need to go. And there's so much more we, you know, that's in the book and that we won't have a time to get into. - Well, we forgot to talk about John Orberg and his idea that good faith is me being in leader-hosen and thinking about the brass band. - That's true, actually, yeah. John Ortberg wrote in and he said, "Yes, ask David why he loves polka music "and constantly dresses in later-hosen. "Talk about un-Christian." (laughs) - So I love him really good, John. - Thanks, John. He often gives me such great, great, great fun on Twitter. So I just, I think the thing-- - That's worth a book. - Well, the thing was that I, the reason I dress in leader-hosen so often is that for me, I think that it all goes, when the game is over, it all goes back in the box. And so that's a little, a little, - Little John Ortberg humor. I've got to have him on the podcast. John's been such a great influence in my life and his books and his teaching and his leadership. And that was my favorite tweet of the year so far when he tweeted that at me and you last night. That was great. - Such a great sense of humor. Well, hey, listen, one of the things that this represents in terms of good faith is we as Christians ought to have a pretty good sense of humor. I think this is one of the most important skills that we should be cultivating in our lives. We should be able to laugh at ourselves. We shouldn't take ourselves seriously. - So good. - And at the same time, we should be more convinced than ever that Jesus has something good for us in scripture, that this is in fact good news not just because you get to heaven, but because it actually gives us a way to be human in an era of Facebook, in an era of the 2016 political election here in the United States. What a disaster in so many levels. And so the truth is that it's good news in 2016. It's good news for how it is that we're going to live this out. It's good news for millennials. We talked earlier about some friends of ours who have found that being honest about our faith, being able to ask really tough questions by saying like nine years ago, the church is really on Christian. We should admit our faults and we should be honest with ourselves. That that actually is good news to a generation of skeptics. And so that's my hope for this project is, and we saw this actually, we just launched the book three weeks ago. We went on, we were in 20 cities in 14 days and it was such a fun privilege to do this with my good friend Gabe. And what I saw in the hearts of people, we spoke at several churches on Sundays, we did other events and afterwards, we had so many people, young millennials especially, but parents and grandparents who would come up and say, my kid is transgender. And we don't know how to have a conversation about these very critical questions. We had one young woman who came and said, I'm a gay millennial Christian. And the words you use, the language, the idea, like you gave me some hope. I just literally said through tears, you gave me some hope. I prayed this morning that God would give me a way forward. We give in the book a way to think about this in a historic traditional way. And yet we're trying to be honest about the ways the church has failed on these very critical questions. A young woman came up and said, I'm a creative, I'm a designer, and I haven't been to church for a long time. And the fact that you talked about vocation and calling as a way to be part of a good faith Christian, again, through tears, it was like, I've never heard this before. And so that's my hope for this. I mean, I feel like I approached this research with the heart of the pastor. I see the ways in which our churches can sometimes be so safe, unlike Aslan, we're trying to be so nice and safe and comfortable. And we end up kind of sanding off the rough edges of these difficult conversations in a way that we experienced over the last three weeks, that young people especially, but all generations are just so aching to have a deeper, safer, more honest conversation about what it means to be a Christian, a very complicated, often very hostile environment. So those are just a few of my reactions to that question. But it's hard to see you as a leader, as a communicator, as a pastor care. Obviously a lot of your listeners are gonna be communicators or leaders are creating communities to try to disciple people. And so my heart is how do we help disciple people in an era when these cultural values and this idea of how to be Christian is just overwhelming to so many. And so we try to give people hope, a roadmap, some good ideas, some language to maybe create that kind of counterculture as a Christian community. - In many ways, it's about adopting a whole new attitude and a whole new stance toward the world. - It's a new posture. - It's a new posture. It's not an old one, it's Jesus models it so often in his interactions in the world. But it's at various points, what does happen, it's different is the way in which the Christian community oriented to its cultural context. And that's what, as a researcher, I love, is to say, hey, the context is different. Human nature doesn't change, God's nature doesn't change, Jesus Christ is the same yesterday, today, and forever. Our cultural context is different. Our technological tools, these all change the way that that spiritual reality gets played out. And if we're not aware of that, we won't be good stewards of our moment of leadership. And that's where I would love to end, which I just like, I love this culture. I love the moment that we have, what a privilege that we can be in an era when Google, I mean, this is, Google is teaching our kids about sex and sexuality at Google Search, how to ask somebody on a date. You know, it's a crazy world that we live in. And what an amazing opportunity that we have as God's servants to be a part of that. I just, I think it's, I shake my head in awe at the opportunities that we have as leaders today to be a part of that, figuring out what it means to be faithful in this context. - Well, what I appreciate is I think you're helping us get our heads around some of the language and the attitude, the stance, as you say, the posture that we need to make a difference. David, as always, fascinating riveting. This has been helpful to me and reading the book. It's a great idea. I would hope people would click on through if you haven't got a copy yet, make sure you pick it up. Good faith. David Kinnaman, Gabe Lyons. David, thank you so much. - Carrie, I appreciate you as a brother and a friend. And it was fun talking even before the podcast and of course during the session here today. I love you. I appreciate your heart for Jesus and your desire to invest in leaders. So thanks for having me today. - Well, it's 100% mutual. Thanks, David. - Well, there is so much more that we didn't even get a chance to get into, isn't there? And really, seriously, you can get all the links to his book, "Good Faith" at kerrynewhough.com/episode82. And it's a great read. It really, really is. So you'll wanna look at that and there's a lot more that we just couldn't get into. I know I'm gonna have David back again. Maybe when that pastor thing is revealed in January, the study has sort of made public. I would love to talk about that. And sort of the state of what pastors think and what they know about the Bible and how we approach theology. Just fascinating stuff as always. Hey, I also said that Ravi Zacharias would have been a guest. He's actually up next week. I got the sequence wrong. So if you subscribe, you get Ravi Zacharias next week in your inbox and I ask him, what makes for great preaching and what's wrong with preaching in the church today? Great, short, but powerful interview as any time with Ravi is. And you wanna make sure you get that and just hit subscribe, it's free. And just a reminder, this is April. My goodness, we're gonna be together in Atlanta if you're going to Orange Conference or you're going to rethink leadership because that's coming up in just a few weeks time and I would love to see you there. If you haven't yet registered, you can try to squeak in if you can still find room. You can go to the orangeconference.com or rethinkleadership.com. I'd love to see you at one of those. And in the meantime, I really do hope that our time together this week has helped you lead like never before. - You've been listening to the Kerry Newhoff Leadership Podcast. Join us next time for more insights on leadership, change and personal growth to help you lead like never before. (upbeat music) (upbeat music)