Theological Lecture: Blindspots
Download MP3Welcome to our 1st theological talk back of the season. My name is Jeff. I'm the associate pastor at Redeemer Community Church, which is that dome over there. Don't look too long. It might not be there.
Speaker 1:It might fall down. But, this is our 1st theological talk back. The the way that our talk backs work, there is 1 hour of talk, an hour lecture on a theological issue, and then an hour or 45 minutes or so of q and a. So we'll do, the first hour, we'll take a break. You can get something else to drink.
Speaker 1:Make sure that you tip well. These are awesome people and they're so great to let us be here. So tip well, be kind with that. And, and so then after the break, we'll come back and do some q and a. So throughout, Collin's talk tonight, be thinking about some questions.
Speaker 1:If he says something that that that you want clarified, if he if he says something that that really provokes a question for you, write it down, and then be ready. We'll pass the handhold around and ask some questions, for the 2nd hour. We're really glad that you're here. The reason that we do this every summer, we we have a talk back May, June, July, August every summer. The reason that we do this is that we believe that theology is best done in community.
Speaker 1:We believe that it's important to think through these things together, not just on our own. Just like salvation is not a solo venture and life and the church is not a solo venture, Theology is not a solo venture. This is something that we do together. We reason together. We we go to God's word.
Speaker 1:We we pray and we ask questions. And so that's what we wanna do tonight. Colin Hansen is going to be, sharing with us tonight. Colin and his wife, Lauren, have been members at Redeemer Community Church since 2012. They moved here, from, New York.
Speaker 1:Before that, they were in, Chicago. And, Colin is the editorial director of the, of The Gospel Coalition. And he's also written a number of books. Young, Restless and Reformed, is is one of his books. And his latest book, Blind Spots, which came out just a few weeks ago.
Speaker 1:Colin, travels a lot. He is, interviewing people. He's writing pieces. And, and one of the things that that he has seen is, is addressing these kinds of needs within the church of the what blind spots do we have? What are the things that we aren't seeing in our own lives and and seeing in our own souls when it comes to sin when it comes to our passions.
Speaker 1:And so that's what he's gonna be sharing about tonight. Colin and his wife, Lauren, earlier this year welcomed their first child, Paul Carter Bear Hanson. Feel free to call him Bear as much as you want. He seems to like it when I do it. He smiles and closes his eyes.
Speaker 1:But, but we we're so glad that, Colin and Lauren and Little Bear are a part of our church family, and we are glad, that he is here to share with us tonight. So join me in welcoming Colin Hanson.
Collin Hansen:Alright. I appreciate that, Jeff. Thanks everybody for coming out. I think it's going to be an interesting time together. I'll try to make it as interesting as possible.
Collin Hansen:The questions ought to be quite interesting. So especially on a subject like this, of what we're missing in the church, what is the greatest problem in the church today, why are we lacking unity, what does it mean to actually be courageous, compassionate, and commissioned together? Lots of different lots of different questions. I didn't plan this part, but, it turns out that we're meeting tonight talking about this subject at a particularly opportune moment because major national media for the last 2 days has been talking very much about whether you've seen it on the seen on TV, radio, Internet, wherever you've seen it, about the question of what is the biggest problem in the church today. You may know it personally.
Collin Hansen:You may know it from your neighbors. You may see it around you. You may not be aware of this at all, but Christianity is in significant decline in the United States. The number of people who are claiming to be Christians has continues to drop at levels unknown. The United States has always been thought to be an exception around the world, a modern industrialized nation that remains very religious.
Collin Hansen:Only a select few, don't claim any religious affiliation. That's why people have often talked about the United States as a nation that's governed by Swedes, the Swedish who are the most least religious people in the world, but is inhabited by Indians. India is the most religious nation in the world, but we're seeing that change significantly even in just the last few years. So I want to start talking about this, this new survey. It comes from the Pew Research Center.
Collin Hansen:I'm borrowing some of the analysis. Pew did the study, but borrowing some of the analysis from Christianity Today Magazine, where I served as a news editor for a few years after college. This is the US religious landscape study. They talked to 35,000 different English and Spanish speaking Americans about how American religion has changed from 2007 to 2014. So start just by thinking about where you were in 2007.
Collin Hansen:That might seem like a long time ago to you, especially if you're younger. It might seem like just a just a wink, if you're a little bit older, like I am. So 2007, I was starting seminary. I'd wrapped up for 4 years working at Christian Today. Previously, I'd done college, so I was starting my 1st year of seminary.
Collin Hansen:So here's what's changed in those 7 years. Evangelicals in the United States so, basically, think those people who believe that the Bible is true yesterday, today, and forever. It's all true. It's all good. Think about the teaching, you must be born again.
Collin Hansen:Redeemer Community Church is an evangelical church. Okay? Think more broadly. We're non denominational, but think broadly about the Presbyterian Church in America, the Southern Baptist Convention, the Assemblies of God, again and again and again, all these sort of groups. Evangelicals are the largest single religious group in the United States.
Collin Hansen:But the share that evangelicals have, percentagewise, has dropped from 26.3% in 2007 to 25.4% in 2014. It's not a big drop, but a significant drop. They've evangelicals have actually added 2,000,000 people, so up from 59,800,000 in 2007 to 62,200,000. Again, a sizable portion of the population. This is this is interesting.
Collin Hansen:Evangelicals, people are often coming and going among these kind of churches, so evangelicals have actually lost 8 a half percent of their share of the American population since 2007. But then the those 8 a half percent they lost, they've regained then ten percent. So 8 a half have gone, 10% have come in. Also, then, again, a net gain of 1.5 percent actually. So a lot of the results have been showing, and evangelicals are in some measure of decline, but seeming to hold fairly steady.
Collin Hansen:So maybe evangelicals are not the major problem in the church today, but then again, a lot of the analysis has blamed evangelicals despite their increasing in numbers. It's been kind of confusing to watch. I don't know if you've seen any of this in the media, but this is this is this where the news really gets interesting. The mainline Protestants. Think of those who say the Bible is good, but we don't believe all that stuff anymore.
Collin Hansen:Times have changed, and we need to get with the times. This is a large group of people. Think about denominations, the United Methodist Church, the Presbyterian Church of the United States of America, the Episcopal Church, you could go on and on and on with these groups. They've lost 5,000,000 people in only 7 years. 5,000,000 people have left these churches, 3.5 percent of their share of the population, and now less than 15% of Americans, describe themselves as mainline Protestants.
Collin Hansen:Okay. You may not know why that's significant. That's the dominant or at least codominant religious force in the United States over the last 300 years. I mean, in colonial America in the last 300 years, in this area. That's it's a significant, significant decline.
Collin Hansen:Roman Catholics have lost about 3% of their population share, currently about 21%, and here's where things get really interesting. The 2nd largest religious group in America today are those people who claim no religion, who don't have any interest in religion. That is 22.8 percent of adults. For millennials born roughly between, a few years ago, well, several years ago, and then well, think about 1982 or so as a cutoff, so I'm not quite a millennial. It's closer to 33%, so about 1 in 3 millennials.
Collin Hansen:Again, one a significant part of the population claim no religion at all. Again, the 2nd largest religious group in America. 7% of their population right there. They've gained 7% of their population share. So these are dramatic differences.
Collin Hansen:Again, I'm not talking about for the last 50 years. We're talking about last 7 years. Remember where you were in 2 1,007. If these trends continue, there will be a number of churches among the wealthiest, most widely respected, most historical churches in the United States will disappear within a generation, will be gone. A lot of the buildings that you see driving around, not so much in Birmingham, but much of the rest of the country, will simply be empty.
