Faith Under Communism: How the Church Survives Cultural Collapse

Nathan (00:01)

In this episode, I sit down with Stuart McAllister and we talk about the church and transition, particularly focusing on some Eastern European conflicts in the post World War II era and which churches struggled in the transition and which one thrived and then map that onto our modern experience as Western Christians. You'll find this helpful as you think about the way you think about the world, but also as you lead and encourage the Christians around you. As always, if you appreciate what we do, you can like, share and subscribe.

And if you'd like to support us financially, can do so by visiting www.toltogether.com.

Hello and welcome to Thinking Out Loud. I'm Nathan Rittenhouse and today, it’s a special privilege to have Stuart McAllister back with us, a fan favorite, because he brings some actual wisdom to these conversations that Cameron and I can kind of bat around in the ether a little bit and then Stuart can help us put some legs under some of our ideas. But Stuart, one of the, just kind of a, I don't know, over the last year or two, a category that's been interesting for me is to think about the church in transition. And...

Let's not think about North America for the moment at all, although there are transitions happening there, but I've been going back and reading a lot of, I guess you would call it the, the, the OG, the original historical fiction of, you know, from Perl S books bucks, the good earth looking at, you know, the kind of the Chinese peasant up through the revolution. things like, ⁓ show the calves like silent or quiet flows, the Dawn of looking at kind of the caustic way of life, very agrarian rooted to a.

Stuart (00:46)

Yes. yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Nathan (00:59)

In that case, a river, geographic location. And then you have these technological, economic, and political shifts that flip everything ⁓ up through, you know, the Bolshevik revolution. And you can repeat this pattern of just rapid transition and total cultural change within very short periods of time, flipping very quickly. ⁓ And it's just kind of an interesting to look at the totality of that rather than, in this date, you know, Napoleon did this.

Stuart (01:02)

Mm-hmm.

All right.

Nathan (01:26)

to try to think more broadly about life on the ground at that time, because that's how we live and we experience it. And so it kind of got me thinking about, know you're deeply read in kind of not just military history, but also particularly kind of Eastern Europe. You have a lot of ⁓ experience in that. it's kind of, you know, I was born in the mid eighties. A lot of the upheaval there was, you know, before I was born and then significant things happening when, you know,

Stuart (01:27)

All right.

Mm-hmm.

Nathan (01:55)

I wasn't thinking about anything when I, know, in 1986, ⁓ and so up to 89 for sure, big, you know, in those, those years, massive things happening. And so you take the bulk of the listeners to this conversation. We'll have no recollection of kind of that post-war. then I think, you know, we think, world war two was over in the forties and don't really have a conceptualization of just the way that that snowball and the, the outworkings of that splattered throughout the entire,

Stuart (02:09)

Yes.

Mm-hmm.

Nathan (02:24)

particularly Eastern European region. And so if you want to give us just like, know, as you're thinking like things that pop into your head of that time, and then we'll pull in kind of like, and how did the church flourish, perish, get twisted, thrive? This is what I want to poke you on and hear a little bit about ⁓ some of that.

Stuart (02:42)

Yeah, that was great to be with you, Nathan, and to with your listeners and watchers. ⁓ I think growing up in Scotland and post war, World War Two, Britain, there was also I mean, I was, of course, a kid coming of age. And you're learning things in school about the British Empire and this kind of stuff, which in my life was actually the very end of it. So it was literally the tide was going out. And when we watched the news, we had the terrorism in Britain.

from Northern Ireland with the Irish Republican Army bombs going off in London and the big cities of Britain, but of course Ireland where there was much more violence. But equally there was things like places that I grew up with like Aden, which is Yemen today. Well, that was a British occupied, the British army was still there. And then many parts of Africa, was still British army and there was people, you're seeing news, black and white news reports of attacks. So very much seen that and also the post-industrial,

being in Scotland, the collapse of shipbuilding and steel, all the things that had been there during the war were in massive decline because post-war, a lot of that stuff went overseas to other countries. And the church equally was in a place of, ⁓ the 60s was a revolution around the world in terms of values. you had churches that grew up in a kind of a static, if you like, more a given, a slower pace of life and a particular sense of morality.

