Episode 54: Church! What's it good for? (The Religion Issue)

Authority Issues

In this Very Special Episode, rachel, Kendall, and Luke talk about:

• Coming from different evangelical backgrounds
• The shaping of our respective authority issues as related to religious upbringing
• Luke's birth /literally/ in a baptismal font :)
• What we mean when we say "religion"
• Tech salary as a way to fund a church planting career
• Leaving the church behind but bringing the leadership lessons along
• Good and bad authority structures represented by the church
• Detoxing from evangelicisim, finding a new purpose
• Choosing between being right or being good

Switching to rachel's background:

• Moving to the US at 11, with no real religious upbringing before that
• Trying hard to buy into the fundamentalist Baptist faith
• Leaving for college and never returning
• Atheism vs agnosticism
• Whether your beliefs are a choice
• The value of faith in one's own community and whether humanity deserves the asteroid treatment

And on to Kendall's Christian upbringing:

• Dad fasting and actually praying on his knees for guidance
• The weird incentives and blame structures of fundamentalism
• Noticing the tendency to open the Bible more often to curse than to bless
• Working for a religious organization in China for 10 years
• Realizing that much of evangelical Christianity as it is practiced in the US is very much culturally a White American thing
• Not needing to understand how praying works
• Does it matter if you're wrong about faith? Nah. What matters is being willing to be wrong.
• Servant leadership and how it works for both sacred and commercial applications if done well

Back to Luke:

• Was the "walk to remember" a kind of psychic break, or prayer?
• Realizing all you really need is validation
• Only needing a loose grip on the framework to get the benefit
• Not wanting to tell people what to do, and all the insecurities that represents
• Not being able to follow instructions if the goal isn't clear
• How an aversion to certainty can get in the way of leading
• What is justice, if not love at scale?

You can accost Luke with ideas for scaling love on Twitter at @saintlukas :)

Special thanks to Mel Stanley for our theme music <3