Collin Hansen:You talk about going to Europe and seeing all these old cathedrals where nobody worships there anymore. That's the path the United States is on, at least among this group, and that especially that story within mainline Protestantism, it may or may not be your story. If you're in Birmingham, it's probably not your story because the majority of people here in this area are evangelicals, but this is my story. It's my story of growing up mainline Protestant. It gives me an interesting window, I think, into what we're talking about tonight of what is the biggest problem in the church today.
Collin Hansen:So it's a bit of a spoiler alert for that question that we're starting with. What is that biggest problem? Just I'll just get it right out there so nobody asked me that question in the q and a time. The biggest problem in the church today is me. Okay.
Collin Hansen:It's it's me, but it might also be you. So we'll see if that's the case after we get through this first hour. But this talk tonight, as I'm talking about my story, as we're gonna run through this handout, keep it handy. We'll talk about it in about half an hour or so. Keep that handy that you picked up there on the way in.
Collin Hansen:This is about self diagnosis. This is not so much about finding out what's wrong with everyone else out there, but what you are contributing to build up the church of Jesus Christ, and what you're doing to divide it, and how that relates to your story, your experience, your personality, your own theological inclinations, and your own, your own spiritual gifting from God. So we're gonna we're gonna talk tonight a lot about what's wrong with the church and why we don't have unity, But I wanted to start on a positive note because this book that, that I just wrote that Jeff talked about, got a few copies for sale afterward if anybody wants to pick them up. But, that book really came out of the positive experience that my wife and I have shared with so many of you at Redeemer over the last 3 years. During my time at Redeemer, we've been we've seen how you can believe that the Bible is true, that it's all true, that it was true yesterday, today.
Collin Hansen:It'll be true forever, and that it is also good. God's word is good. Not be simply against everybody else. It's been a beautiful thing we've seen at Redeemer. We found that we can love the city of Birmingham where we gather tonight, but not be naive about the challenges that we face, not be naive about the difficulties.
Collin Hansen:We've also found here at Redeemer that you can share the gospel of Jesus Christ, the good news of his death, his resurrection for sinners, his imminent return in glory. You can share this good news with people, but not be simplistic about it, To not boil it down into something that's that is just immediately you immediately ascent to, and that's it. I mean, the gospel message is simultaneously very simple, but also you spend the rest of your life and even eternity as a believer plumbing those depths in unity with Christ. So that's what we've seen at at Redeemer in these last 3 years, what so many of you and our elders and our pastors have modeled for us. Jeff mentioned a little bit of our background.
Collin Hansen:I grew up in South Dakota, moved to Chicago, met Lauren there. We lived briefly outside of New York City and been in a lot of churches, been involved in a lot of those places. My work with The Gospel Coalition has me traveling regularly, meeting with these churches, and Redeemer is the only place we've ever been to where every week, I seem to meet somebody else who's at Redeemer for a reason that's not known to me. I don't know what brought that person to redeemer. A lot of you go to redeemer.
Collin Hansen:Some of you haven't. Maybe you've experienced this phenomenon. I'm just not sure why they attend. It could be that you really enjoy Joel and Jeff's preaching. It could be that you love Jess and everybody else's music.
Collin Hansen:It's amazing. It could be that you love the mission of redeemer being in the city, for the city, loving the city. It could be because a friend simply invited you. That might be why you're here tonight. It could be because you're right down the line with everything the redeemer believes theologically.
Collin Hansen:The point is that it's all good, but it means that when I meet somebody for the first time, I have no idea what brought them there. That's the first church I've ever been to that's really like that, and what that does is it actually makes things pretty messy around redeemer. It means that we have a lot of different perspectives on things. We have a lot of different fears that we're running against. We have a lot of different expectations that we have for church.
Collin Hansen:It makes leading and participating in home groups sometimes very challenging because you have so many different kinds of personalities. I think a lot of people look around Redeemer and think that this church cannot be very diverse, because so many people are young, almost everybody is white, some people dress similarly. That's kinda changed though in the last few years. But, so there's just you they would think from the outside that it's a very, kind of it's a monoculture, but to anybody who's really gotten to know one another at Redeemer, and especially from the vantage point of our pastors and elders, it is anything but diverse in terms of people's experiences, their personalities, their giftings. Like I said, that's a very messy thing, but it's a beautiful thing because that's God that's how God has gifted his body to be.
Collin Hansen:And that's the kind of positive vision that I wanna move us toward tonight, even as we talk about some of the challenges, because I find that it's easy for anybody to complain about what's wrong, but it takes maturing Christians following Christ to resolve to want to be part of the solution. And I see Redeemer as a place where people have banded together to want to be part of the solution, and the answer to the question, what's what's the problem with the church today? The thing that makes that so unique and and, and different about Redeemer is that it's so easy to start a congregation, and our church is only 6 or 7 years old. It's so easy to start a congregation, to make it about everything that you didn't like about churches before. It's just easy to be in reaction to what you didn't didn't like and what you knew.
Collin Hansen:I think that's especially true in the south where such a high percentage of the population has significant church experience and often not particularly positive, or if it is positive, that makes it difficult to judge other churches compared to that as well. So it's easy to start a church where you say, well, I want this church to be a place that has relevant preaching, not like what I'm used to before, where it has an exciting youth ministry, unlike what I experienced growing up, or that it has a historic liturgy rather than whatever thin kind of popular culture was grafted onto the church that I grew up in. None of these things I'm identifying though is necessarily a problem. None of it's necessarily bad to look for those things in a church, but again, it's so easy to simply react. This is what I didn't like, so I may have a church that's just none of the things that I didn't like.
Collin Hansen:Easy to have a critical spirit rather than a positive spirit. And I think even though the congregation is relatively young, we're also mature mature compared to what I've seen in a lot of other congregations in this regard, and I think it has a lot to do with the vision that Joel often talks about at redeemer, that nobody gets the church you want, but that all of us get from God himself the church we need. And that is very significant. Understand this is not simply about coming in and saying, here I am. Serve me.
Collin Hansen:But here I am, Lord. How can I serve? Makes a big, big difference with all these problems that I'm that I'm talking about tonight. It moves you away from being a church full of consumers toward disciples of Jesus Christ. And again, maybe you maybe you've seen, like I have, so many places where I've been part of that problem.
Collin Hansen:Lauren and I, when we were in Chicago, we had a hard time for a lot of different reasons. But among them, we, we walked into church, we sat down, and we ran out as soon as possible. And we were a lot of things had changed in our lives during those times. A lot of people we'd been close to had moved away. We had a hard time breaking in because we didn't share a lot of the cultural our If we simply served and lived out our faith and our gifting that God's given us, we could be part of solving the very problems that we see in this congregation, but we couldn't do it.
Collin Hansen:Chicago, that had a lot to do with why we moved to Birmingham, and why we resolved that it wouldn't be that way for us anymore, but it took us took us almost 10 years of marriage and adulthood to figure that out. I think, the problem with always being reacting, reacting against the church, is that you end up in a state of almost perpetual rebellion. And in the South, there's a lot of people moving away from relatively conservative churches to more liberal churches. It would seem odd in the grand scheme of things to describe Redeemer as a liberal church, but to a lot of you, it probably feels like a liberal church. We're in a bar right now talking about this stuff.
Collin Hansen:Okay? It feels to you. Redeemer is not a liberal church. We believe the bible, and that's actually one of the reasons that we're in a bar, because we believe the Bible. And a lot of those types of things happened in places like Joel just preached about, a wedding in Cana, a celebration with wine, but, but especially in the South, there's a tendency to to always again be in reaction to to what you're used to, especially from conservative to liberal.