and maybe social ethics, but then the social ethics disappear, the morality gets readjusted, and Christians find themselves rather than being in a kind of positive place in culture, increasingly moving into the back foot. And that's just in Britain. But when you go to the continent in Europe, you have whole cultures that were first of all brutalized by the Nazi experience, which was a war of total annihilation. mean, when the Nazis came in,

not just the Jews, but the Slavic peoples were hated, the gypsies, and anybody who didn't fall form into the Reich's racial theories. So when Stalin and the Russians, of course, fought back, was equally annihilation coming the other way. But for the people in the middle, and that would be Ukrainians and Poles and Hungarians and Bulgarians, they substituted one slavery for another one. And in between that, there were Christians on the ground.

who had believed God. I mean, I remember sitting with ⁓ Baptist men, men preaching in this church in Poland. And as these old hardened men, at that time, probably in their 60s, or 65 or older, but they had been ethnic Germans. So they lived in Poland, but they were ethnically German in roots. So they were basically force recruited into the German army, had to fight for the Germans all the way into Russia.

fought all the way back from Russia against the Soviets and then were captured. And then for many of them, they lived for 10 years as prisoners in the Soviet Union, helping rebuild the Soviet Union and only came back to Poland, their home, in 1955. And now these were Baptist men and these were guys who were Bible-believing, know, believing Christians. So you can imagine their life, and you talk about adjustment, talk about... ⁓

living under that and talk about their families, their parents living with these, their relatives with no communication at all while they were in the Soviet Union, that they die or whatever they, they may know they were alive, but that was about the minimal amount of communication they could get. So yeah, transition is a huge challenge. And I think culture moves at a rapid rate, things can go for very stably for a period of time.

And then either from technology, war, some other factor comes in and boom, you're in an acceleration. And often we find ourselves unprepared for that. And I think the danger is that we react out of emotion and seeking power rather than going to the scriptures to God and being ⁓ coordinated by the things that God has given us, the eternal things, the eternal over the, if you like, Kairos over Kronos in terms of time, you know.

Nathan (06:55)

something about because it strikes me as interesting that how and I'll show my ignorance here and just ask a question that may or may not even make sense but there there it seemed to me that some of those so you said you know culture can go along for long for a very long time and then you get these massive disrupting forces and it seems like one of the the main disrupting forces there is the displacement so you think of these guys are hauled off to another you know country for ten years ⁓ but that

Stuart (07:14)

Yeah.

Nathan (07:24)

there was a way in which Eastern Orthodox Christianity kind of got rooted in the nature of

the cycles of the seasons and the church calendar and the language. ⁓ So you go back and you certainly shouldn't idealize any of those orally, we would call more primitive at this point, agriculturally based systems, but they were more native and they were more rooted in the

the structure. so it seems like the Christianity was more ⁓ culturally deeper and interwoven into everything from the dress to the... What am I trying to say here? It doesn't feel like that. Okay, yeah.

Stuart (08:02)

Well, yeah, think as we see if I could take a shot of what you're

trying, I think you're trying to say. OK, so Christianity classically transmitted across the hundreds and 1500 years Christendom, if you like, but it took on a different face in orthodoxy and then from the Catholicism and then in the reformation with the Protestant countries. what they had in common.

was that there was a cosmic order. There was an order that God was in the heavens, the earth had a rhythm, that there were seasons, and the church calendar and the agricultural calendar kind of were in sync in a way because the church followed the life of Jesus, creation, fall, resurrection, and particularly around the events of Easter, which also coincided with spring and the new birth and planting and all this kind of thing. And it was connected in many ways to the Jewish calendar in terms of

the feasts which were then fulfilled by Christ. So there was a rhythm, there was a narrative, there was a structure. What modernity does when it comes in is you have ⁓ secularization that leads to pluralization, it multiplies the amount of belief systems if you like, and then increasingly over time privatization. So those structures, not all at once, but in the case of the totalitarians, the Nazis,

Nathan (09:00)

Mm-hmm.