Collin Hansen:But that's why I wanna share a little bit more about my own story because my story is the opposite of that, and it might give you a window on understanding your own story to self diagnose with some of these things that we're talking about or what the problem is in the church today because I did not I would not have seemed particularly rebellious growing up. I got good grades. I mostly did the right things. I didn't always get along with my parents. I didn't cheer for the same sports teams, never liked farming.
Collin Hansen:And my dad and everybody else growing up, everybody was a farmer. I didn't like that very much, which is why I'm here with you today. But, so you wouldn't have thought of me as particularly rebellious, but in some ways, I guess I was. But, even as I was kinda pushing back against my parents, we shared one thing in common. At least for the first 15 years of my life.
Collin Hansen:We all absolutely hated going to church. Again, my parents, we hated going to church. They thought it was the right thing to do. They thought it was the responsible thing to do. They thought, well, when they had me within their 1st year of marriage, I thought, well, we want him to have good morals.
Collin Hansen:This seems like the important thing to do, and so we went. At least when we couldn't find an excuse, and let me tell you some of those excuses were pretty flimsy. A lot of flimsy excuses of not to go to church, but it felt like church was essentially a do good, feel good place for responsible middle class people. That's what church felt like to me growing up. And I think that's I mean, that probably described my parents as well.
Collin Hansen:So that was the kind of people that we that we, you know, hung around with in church. I I think there were some positive things that happened there. I learned some good good songs that I still remember today, some good hymns, some things that I'm singing even to my son. I learned some Bible stories. I even learned some of the inspired hand gestures to go along with a lot of those stories and songs.
Collin Hansen:Maybe you're familiar with some of those yourself. But but to give you a sense for my background and why it might be a little bit different from yours, I did something called confirmation in this church. I don't know if you've been gone through something like that before. It's for churches that baptize infants, and then when they get to about junior high age, they go through a class to say, okay. I'm a Christian.
Collin Hansen:I'm becoming a member of the church, going to take communion, and, I'm gonna officially officially sign up. Well, in the church that I grew up in, confirmation was church graduation. You go to confirmation, and then you say so long to church at 9th grade. I don't want anything to do with this anymore. Keep in mind that was the parents' attitude.
Collin Hansen:I gotta get my kids through confirmation so we don't have to go to church anymore. And I'd say probably out of the class of 16 that I was confirmed with in 9th grade, I'm guessing probably about 14 of them don't go to church at all, and that's in one of the churches we're talking about there. Those 5,000,000 people who have disappeared from mainline churches in the last 7 years, that's those are my friends. Those are my classmates. They've disappeared, all of them with parents who took them to church just like I did.
Collin Hansen:I'll give you another sense. Are the parents of the students that I was confirmed with chased the confirmation teacher out of the church because he assigned homework, Because he said, we want you to learn the Apostle's Creed. I want you to learn the Lord's Prayer. I want I want you to learn Psalm 23. I'm gonna test you on it.
Collin Hansen:Again, the parents ran him out of the church because they didn't want their kids to be learning these things, or at least they didn't want to have to enforce their kids learning these things. Again, maybe that's not anything like your background. It was all I knew growing up. The only the only people we judged in church were the people who liked it too much. So if you smiled in church, we hated you.
Collin Hansen:Okay? It was just like, there's something wrong with you. You don't understand how dumb this is. Like, this is this makes no sense. I remember I was probably only 10 years old thinking, I can't wait for my generation to grow up and leave all this foolishness behind.
Collin Hansen:But, I'm That that was that was the that was the that was the Again, just what it was like in confirmation there. And I think it was, again, in this mainline tradition, the church was known for in many ways very wonderful, compassionate acts of of care for the vulnerable, while at the same time some pretty fanciful, and odd, and convenient interpretations of scripture that were never more than 2 steps behind whatever the Democratic party believed at the time. That was essentially the church I could grow up in. Again, maybe you can't relate to that at all because probably you had a church where most people voted a different way. I think, again, it was hard for me to understand that the reasons that my ancestors, my family actually, had been involved with this denomination, I think for well, to when they were in England.
Collin Hansen:So I don't know how many generations, but oddly, even my grandmother wanted me to be a pastor in that tradition. But whatever reason people went to that church to begin with, it wasn't what I saw growing up growing up in it. So again, my act of rebellion was to was to rebel against this church, and that's when I met Jesus for the first time. At 15 years old, I'd known his name, knew his stories, but I didn't know his spirit. I didn't have the life of God in me.
Collin Hansen:I had not been born again. His spirit was not alive in me. The thing is, in this church, I didn't even know that I was supposed to be born again. That was not something we talked about. John 3, which we're going to come across soon, I think probably, in in our messages through John.
Collin Hansen:But, again, you you must be born again, Jesus talking with Nicodemus. Confuse as confusing to him at the time as a Pharisee coming to talk to Jesus in the night as it would have been to me and many others in this church, It wasn't until I was 15 years old that I actually saw anybody my age who loved Jesus, And it was such a jarring experience for me that at first it was repulsive. Again, I could not understand why these people would love Jesus, what was special about him. Again, there's a picture that was taken of me the day before day before roughly I became a Christian, and I just looked like the angriest, surliest 15 year old you can probably imagine, because I, again, just couldn't get it. Like you guys are obnoxiously peppy and nice.
Collin Hansen:This is not the way it's supposed to be, especially around church. But eventually, that very friendliness and love and compassion and especially, passion for Jesus is what captivated me and what made me think there must be more to Jesus than what I knew before, and I wanted what they had. Forever, but I didn't know anything about sin and judgment really. At the time, I wasn't reasoning about the trinity. I wasn't understanding every analogy.
Collin Hansen:I probably knew about the trinity with some kind of heresy. I mean, all I knew is that this Jesus guy was not who I thought he was, and that he could change my life, and he could make me a very different person. Not just happier, but with a kind of joy and love and an outward focus on others at a time when I could only think about myself and my sports and my school and well, really, again, just myself. I think now again that I know that what I experienced is in John 3. I'm I'm fairly ashamed and somewhat just how simple and ignorant my faith was, but as little as I knew about God, he knew me.
Collin Hansen:And that's what mattered, not the strength of my faith. At the time, it was genuine but weak and ignorant. But the love of God, the the object of my faith, not the strength but the object of my faith is what made all the difference. I didn't, again, I didn't learn a lot even in these years because I stayed in that same church. I remember the girl that I dated for a few years in high school, she was trying to encourage me in this faith.
Collin Hansen:She handed me a book, and I was like, this doesn't seem quite right. She bought it at a Christian bookstore. It turned out it was a cult book. Thankfully, I guess, again, the spirit was working, so I was like, it's just not right. God doesn't talk that way, and so that was very helpful to me.
Collin Hansen:But, again, I think there was another challenge I ran into. I was talking with my pastor at the time, and she I was telling her about how I wanted to I wanted to pray, and I wanted to go on a trip where we're gonna tell other people about Jesus out in California. I was asking the church for some support, and she said, you know, I've always been annoyed by those people who pray and expect God to answer them. I've always thought God helps those who help themselves. And I remember thinking, I don't know a lot about the Bible, but I know Benjamin Franklin didn't write it, it, and he's the one who said that.
Collin Hansen:So that's that's probably a problem. I mean, like, I didn't get much support. So again, like, how what I mean, imagine what this is doing to shape my faith when you're thinking, I can't trust my parents, I can't trust my church, and I can't trust my pastor. I mean, this is this is creating a very strong and personal and individualistic faith in a lot of ways. I went off to, just to kind of put a wrap on this story, I went off to a college that was actually founded by my denomination, and the original motto of the congregate or the of the of the seminary was from Philippians 4 not from seminary, from the college, university.
Collin Hansen:The motto of the university was whatsoever is true from Philippians 4, But this church for at least a 100 years, I remember there was actually a seminary in the middle of campus, and I thought, maybe I'll go to maybe I'll go to this university, then I'll go to this seminary afterward if I want to be a pastor. I came to find out that the seminary didn't even use the Bible in their curriculum. They're training pastors not even using the bible, but I remember just thinking that how sad it was that a place that was founded on the on the foundation of whatsoever is true had forsaken Jesus himself who claimed to be the way, the truth, and the life from John 146. So again, I share so much about this personal story because I'm hoping to stir some reflection on your own story. And whether yours is anything similar to mine, in many ways, I hope not.
Collin Hansen:But there's probably some measure of self reflection, self interpretation that you've probably already been engaged in and may Again, none of us is a perfectly formed theological whole just because of what we've read, whether in the bible or anything else, our theology is largely narratable. Our theology is largely biography. In God's word and what we reject has very much to do with your own biography, at least if you're anything like me. So you can imagine then that the particular aspect of Christian faith that came through to me very clearly as a young adult and today is the necessity of courage. The necessity of courage that you have to be willing to stand up for what you believe in.
Collin Hansen:Joel was not the only one wearing those Christian t shirts in high school. I was wearing those Christian t shirts as well. Again, my my parents didn't support me. My pastor didn't support me. My teachers would mock me openly.
Collin Hansen:Most of my fellow students thought I was ridiculous, including most of my best friends, but I quickly learned that following Jesus would come at a cost, and it would come there was a cost to discipleship that I would have to stand up for my faith whether or not people believed it or not. So I don't think probably many people brought their bibles, but I wanna read from Matthew 13. I'm gonna look at verses 20 and 21 just to underscore parable of the sower. It's probably called in your It's more accurately described as the parable of the soils. The soils here are our hearts.
Collin Hansen:How the same objective word comes from God, but it falls on us very differently. That's what I'm trying to say here about our biography shaping our theology, shaping what we, again, amen in scripture and what we reject. So in Matthew 13 verses 20 and 21, this was what I feared, but this was not a problem for me, this warning from Jesus. As for what was sown on rocky ground, this is the one who hears the word and immediately receives it with joy, yet he has no root in himself, but endures for a while. And when tribulation or persecution arises on account of the word, immediately he falls away.
Collin Hansen:I saw this in many of my friends. I saw this in many of my friends that they heard the same messages I did on the same retreats, and when they got back to school, they couldn't handle the first mocking comment about being a Jesus freak, or about being a Bible thumper, or something like that. It didn't take much, but that joy that they expressed to everybody on Sunday had evaporated on Monday, and I believe that's what Jesus is warning about here. I think courage also from Matthew 5, and look at verse 11. Courage also takes seriously Jesus's, warnings throughout scripture about the cost of following him.
Collin Hansen:But interestingly, this particular message is actually a blessing. This is the last of Jesus's beatitudes. His beatitudes or blessings come at the outset of the Sermon on the Mount, the most famous set of teaching, maybe of all time, certainly in scripture, and from Jesus himself, his Sermon on the Mount. But a lot of us skip over this last blessing because it doesn't sound like a blessing. Verse 11, Matthew 5.
Collin Hansen:Blessed are you when others revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account. Rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven for so they persecuted the prophets who were before you. Again, blessed are you. So again, I think one thing again instilled in me early on is the necessity of courage when following Jesus. You see it throughout scripture.
Collin Hansen:But I'm guessing that more of you have a different experience, especially if you're at Redeemer, and especially if you're here tonight. Because the problem is when you hear somebody talk about courage, you probably think about churches that adopt an us versus them mentality, that inside the church, we have all the answers. Outside the church is a dangerous place. Inside the church, we rail against all of those liberals on TV, those liberals on those websites, those liberals in Washington and New York who are destroying everything. That's probably I mean, so if you hear a preacher who's really firm on the need to follow Jesus, whatever the cost, even if people think that you're offensive, even if people think that you're bigoted, you probably recoil a little bit from that because you're thinking, okay, I know what that's like, and I it's exactly why I'm not at a church like that anymore, that thinks that the problems are all out there with those people far away and not inside here, and that's why we need to be this holy huddle.
Collin Hansen:That's why we need to vote a certain way. That might be when you hear my story and me talk about the value of courage, what you're actually thinking about right there. I think what's interesting about that is courage biblically doesn't look a lot like that because, in fact, the disciples' experience was in some ways closer to my experience than what we see so much, especially in the south, because the courage that the disciples needed was actually to stand up against people in their own homes. Remember, Jesus's siblings didn't believe him. We just talked this last week.
Collin Hansen:His mother certainly supported Jesus. She trusted Jesus, but she did not stand everything, not until his death and resurrection. Well, just until his resurrection, really, didn't understand what was going on. So the courage the disciples needed was often in their own homes. The courage the disciples needed was also in their own synagogues.
Collin Hansen:Again, the first believers were Jewish. Okay. Well, not all Jews believe. Jews were conspiring with the Romans to kill Jesus. Jews like Paul were conspiring to kill other Jews who were following the way, Jesus.
Collin Hansen:So again, the courage they needed was not an us versus them outside, but but a follow Jesus, when the people who love you the most are the ones who give you the hardest time. Predominantly Muslim parts of the world today. That's more like the courage, I think, that we see in scripture. So again, I think Jesus shows us the pattern of courage through especially his own death and resurrection, the thing that took him that got him up, praying tears sweating tears of sweating sweating blood in Gethsemane. What gets him up there and takes it and gets him to take up his cross in Golgotha, that's courage.
Collin Hansen:That's the kind of courage that we're talking about from Jesus. But the problem is when the problem we get in the church is when people like me turn courage into the only or the supreme value by which we judge everybody else, by which we look down on everybody else in the church. Because just as much as courage took Jesus to the cross, so did compassion. So did his great love for his people. So did his commitment to come to seek and to save That's the kind of Jesus that we really love.
Collin Hansen:Again, I would say we imagine ourselves being just righteous in indignation about the evil and bad things in this world And I think, again, you see that Luke 19. Again, you can turn there if you want. Luke 19, you see that, again, him, overturning the tables in verses 45 to 48. But I wanna read what Jesus does before he overturns those tables. Over it saying, would that you, even you, had known on this day the things that make for peace.
Collin Hansen:But now they are hidden from your eyes. For the days will come upon you when your enemies will set up a barricade around you and surround you and hem you in on every side and tear you down to the ground, you and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another in you because you did not know the time of your visitation. So the only kind of courage that actually matches Jesus' example is a kind of courage that's drenched in tears. It's drenched in tears of compassion for these people who are like sheep without a shepherd, who are lost, who are looking for a pea looking for peace at a time of war, or who are, again, crying peace peace when again their doom is imminent. As it was, Jesus here is prophesying about what would happen to Jerusalem in 80 70 when the Romans, responding to a rebellion in Jerusalem, would destroy the city, including the temple.
Collin Hansen:Again, a transformative event in world history that he's talking about about 40 years ahead of it at the time. So courage needs to be drenched in tears, while compassion on the other side, in weeping for the lost, compassion needs to be consistent with scripture and bringing glory to God. That's where compassion often goes wrong. However and this is, I think, how it tends to go wrong. This isn't my story, but it might be your story.