Stuart (09:29)

or the Soviets was to the church part particularly was to be warred against any metaphysical claim, any claim to authority of morality or structure or rhythm had to be either destroyed or subsumed into the Nazi way of life or the communist way of life. Or I would say today, the economic imperialism of our time in which, you know, consumerism does the same thing to the church in a way.

Nathan (09:55)

Okay, well let's go there because this is the question that I have in my mind, is I'm reading historically and I'm watching what are the key elements that have destroyed and it's wild to live in a time, and again, in my lifetime I've experienced nothing that's even remotely on the level of brutality and bloodshed and loss. So I'm not undermining that, not downplaying that, I recognize there's a monumental difference there. The flip side is, I do feel like we're living in a time in which we watch the collapse of

There's some sort of similarity here that's happened without the bloodshed. ⁓ And so, I'm trying to decide what's just coincidental there and what's an actual cultural or metaphysical. So, I feel like, you if I look sideways at my generation, people do feel displaced. They do feel they don't have a story. They don't have a rhythm. They don't have a history or a cultural or a... And so, it's like living among a displaced people that never experienced a war.

Stuart (10:30)

yeah, I don't know. I mean, I used to see...

think the difference is in...

let me, I think the difference is that when I used to visit the states coming from Europe, I used to, I got the impression that America almost was rather than being a nation was more of a market. Because I found Christians talking and people talking always about the stock market, the Dow and all that, which we do, you hear on the, you know, so we thought in economic terms, we were economized to such a degree. And I had a feeling that that whilst persecution, whilst persecution,

was the law of Christians in Eastern Europe and China and many parts of the Muslim world, that seduction was a far greater effect in the United States and in many parts of what became, you know, Western Europe, Australia, Canada, and so forth. So the underlying assumption of materialism and the vision of ⁓ the self, the loss of a sense of community and purpose, but that life exists for the maximization of pleasure and the minimization of pain.

And that becomes the sum on bottom there. And that can be defined by any lifestyle. So the idea of community of particularly when you're thinking about a nation, nation and shared visions, E pluribus unum, that goes out the window because you're not, who cares about the unum as long as there's a market and my toys and I've got my cable television and I've got my iPad and whatever. I can construct and consume the life that I want. And you are, I think you ask questions from a place

of a deep, not only a deep sense of an embedded community, but from a deep longing for the breadth of that to spread. There is, we are connected to the earth, we are connected obviously primarily to God initially, we're connected to others by virtue of birth and heritage, and we are connected morally and responsibly for the execution of the kind of life we should have together. There's moral things like truth, justice, righteousness, equity.

rightly defined are things we should be concerned about. But increasingly in a consumerist world, it's like, I don't care because as long as I'm getting mine, you know, I don't care about anybody else kind of thing.

Nathan (12:57)

Yeah,

so I guess this is me speculating that I feel like I live in a time, and for those chronologically coming behind me, who have recognized the shortcomings of this, but have no clue how to begin to put something back together. That seems to me, and so absolutely, we can't, you know, and you have the rise of the interest in Wendell Berry and all of that kind of thing, but I know good and well that nature is not a clear enough vision for unity.

Stuart (13:13)

Right.