Collin Hansen:It's a lot of people's stories. A lot of books out there from people along these lines. You might have been burned by church because the leaders were not under shepherds of Jesus, but actually abusers. Those people who had the audacity to stand behind the Bible while they abused people with their words, with their, actions, in any number of ways. You heard a lot about Jesus, but you didn't see any of the first clamoring to be last.
Collin Hansen:You didn't see anybody actually following through on all the stuff that Jesus actually said there. You saw everybody talking about the problems outside of the church. The problems are all out there with those other people. The path to holiness in this church's understanding was within. So why did you experience then so much love and joy and compassion and understanding from people outside the church and so much judgment and hatred and condescension within the church?
Collin Hansen:How does that look like Jesus at all? So if that's anything more like your story, I suspect it is for at least some of you, you're likely then to answer that a lack of compassion for the weak, for the orphan, for the widow, for the poor, for the outcast, for the the people that Jesus seemed to be spending most of his times with. You might see compassion as the greatest need for the church today. If only the church would love people the way Jesus loved people, then we wouldn't see all these problems. We wouldn't see all this decline in the church today.
Collin Hansen:People would be intrigued by Jesus, And I want to just affirm you, insofar as saying that you're absolutely onto something when you're matching your when you're matching this to Jesus, because he saved his harshest words for those who trusted in their own good works for their righteousness. Their own good works, it was a self righteousness for their salvation, and he actually shared his most compassionate words for those who already knew they were on the outside, who were sick in their sin, and knew they needed a savior. Again, I think that's that's that's significant though to focus on there. People who knew of their sin or were convicted in their sin around Jesus and turned him as their savior. Those were the people for whom he gave the greatest words of comfort and invitation to follow him.
Collin Hansen:So I want you to I want you to think, though, about how that experience, as it opens up one venue into seeing something compelling and incredibly wonderful about Jesus, could, if you're only reacting against that, could end up creating a blind spot, creating a blind spot toward maybe more people like me or people who are emphasizing more of the need for courage to stand up to believe the truth in a hostile world. So again, I want you to understand that the problem with blind spots in the church that begin to form depending on our experiences, our personalities, our backgrounds, our gifting, is that you're plowing ahead thinking that you're following Jesus. Again, just think about that being on the highway there with the blind spot. Again, but you can't see what's happening in these in on your flanks over here, but everybody else can. So everybody else can see your weaknesses.
Collin Hansen:They can see what you can't see, and you can see what they can't see. This is the biggest problem. The problem is we're seeing each other's weaknesses, only our strengths and not understanding, but by comparing ourselves to Jesus, we see that kind of necessary, fulsome balance. Not just a little bit of this, but all of it. Jesus was not partially compassionate and partially courageous.
Collin Hansen:He was both of them. He was not only, you know, maybe this time my strategy would be to overturn the tables, and this time I'll weep. No. It was his same zeal for God's holiness, his holy love, that led him to love those people that had been cast aside by everybody else and to denounce those people in courage who were leading people astray. When we compare ourselves more to Jesus than we do to each other, that's how we get rid of these blind spots that develop.
Collin Hansen:That's how we get out of this perpetual spin of always reacting to whatever we're used to or reacting to everybody else. And maybe it's just because of where I work in the church today. Maybe maybe that's what's going on. You? And I'm thinking again, where is Jesus in this?
Collin Hansen:Because I don't know about you, but Jesus does not make me comfortable. He does not confirm me exactly where I am. He does not say, okay, Colin. There's your history, your personality. You are good to go.
Collin Hansen:I mean, he is always sanding off these rough edges. His spirit is always challenging me to love more. It's easy for me think of it this way. The old liturgies talk about sins of omission and sins of commission. It's easy to think about sins of commission, and I think that's that's the thing.
Collin Hansen:Like, you think, well, here's a check list of things that I either do, alright, and I'm and I'm holy, or I or I don't do, and I have a problem. Okay. Those are your sins of commission. Adultery. Okay.
Collin Hansen:I I shouldn't do that. Okay. If I didn't do adultery, I'm didn't then I'm okay. The sins of omission, though, are what always get me in trouble. Have I loved enough?
Collin Hansen:Have I cared enough for other people? Have I spoken the gospel enough compared to Jesus or compared to Peter or compared to Paul or compared to anything else? That's what always trips me up there. Not the commission, but the omission. And I think that's those sins of omission are the ones that Jesus wants to help all of us with especially to to understand that holiness is not just about avoiding certain things, or doing certain things, or voting a certain way, but it's about becoming like Christ, and your life, again, beginning to resemble his.
Collin Hansen:I think, I think about a Jesus who, like Joel preached about recently, sees us under the tree. It's like he saw Nathaniel. He sees all of us and says again and just again and just saying, I see you. We collapse because only each of us individually knows everything we've done, everything we've thought, except of course then also Jesus who sees it all and extends his love, his life for each of us as well. That's the kind of Jesus who sees us, and by seeing us, he exposes then our blind spots and helps us to love those people who are not like us, who helps me to love the people who nurtured me and cared for me in that church growing up imperfectly, and who did the same for you, however imperfect your church was growing up, or how, Matt, how imperfect redeemer is today.
Collin Hansen:That's the Jesus that I want to point us toward tonight. So if you got the handout, we're gonna spend the next, few minutes talking about that. And so you've already seen me then describing the essential contours of the courageous and the compassionate group. Again, both of them reflecting significant aspects of Christ's ministry, but also in their blind spots coming up woefully short of Jesus's full example. So in this handout, it's either the yellow part.
Collin Hansen:That's the good part. You see smiley face. If we do that. And then on the outside, not smiley face, not really frowning. He's just kinda miffed.
Collin Hansen:That's, that's the green part, that's not so good. So the yellow and the green parts, they come together for each of us, and they're essentially a flip side for each one, the positive and the negative, the sinfulness and the holiness. So let's look through the courageous and the compassionate parts, then we'll turn to the commission part as our last part, before the questions. So positively, in Christ I mean, Christ was steadfast. He was learned.
Collin Hansen:He was bold. So he was steadfast. Again, standing for truth in a culture that denies it. That's an absolutely crucial value of Christ. The problem is how many people are steadfast and at the same time combative, angry, almost eager and zealous to offend other people.
Collin Hansen:That's not good. That that is that is not that is not like Christ. Okay. Learned. Nobody knew the scriptures better than Jesus.
Collin Hansen:He was discipled. I mean, discipled to grow up in those scriptures, studying them faithfully as he worked as a carpenter for 30 years before his public ministry. Again, we're wanting we're wanting to encourage people who are learned, who understand the faith, who can defend the faith. The problem is, what happens with knowledge? Knowledge puffs up.
Collin Hansen:Pride comes before a fall. So again, the problem with the positive side, learn it. The negative side, you end up prideful. Positively, again, if you're courageous, you're very bold. You're willing to speak the truth, but that also makes you individualistic thinking, I'm the lone ranger.
Collin Hansen:I'm the last man or woman standing here. All have fallen away, Lord, but your faithful remnant stands here. That's the negative flip side of being bold. So let's look at compassionate then. Okay.
Collin Hansen:So It's wonderful. That's commended throughout scripture. The problem is you easily then grow frustrated. Frustrated because nobody else is generous as you you are. So you give this money, but what's the problem?
Collin Hansen:Now, nobody else is giving. That's probably why we end up in churches where there's like a name on every brick, because people are generous to give, which is wonderful, but they're wanting to make sure everybody else is held accountable to do the same thing. As you are. Your opportunity and generosity is to draw them toward Christ. You know, empathetic.
Collin Hansen:This is this is so crucial. You can put yourself in somebody else's shoes. What a beautifully wonderful Christ like aspect. The problem though is that you might end up being naive. You might end up getting taken in by people.
Collin Hansen:You're so empathetic that you can't see that, again, convictions are made on the testimony or of 2 or more witnesses. There's another side to every story, even for those people that you're so empathetic toward. Okay. And then finally, you're also sensitive. Again, you see that person in church that nobody else is talking to.
Collin Hansen:You see that person who wandered in late. You see that person who doesn't quite know what's going on, doesn't quite seem to fit in. You're drawn toward those people. Jesus saw those people. Jesus sees those people, even today, and he sees them through you.
Collin Hansen:That's how he's gifted you. So he's made you compassionate. The problem is, in our sensitivity and loving other people, we're tempted to compromise what scripture teaches. We're compromised to call something good that scripture calls bad out of our loving sensitivity toward those people. So again, there's there's again the positive and negative flip side on all of those.
Collin Hansen:So the last the last group though that we're gonna look at then is this commission group that I haven't talked about a lot. This is probably the hardest group for me, which is odd because this is where I became a Christian. I mentioned, you know, some of the some of the good and negative values. The compassionate part is more like what I grew up with. How I became a Christian, I kind of swung around the wheel over here, more in the commissioned part.
Collin Hansen:The problem is that while I can easily see that these ministries that I was nurtured in were very creative in that they gave us a lot of candy as teenagers to keep us up really late at night and kinda with frayed nerves. They were pretty innovative with some skits that were, in retrospect, rather cheesy, and they were practical with messages that were, well, again, so practical in some ways that I didn't learn a lot from them. But still, these are actually very positive things. You see that scripture, you think of Paul saying that I became all things to all men that I might save some. I mean, that's that's again being creative that the gospel translates into every different culture with the same essential message of Christ, but with some different aspects to it.
Collin Hansen:Well, the problem is that you see then with this commission group, and I and I would say, a lot of what you think of as the biggest churches are biggest for a reason, because they fit the positive part of this category of commission. And I'm talking here about the great commission of Matthew 28 18 to 20. Go therefore to all nations, Jesus says to his disciples, baptizing them in the name of the Father and Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to obey everything that I've commanded, and I'm behold, I'm with you until the end of the age. So again, they're fulfilling that vision to go to the length, to the ends of the earth, to find people and to reach them for Christ, it's absolutely beautiful. They found me even in rural South Dakota.
Collin Hansen:And so the problem though is they end up then also impatient with the Holy Spirit, trying to compensate with strobe lights and fog machines what's lacking in the power of the Holy Spirit. That maybe you're familiar with some youth groups like that. They tend to be in some ways almost disrespectful toward Christian history and scripture. There's not a lot of scripture even used, and there's an an attitude as if we're the first people in the last 2000 years to really figure out Christianity. Not understand there's a lot we can learn, from history, and then also then over contextualize.
Collin Hansen:This is preaching a kind of good news that sounds good to people because it's what they want to hear. It's not the message of Jesus that that that convicted people in power and took them from death to life. It's more like a midday talk show brought into church. Something like that. So it's more over contextualized.
Collin Hansen:So again, the positives in following Christ and the negatives all coming together. And I think, again, there are a couple I want to read just a couple passages. 1 comes from 1 Corinthians 12. This underscores, I think, some of my critique of this kind of church, again, the kind of church that God used to bless me in many ways. I'm gonna read 1 Corinthians 1 21 to 25 to describe what I think is part of the problem in this group, at least insofar as they're following, they're ministering out of their blind spots rather than in the glorious light of Christ.
Collin Hansen:So 21 to 25. For since in the wisdom of God the world did not know God through wisdom, it pleased God through the folly of what we preach to save those who believe. For Jews demand signs and Greeks seeks wisdom, but we preach Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and folly to Gentiles. But to those who are called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than men, and the weakness of God is stronger than men.
Collin Hansen:Okay. So let me let me kind of move through just the last couple minutes here. We'll take a break. I mentioned to you this is the kind of ministry where I came to Christ, and I think what's tempting it's also a ministry, I should mention, the kind of church where my parents were both saved as adults after I became a Christian. They're both baptized in their late forties in a church a lot like this.
Collin Hansen:In fact, a church where I wouldn't agree with much at all in terms of the strategy doesn't look a lot like redeemer, and yet what I have to remind myself is that did they pray for people to be born again? Do they regard the Bible as the ultimate authority? Do they preach the good news about Jesus? Absolutely. Yes.
Collin Hansen:And so for all of my problems with them, for all of my reaction toward them, I have to acknowledge that they're doing something something right and something that Jesus would commend. And I would say also, it might be a particular challenge here for redeemer, that we know all the ways that evangelism has done been done poorly. And all the ways that we don't want people to talk about Jesus that we think are so cheesy. I remember a quote from a Christian leaders Christian leader from years ago who said, I like my way of doing evangelism better than your way of not doing it, and I think that's a message that we need to consider that if you're not I don't I don't care how cheesy it was. That person took a chance to tell you the good news, and how are you taking every opportunity now to share that good news likewise?
Collin Hansen:So again, I want to just close and say that I don't know where you're coming from tonight, where you might start out on in this wheel, but what I'm hopeful of is that together in the body of Christ, particularly in Redeemer Community Church, that as we spend the time with one another who are very different, that if we're pursuing Christ together, we're gonna be moving toward the smiley face. We're gonna be moving toward Christ together. And as we move there, we're going to find other believers from different backgrounds, with different experiences, with different giftings. And together, we're going to be so much stronger than we could be apart. And I'll just also say one of the most blessed things I've seen at Redeemer is that true community is possible in Christ in a way that challenges what we expect about community.
Collin Hansen:It's not the community of a protest march. It's not the community of a country club. It's not the community of a sports team. It's not the community it's not a community of people who are essentially like you except in the deepest, most life changing, eternity defining way possible that they know Christ. And if we're following Christ together, we'll expose those blind spots, we'll find him to be beautiful, and we'll be able to get along in our home groups in every other place because we're pursuing Jesus more than we're comparing ourselves to one another.
Collin Hansen:That's all I got. So
Speaker 1:Alright. So first question, who would like to to kick us off here? Alright.
Speaker 3:Hey. Okay. I'm gonna try to ask this question without sounding like a super conservative blind spot person.
Collin Hansen:Yeah. That's that's me, so I can identify.
Speaker 3:So, with the more liberal style of preaching and teaching, I guess you you would call it the mainline Protestantism. How as, an evangelical, can I best love and confront, fellow believers who are I believe are preaching this false gospel, or, you know, being maybe too comfortable with people, or ignoring sin? And, yeah, I guess that's kind of what I'm trying to say.
Collin Hansen:That's a great question. I mean, I think, we tend to put too much emphasis on arguments. I I wish one of the things I talk about, the opening of the book is I wrote this book because my argument stopped working and I thought that I could win every argument by appealing to scripture, appealing to history, and appealing to reason. And I figured, well, those are all good things. Right?
Collin Hansen:I mean, I I think I think those are all valuable. They're godly. They're means God has given us, be able to understand himself and understand his word. But the problem is I found that people just didn't listen to me on those things. They would just say, well, who's to say the Bible is true?