Nathan (13:26)

I know that, you know, and so I'm watching people grasp for things that I know look nice for about 18 months, but they aren't enough to create a vision of a, to use Paul King's North categories of a place in the people and a past in a prayer, of we're seeking meaning, but it's not just meaning. We're looking for shared meaning and we're no good at it. You know, that's kind of what it feels like. ⁓

Stuart (13:52)

But

a place for us to go in this, think this is where the, like Matthew chapter 13 in the parables of the kingdom, the kingdom of God, you know, Jesus said is like a mustard seed. So we have to have that mustard seed kind of vision of life. The strategy it seems that God has employed in the New Testament is the placing of His word and His people. So His word in people and those people with the word in them in places. And I think that's the Christian vision of subversion.

Nathan (14:16)

Mm-hmm.

Stuart (14:22)

that God places people, Daniels, Esther's, David's, Joseph in Egypt with the Pharaoh across time and in the modern world, you know, sends out people like the apostle Paul and the apostles scattering these seeds everywhere and the seeds plant in the midst of ⁓ despotic power of the Roman Empire.

And with no power, no authority, no economic well-being, no strength, no backup, no non-prophetic organizations, no internet, none of the above. But they had the Word of God, the power of the Holy Spirit and the drive of mission. And God used them. We must beware that we are not children of the technocratic age where we need a complete strategy for everything. Unless we could come up with a vision, a plan, an organ, a strategy, we find ourselves lost.

Nathan (15:04)

Mm-hmm.

Stuart (15:11)

I think in times like this, in transition, we go to the coordinates that God has given us based in worship, ⁓ integrity, living out faithfulness and service. So service within to those around us within our communities, our church, witness to the world. We testify, we share and we act responsibly. And then we look for co-belligerence. We find others who share

with even in our faith or outside it, people who share similar coordinates, if you like, that we can align with for common goods, common well-being, but not waiting for the bigger picture. think at the higher level, Nathan, because of technology, because of money, because of unregulated power, you're in a world in which this is a little bit like the Lord of the Rings, know, one ring to rule them all, one ring to find.

one ring to bind them all and in that darkness, bind them. that issue today is power. It always has been. And so we are fighting against speaking truth to power, not just truth to power to say who wins the political. There's a metaphysical dimension of this. It's the escalation of the conflict that is all seen all the way through the Bible and of ultimately leading to the final worship when the king comes back and says it's done and the trumpets blow and Christ

shall come and we will celebrate but until then we have to live through the mess and the muddle of the daily complexity of life trying to be faithful and focused in our life.

Nathan (16:46)

a statement, a follow-up statement and a question then. So as you were making this list of the Daniels and the Esthers and the Josephs, know, and on through Scripture, it should jump out to us that none of those stories came about by advanced human strategic planning. There wasn't any like, you know, if we could get Joseph sold into slavery, he could rise into power into, you know, the upper levels or, you know, we could get Esther. And so there's a little bit of that faithful presence idea there that I very much appreciate with your perspective on this.

I guess one of the questions that comes out of that is, you grew up Scotland, the British experience, your testimonies for another time, but you weren't super interested in the things of the church during that period. Then the Lord gets ahold of you and we're all grateful for that. Then you go into the mission field and then into the Eastern Europe side of things. What years would that have been? The 80s or so?

Stuart (17:29)

So,

1978, I went to, began in 1978 and I was in, we lived in Austria until 1998, so 20 years. So we lived through the actual fall of the iron curtain and the Berlin Wall.

Nathan (17:45)

78, okay.

Yeah, was

laughing showing my kids the other day, I have a globe that still has Czechoslovakia on it. ⁓ That's my modern artifact, I guess. So as you're pushing into these areas,

Stuart (18:01)

Hahaha

Mm-hmm.

Nathan (18:12)

what fragments of the church are still there? What are you connecting with? And what is the, I'm curious about their post-desolation reconstitution, I guess. Were you doing first time biblical contact or were you finding some glowing coals and embers that needed to be fanned into flame there? And how were those people hanging on after all this?

Stuart (18:32)

Well, during the Cold War years itself, that we were working with very much living believers, we were working with churches that were either some that were above ground, but most that were underground in some capacity, or trying to be as low key as they could be, but they still received literature, Bibles, materials, songbooks, children's stuff for camps.

where they would take kids off for Bible training to the mountains in Poland or in Bulgaria and Romania and all this kind of thing. So there was the period itself in which they were very largely very vibrant. Of course, the people that received the literature would be the more serious Christians because they were willing to face jail sentences. And that happened ⁓ or, you know, ⁓ getting denounced by neighbors if they were caught or Westerners were seen coming to their houses. But then in the postwar years,

That was a time of confusion for all because you had the collapse of a system of total domination and shepherding, you know, the nanny state on steroids that basically didn't function fully, but functioned at a level that everybody was not. It was the norm. And then the free market comes in and all of a sudden people find out their currency isn't worth as much, that new moralities are coming in, television programs from the West, know, pornography and all the usual stuff that comes in the tail of that. And the church found that

quite hard to make the adjustment in the initial. The leaders who had been raised under communism were trained to kind of watch and shepherd. So they had a very hands-on, a bit controlling in terms of the church. And they couldn't, they didn't find it easy to lay up. even, and then some of the innovations when people came in from America, from Britain, from a young trendy looking Christians with guitars and noise. ⁓ I mean, I remember being called in several times to mediate.

⁓ and a couple of people I admire very deeply ⁓ didn't make the transition very well. In fact, one guy in particular, I headed off a crisis where the people loved him to death, but they now saw him, a hero who had suffered for the faith and been imprisoned. They saw him as one of the major obstacles to growth and to try and get him gently to step aside so the church could move into this new era and advance with the gospel, advance with...

the new conditions, the context and conditions that had changed, it wasn't easy for them to make that change.

Nathan (20:52)

This is,

I'm so glad I asked you about this, because this is raising a whole lot of fascinating questions in my mind. And so just let me repeat this back and make sure that I have this right. ⁓ underground church maintains some vibrancy and maintains a leadership structure. There's, you're part of, you know, and there's a broader literature being smuggled around and all that sort of thing. And so the church adapts to that culture, functionally speaking, it's operating. You're not putting an advertisement in the local newspaper or, you know, radio program of, you know,

Stuart (21:11)

it.

Nathan (21:22)

What the kids. ⁓ So that's happening. Because I think there's a part of us to say that in a time of physical persecution. That that would be the hardest and it's interesting that you've said that actually.

that wasn't, while that had its challenges, the bigger questions happened was, okay, so we have a stable thing going along here, it's not good, but it's stable, and then quickly things change into theoretically a better political economic future, but the church struggled with that term into...

Stuart (21:49)

Mm hmm. Oh, big time.

Mm hmm. And in fact, there were leaders. I would meet people that were people that they got just like you guys. Sorry, just that you actually get also amongst the wider population. There was there became almost a nostalgia for communism because in a sense, the enemy was defined. The situation was defined. You what you're fighting against when capitalism came in and changed, the game changed drastically.

And rather than people being controlled, they were so-called set free. But many people have never been able to live with freedom. Freedom is a problem as well as a blessing. Because, and I think we've discussed this in previous episodes, but when freedom comes in and you haven't a chance to, experimentation, ⁓ trying things out and getting your fingers burned becomes an issue. And the older people who live with very tight guardrails,

can then become seamless problems because they can't allow enough bandwidth to do the necessary expansion into freedom, positive freedom. They only live by negative freedom. And I think that's where the Christian coordinate of always defining, well, what do we mean by I'm free? Paul said that you see in the New Testament, Paul, many of the letters, I Corinthians and others were written trying to explain what Christian liberty was and what it was not.

So although he was an apostle, he was free to do certain things, but he wouldn't do certain things in certain people. He wouldn't do some things at all, but there's other things he wouldn't even do if he knew it caused someone to stumble. So this was the kind of thing, what was allowable. And that's always, I think, one of the challenges. What does it mean to be free, but responsible? Or I think Oz would use the phrase ordered liberty. So, and that was very much a question. I think that's what America was born into.