Collin Hansen:And just not even engage the argument, so I did, I'll give you another example of this. I did an interview with PBS recently, it was on this book and, it was about the issue of homosexuality, which of course is, you know, it's the biggest issue that you're talking about, I'm sure probably there in all sorts of other places. And I was on the side saying the Bible says that this is a sin, not an not a unforgivable sin, not one that you can't repent from, not one that's automatically worse than any other sin, but nevertheless a sin. And they had somebody else on there who's been very successful in trying to argue to evangelicals from the opposite view, and he said, I'm here to offer people arguments for when they've changed their mind. I thought that was fascinating.
Collin Hansen:After they change their mind, I give them arguments. And that's actually the way people change. They change because of pressure, They change because of feeling. They can't change because of experience. They change because of relationships.
Collin Hansen:And then after that, they go in search for a reason to justify what they believe. But they very rarely start out with thinking, that's a good argument. I'm gonna believe that right now. I mean, you can see that especially on this issue, but all over the place. And so I would say, let's continue to make good biblical, historical, rational arguments with courage, with boldness, but let's also understand, Joel has mentioned Rosaria Butterfield's book, Secrets of an Unlikely Convert, and the particular role of hospitality and the particular role of a loving relationship that played in her making a complete life transformation.
Collin Hansen:And without wanting to downplay the authority of scripture or the successive arguments, I'd say with people who disagree with us from that perspective, it's we're not going to get very far unless they, at the very least, understand that we care about them, we love them, and that even if we regard them as an enemy, Christ says to love our enemies and to pray for them and to heap Romans 12 is one of my favorite passages. To heap burning coals of love on them. So that's my suggestion.
Jeffrey Heine:This author used softball because I think it's it helps clarify. So we have this chart and it looks like a pie and it looks like a pie with 3 pieces. Yeah. So are we looking to have balance and, balance our pieces of the pie, or are we looking for a whole pie as we embody these traits?
Collin Hansen:Great question, Lauren. I actually use that word balance, and I was trying, as I was speaking, to not use that word, and I still said it. The reason it the reason she's asking that question is because a lot of people have said, okay, Colin, so we need a little bit of this and a little bit of that
Jeffrey Heine:and a little bit of this.
Collin Hansen:And even when my publisher was asking me who should endorse the book, they chose somebody they were like, let's choose one guy over here who really doesn't like you, Colin, and is really on the courageous part only. And another person who's on the compassionate side and really doesn't like you, and somebody who's on the commission part and really doesn't like you. And I was I mean, they've literally chose 3 people who have been my harshest critics over the years. And I thought, I think we've missed something in my explanation of this, that I'm not talking about just getting together people who are equally balanced, or as in, like, out of balance, and therefore we achieve some kind of balance. But then, in fact, Christ in himself is perfectly fulfilled in all these ways.
Collin Hansen:And since he gifts us in the body of Christ as himself united to him, then our churches ought to have people who are inclined in one direction or another, but fully supportive of people who are likewise the other way. So when people come to redeemer, you don't want them to say, that's a church that's a little bit of this and a little bit of that, but a church where they believe the Bible unapologetically, They love people without qualification, and they preach the gospel without reservation. That's what we want at Redeemer. That's what I'm trying to commend here.
Speaker 5:Curious if there are certain denominations that you say very clearly fit into these categories? Yep. And then also, what would you say redeemer as a community and our members, our church? What would you say our blind spots are?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. So, yeah, that's kind of the I talk about self diagnosis a lot in the book and in this talk because that's the question I always anticipate and that I dread a little bit. I'll give you an example. So Tim Keller wrote the the foreword to the book and one of the things that he argues as a Presbyterian, PCA pastor in in New York City is that his denomination is actually all three of these, just in different churches and in different parts of the country. So he would say that the PCA in Birmingham is very much on this courageous part, like, stand for truth, preach the truth, but up in New York City, they might be tending more toward the compassionate part.
Collin Hansen:I actually think Redeemer, up in New York City fits all of these 3 pretty well, but, he would break down all of his denomination that way. I mean I think certainly the Southern Baptist Convention is is, by far the biggest denomination and over the years especially, they've been extraordinarily strong in both the courageous and the commission parts, but not in the compassionate part. And that's, been the cause of a lot of consternation and a lot of accusation from people toward them over time. And I would say just to give you an example, that you would be familiar with, we have some notable exceptions here in Birmingham, but the Episcopal church in particular, which has enjoyed the I shouldn't say enjoyed. They've suffered the greatest decline of any denomination percentage wise, almost exclusively on the compassionate side.
Collin Hansen:But I don't actually think that's a compassion that looks like Christ, it's a compassion that's out of balance that's actually on the green side of things. So calling, holy what it what God's word calls a sin and thinking that there will be somehow be growth so in that. So that's, that's the that's the problem that we run into. So again, you could work through the other denominations, but those would be a few touch points. As far as our congregation, I think in a lot of ways, we really are, I mean, we I think we do really prioritize the gospel above, a lot of these differences, but if I had to guess, I would guess that a lot of us are running away from the courageous and commissioned parts of our backgrounds and, finding the emphasis on grace at Redeemer to bring us in more toward the compassion side of things.
Collin Hansen:That's what I would guess, which is interesting because in preparing this talk, that means that my experience as I shared is presumably not normative for people at Redeemer, which is maybe why I've been blessed by Redeemer, because it's exposed the problems, so I would say that I would not have written the book without the positive example of Redeemer and the negative example of some other churches in the area. I'm I was working with 1 pastor. He He and I spent a lot of time together. He was going through a tough time in a church here in Birmingham, and it was one of the first times I realized that I could agree with everybody theologically on every single point and I would never in a 1000000 years wanna be a part of their church. I realized that it's wonderful to preach the gospel, but if your church culture doesn't demonstrate the fruit of the gospel, I don't care what you preach.
Collin Hansen:You can be orthodox, but, hey, the demons are orthodox. Doesn't get you much. Listen. It gets you a lot if you practice it. I don't wanna dismiss it.
Speaker 6:At Redeemer, we as members commit to being part of helping parents in our church raise their kids. Mhmm. We see that in our children's ministry. It's not just a few select teachers. It's all of us teaching in rotation.
Speaker 6:You talked a lot about generationally what happens and how we react to things. Now as a new dad who has a kid who's gonna be taught by all of us
Speaker 3:That's a good question. I know Grace is gone.
Speaker 6:As we reflect on these things, what do you think this kind of analysis, what kind of change are you hoping for
Jeffrey Heine:Yeah.
Speaker 6:In the way that we teach the next generation of kids in our church?
Collin Hansen:Man, I expected a good question from Melissa. That was really good. You know, I had a I had a conversation with a pastor where his conversion story is extremely dramatic. He was tossed out of his home at age 16. His parents, they just they they were like they called the police and said, come take him.
Collin Hansen:Like, we're just done with him. And he had a powerful conversion around age 20 and went on to, a very fruitful ministry in local churches. And I asked him that same question. I said, your story is so paradigmatic. How do you raise children in a way that reflects your desire for them to know Christ, like you know Christ, but doesn't want them to pass through the same experience that you pass through.
Collin Hansen:And his example to me was his response to me was, I have no idea. And sure enough, his oldest child went through the same thing. And, so part of what I would hope for any of us teachers is that any of us with our kids or any of us in children's ministry, is that, again, by looking to Christ as a positive example, more than we look to our experiences as negative examples that we're in reaction against, And the more that we come to have real life on life community among believers who are very different from each other, but are following Christ together, that hopefully, that's gonna that's going to prevent us from being the kind of church where all of our kids grow up one day with a paradigmatic, oh, I grew up in Redeemer Community Church and now this is why I'm screwed up. But you can see how many of us talk that way about our own churches. And so again, my and I dedicated the the book, Lauren and I dedicated the book to Carter, in the hopes that he would grow up in a courageous, compassionate, and commissioned church, and I think we do have that at Redeem, we're not perfectly so, but better than I've seen at most other places and that's precisely because we're seeking to be united in Christ, in the power of the gospel, and to teach that as the leading edge, and not loading up our teaching with a lot of our personal baggage and with a lot of fear.