Nathan (23:40)

Yeah, okay.

Stuart (23:46)

but has then left. so now freedom is disordered. We want liberty, but without the order part.

Nathan (23:53)

So bring me, let's step back once and then go forward once here.

So what were the characteristics of the people who did, of the churches and the leaders and the Christians who did make that? I'm not saying that wasn't difficult for anybody, but, and I think I know what you're going to say here, but there surely were examples of groups or people that navigated that transition well. And I'm sure you noticed a couple of things about what made those work uniquely well during that time.

Stuart (24:23)

Well, yeah, I mean, even in the same country, there was there were two people in contrast, there was one guy in particular, who we worked with a lot and brought a lot of literature and he that he was he was a real risk taker. I mean, he he really saw God move.

taking literature and being stopped by the police with literature in his car and not getting caught. They didn't find the literature and ⁓ his own father-in-law had probably been murdered by the secret police in his country. And he moved quite well because he was very missional. He was very outgoing. He recognized the changes, but he'd already done been doing work, but I would say the much more worldview says developing his thinking about economics and other things.

as things were beginning to happen, many of the others had not, the gentleman I was thinking of that I was kind of alluding to was, although had been an academic at one time, really gone into a very narrow world of a kind of a very, almost a fundamentalist biblical model. And he didn't have categories to work with. I don't think he had things like creation, fall, redemption, and eschaton. I mean, he had genuinely redemptive sense of,

Jesus is alive, the gospel is true, preach the word. But it was a very black and white world. Everything, it was very clear. And they had no room for gray or nuance.

Nathan (25:43)

Mm-hmm.

Stuart (25:50)

And I think part of the thing that these leaders were was an openness to explore and still be able to say no, but you had to grow into things. Well, what is the biblical picture? I had to test the waters and apply my ethics and my morality and prayer and discernment as you move into the new world. It's not a fixed world. It's not a set set in concrete, one size fits all for all time. ⁓ And then you can adapt to the changing realities.

Nathan (26:18)

Well, so what I'm wondering in this is as I'm listening to you say that and then trying to apply that to we made some ⁓ kind of illusions or ⁓ correlations between the moment which we're living in this time of great disruption. And it does seem to me that out of a ⁓ very real sense of gospel faithfulness and of, you know, looking around culturally that a lot of the work of the church right now can be into, we're going to define the evil that's

Stuart (26:20)

Mm-hmm.

Thank

Nathan (26:46)

You know, that's

Stuart (26:46)

you.

Nathan (26:46)

all laid out clearly for us everywhere we look and then that the work of the church becomes in maintaining and defending the church against X, Y, Z. That doesn't have, so it's interesting to me that you said that the guy who made it had a missional concept of this is a continue, even coming out of a personally difficult time. ⁓ The church is continuing to lean forward and see that as part of its posture toward the world rather than just being defined in the negative sense of how do we,

Stuart (26:59)

Mm-hmm.

Nathan (27:15)

So instead of saying, how do we not fall apart? How do we multiply? Is a posture that helps us kind of keep our eyes up in a helpful way.

Stuart (27:24)

Well, if you take a defensive posture, in other words, you're living your life by threat. Everything is a fearful issue. Everything is a danger. can make the catastrophe, your faith collapse, your life be compromised, your spiritual and all of this, but living by fear and not by faith. And I think one of the things I mean, learning like even from the Marines, who, you know, were often taught, you know,

procedures at combat and things, but they knew that when a battle began, things would change. So you had these steady procedures in your head and the tools that were given to you for combat, but you also learned that in the context of conflict, you had to be able to adapt, innovate and improvise. So as a Christian, I get this surety of God's word that's given to us. We have the scriptures, the prophetic word made more sure as it says in Peter.