Collin Hansen:I mean, just think of that, like how much teaching as parents and as churches is based on just instilling a certain fear as opposed to a hope, and offering a compelling positive example of worshiping Christ and following Christ. So I guess that would be something I'd emphasize a lot, Fear over or hope over over fear. Oh, got a couple of them back.
Jeffrey Heine:So you were talking a lot about how our reactions to other members of the church would cause us to be in one of these extremes. But have you found that there are any lies that we're believing about God that might cause us to end up in one of those extremes? Like, his expectations of us would cause us to end up too commissioned, like, in the negative of that, if that makes sense.
Collin Hansen:Yeah. Well, certainly, in in the vein of what I was talking about with theology as biography before, one of the most one of the one of the classic examples that we see is we often expect certain things of God based on fathers or based on authority figures or something like that. So insofar as our family experiences tend to shape our theology and therefore our picture of God, we see then that, yes, we tend to believe that God is always upset with us if we're not doing the right things, or that we think that we we have to appease God by doing certain things. And I think that's that's what you hear Joel talk a lot about, the freedom of following Christ as opposed to doing it out of kind of a white knuckled obedience and fear. And so I definitely see there's a lot of that happening of of believing I mean, ultimately, I I had a line that I didn't get in there talking about, but ultimately, these different things are rooted in idols that we believe.
Collin Hansen:Things that if we do these certain things or avoid these certain things, we'll get certain outcomes. That's a transactional type relationship with God that's entirely contrary to the picture we see of God in scripture that he is the one who initiates the relationship promises to carry us through to completion, the good work that he started in us. And so I think it it insofar as we're following Christ in freedom and surrendering to follow to follow him wherever he leads, even through suffering, even through hardship, even through misunderstanding, then we're gonna end up in the center there where God where God dwells, and not believing those lies of, you know, God hates me right now because I'm not I'm not sharing the 4 spiritual laws with somebody. God hates me right now because I'm doubting the, whether or not I can really believe this about the Bible. God's hating me right now because I'm not doing enough good things for people.
Collin Hansen:Again, that's Grace. It's wonderfully freeing and wonderfully motivating when we understand what God has done for us and Jesus. Good question.
Speaker 7:So how do you think your book speaks to someone who maybe doesn't believe in Jesus or even God and maybe the church is outdated and doesn't matter, but I like the good things they do. So maybe he's down with the compassionate side, but how does it how does this affect them?
Collin Hansen:Yeah. So, one of the things that I actually I talk about Redeemer in the book, and I talk about the experience. I can I told her I would talk about her here because she's not here? I talk about the experience of Sydney Buck, coming to our congregation at redeemer and becoming a Christian and becoming baptized. I had a privilege of being in a home group with her for a few years.
Collin Hansen:And, coming in as a as a non Christian, I remember one of the first things she said to her friend who brought her, this was a it's just a friend who was working with her and wanted to just invite her to church to meet some more people and ultimately to meet Jesus. And I remember her friend I remember Sydney turning to our friend and saying, this can't be what church is really like, is it? And of course, the answer was, yes. This isn't some kind of special church. This is just a church where people are trying to humbly, with recognition of our own sins, follow Jesus together.
Collin Hansen:But when you only know churches from media or from whatever caricature you see, or Westboro Baptist, which is like 40 people who are all in the same family, and I can't I mean, literally, they're all in the same family. It's really weird. I mean, I can
Jeffrey Heine:understand, but what you what you've
Collin Hansen:seen is, you've seen all the green on the all in the same family. It's really weird. I mean, I can understand, but what you what you've seen is you've seen all the green on the edges. You've never seen any of the beautiful yellow, and that's to the great detriment of the church. But my hope is, like, this is nothing special.
Collin Hansen:This is just what the body of Christ is supposed to look like, and I think that's a com wonderful, compelling place to be. And I would also say that I'm glad people see the good things that the church does, maybe in the in the compassionate part. But the challenge that each of us has to face is, on what basis are we compassionate? Meaning, it's easy to worship a God who agrees with you about everything already, who sees what's good who who sees what's good that you see as good, who sees what's bad what you see as bad. But the God of the Bible is very different.
Collin Hansen:He challenges all of us, Republican and Democrat and conservative and liberal and young and old. Like, he challenges all of us with a standard of righteousness that none of us can meet apart from his grace. And so, the kind of compassion that is not just about making you feel good about yourself or calling good what you already think as good on your own, is a kind of compassion that compels you to love people who hate you. That's the kind of compassion Jesus demonstrated, and that's the kind of compassion that is only known by people who know Jesus. That's the kind of compassion I want to encourage anybody who doesn't believe Jesus to know in him, because while we were yet sinners, Christ died for us, the ungodly, all of us.
Collin Hansen:One more. Alright. Jonathan.
Speaker 8:So my question is a little bit more practical. So if you have a church that has some of the rough edges, and maybe just elaborate on this a little bit more, but so us as a church, we are focused on on Jesus and going towards a smiley face like you said. But how do we encourage others to really seek after Jesus and, you know, encourage the church as a whole to come to the middle? Because most likely, they they see themselves as already in the middle. So how would you go about encouraging, other parts of the church to do that?
Speaker 8:I think all
Collin Hansen:of us are hardwired as Americans, to seek a church that can meet our needs. To come to think of what can these people, what can this place do for us to enhance to give me something I don't have, to give me community, to give me people who can do life together, to give me, again, some to meet some felt need. And I think that you can find that in church, but you can find that in a lot of kind of churches, and you can find that in a lot of kind of social clubs as well. You don't really need the church to be able to do that. But the beautiful thing that happens inside the church is that it gives us an opportunity in the power of Christ and with His Spirit working in us to serve, to give our lives, to love one another at cost, and to be joined with other people who are really different than we are, maybe who don't believe, maybe who've been burned by the church when we've been blessed by the church, who are angry while we've or alternately who are very happy and and don't have any doubts where we are full of doubts.
Collin Hansen:So I think, practically, what Christ calls all of us to do and what our church covenant as members calls us to do at Redeemer is to seek out those to love, to care for, again, practical ways that just it's so easy to look around for the people who fit your life stage, to fit your lifestyle, to fit your personality, to fit what you want. And that's not all bad, but it just you don't need Jesus to have that. You need Jesus to love your enemies. You need Jesus to love the people who annoy you. You need Jesus to be loved by people who are annoyed by you.
Collin Hansen:And that, that's the kind of love that transforms us because that's the kind of love that God showed us. So just practically speaking, there are all sorts of action steps that we can take, to think on the compassionate part about, about those sins of omission of people we haven't loved, to think on the courageous part about those beliefs in the Bible that we've been intended to just kind of push away because we don't want to think about. Or on the commission side to think about how we don't want to preach the the gospel because we're afraid that somebody's gonna think we're, you know, a dumb bible thumper or something like that. But, but Christ compels us. He calls us.
Collin Hansen:He equips us, and he goes before us in all of that. And I think that's, a wonderfully encouraging thing. We don't do any of this without him and his spirit. So, Jeff, you wanna pray and close this up?
Speaker 1:Yeah. Join me in thanking Colin for