And we regular reading and soaking in the narrative, the story, regular prayer and communion that keeps me in tune with God. And then when in the openness of life, as things change, I have to adapt, innovate and improvise. I'm not innovating in the sense of changing the script. I'm applying God's word to this context. I'm listening with God for obedience in the here and now in this context with these people under these circumstances in this moment.

Nathan (28:47)

Yeah, I so I imagine everybody listening along is like that's great Stuart ⁓ And that's true and I can even say you know from my own experience I remember when I was at Gordon Conwell and speaking a lot in ⁓ colleges and campuses up in New England that there were many times I'd be sitting in a a seminary class and think that is absolutely true I agree with that and that is absolutely not the way I'm going to start talking about it when I get to the college campus this evening and so it wasn't it wasn't a difference in the fundamental truth it was a

Stuart (29:11)

Yeah.

Nathan (29:16)

Okay, actually, you know, it

sneaks up on you. This book is now 20 years old. This sociological idea has, and so this rapid change that I think is difficult for Christians and for church leaders to say, okay, where's the actual ⁓ solid rock here? What are the things that are flexible? And what are the things that if we bend them, the whole thing comes crashing down? ⁓

Stuart (29:20)

Right. Yep. and

Nathan (29:41)

That's not fear-mongering. It's just the reality of what it means to be human. I think some of the questions I'm asking you is drawing out, hey,

⁓ there have been faithful Christian people who have done this very well for a very long time.

Stuart (29:55)

Yeah, there was a phrase I was just looking for because I took a note to myself or there's sometimes I look for things like mnemonic devices, you things that will help me in my memory. But there was something I read this morning. I can't even remember the context. It was talking about the clock, the calendar and the compass. And I thought, so the clock, a clock is a symbol of what's the time.

So what time I'm in, that's what you're saying. So you've gone from your theology class to your student encounter. Your calendar is the kind of the depth, the stuff that you've not, there's things that I can achieve here in this limited time. And your compass, I think, is the true north that you're aiming for. want to talk about, I want to think about honoring God. I want to love him with all my heart. I want to glorify him. So there are pieces that we have given that we have to think of adapting to the context. And I think part is bringing to consciousness

the applications of some of the tool sets that we have and using them in the moment in a more robust way. And then sharing the experience that it's not just a one time for all, but you can test the maze. I think in a church, the life experience of people in the university or people in the mechanics workshop or people working in the medical, whatever field it's in, they share anecdotally how they have seen Christ manifest the spirit working.

Nathan (30:54)

Mm-hmm.

Stuart (31:16)

And that becomes a part of our intelligence that we have to then feel that intelligence back into, well, I'm not doing exactly that, but the same spirit, the same God is with me. And I'm praying, I'm asking, show me Lord, how I might, you know, and I'm inspired by the example of God working in them and their example of modeling like that. So I think that's part of the, we learn together as we journey together.

But we navigate by the fixed points. What are the navigational points that we're aiming towards? What does that look like? What's the good that I am living at living for today in this circumstance? What's the good that I can bring to someone? Can I be kind? Can I just talk to them, love on them, pray for them, say, I know you're in terrible distress. Can I help them in some physical ways? Is there financial or some other aid I can give? Is there some practical? So there's always something we can do and even

Nathan (31:46)

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Stuart (32:10)

They say, well, all I can do is pray. Well, it's not all you can do. That's a massive thing. If someone comes and prays for you, you're bringing the God of heaven to bear into a circumstance. And I think that's the kind of thing. Get more of a ⁓ hopeful, transformative. You see, Nathan, one of the things that bothers me about our moment, and I said this the other, I think we talked about this last week. There's, when we're talking about culture, there's too much cynicism.

Nathan (32:13)

Yeah.

Stuart (32:37)

on all levels, we all see and we all see, we think we're too analytical, we're all too clever. We're also yes, but we're all doing sort of the postmodern thing. All of us, I think. And that leads to in the soul, a type of despair. Because we become so seeing through and analyzing that our soul by definition becomes weary. Because we don't see hope, we don't expect hope. And well, God will work, yes, but someday, but that's way, way we think.

Meanwhile, we are down here in the mud, in the mess, in the muddle. Well, we're not alone. Though I am with you always, even to the end of the age. And we need to recover that sense of faith, hope and courage day by day. so what you were talking about in transition, the overwhelming positive characteristics were those who embraced their moment because they embraced their God in the moment.

Nathan (33:33)

There's the line. Yeah. You know, I think practically speaking, ⁓ the way that my wife and I have been praying about this is to say, Lord, would you help us cling firmly to what we need to cling firmly to and be open-handed where we need to be open-handed and sort of have this sense of what are we really latching down to? And then what's just cultural silliness or what is ephemeral that we're being told by a cultural moment, you have to have this, you have to do this. ⁓

Stuart (33:34)

That makes a difference.

All right.

Yeah.

Yes.

Nathan (34:02)

God actually really isn't part of the actual gospel marching order.

Stuart (34:05)

all is

vanity and the striving after wind. And I mean, you do see the ephemeral, the thinness, the hable, the weakness of so much that passes for value and structure and importance and relevance and cool. you have to, all of this, these are manufactured values that then camp in my soul and give me a sense of what is important and necessary.

But it's lies, it's propaganda, it's not all bad. The good things are lasting and the eternal shines through the created order, the loving things that God has given. But there's a lot more fun in the mundane, the normal, the regular, the seeming not as important, sexy or powerful. But it's a transcendent realism that breaks through when we trust God, believe him and don't live with sticky fingers.

Nathan (34:57)

Yeah. Well, I like your thought there about understanding the moment, but trusting God in the moment is the key there. And so I think for those of you who are listening and you're thinking about, you know, remove the plank from your own eye, ⁓ we have to be honest about the way in which these things do seep and saturate into our consciousness, our secular moment here. And so there's...

Stuart (35:05)

and the law.

Nathan (35:24)

A lot of work for us to do individually, but then I think a lot of you listening are also in some form of leadership, whether it's a family or a church or a business or organization or something. And to be thinking about the way in which you can foster proper worship, which does help us clarify what are we really about here? But then also, I think just the room to say, Hey, some of these things are silly and to call them for what they are and to, and to work to be, to be a people and to be part of a people and be fostering in our own lives, the ability to say.

Here's the compass work. Here's true magnetic North. This is the triune God who is and we orient around what he calls us to. And then we look at the calendar and then we look at the clock ⁓ on the day of the day in the monthly and the yearly thing. But if we can have that long-term perspective, then we recognize that some of these ⁓ hamster wheel moments that flip around in our culture, ⁓ we can provide the, on Christ the solid rock I stand. ⁓

Stuart (36:21)

I remember

Nathan a moment with a dear friend. was in the Easter season many, many years ago. I was in New England and this was the pastor founder of a really wonderful church. A lot of blue collar people, just a very mixed, big, loving church. And he just before I was about to speak, he was talking about the Easter moment and he was talking about God's love in the incarnation. And he said, you know, he talked about the fact of, you know, Ferraris and

European chocolates and all these things that we find so special. And then he talked about God's love. A love so special, he said, it had to be imported.

And I think that's part of what this is about. We can have this conversation because that love was imported already. But maybe in some of the moments in our life when we're in that darkness is to import that love again, you know, to realize that there's a love here, there's an agape, there is something in the cosmos, in the circumstances, in my life that would not be there had Christ not come and died for us and then had been risen. So there's a love so special.

Nathan (37:03)

Mm-hmm.

Stuart (37:26)

There's something shed abroad that is here and is growing and is the basis of true spiritual revolution. And that's where we keep our eyes on.

Nathan (37:36)

Stuart, I think we'll end it there. Great words to end on. Thank you so much for your time.