Melissa Kruger | The Hardest Year and the Hope That Never Fails | Gospelbound Bonus Episode | Word First

[Music] you're listening to gospel bound a podcast from the gospel coalition for those searching for firm faith in an anxious age i'm your host colin hansen welcome to a special edition of gospel bound and let's talk i'm colin hansen i'm the host of gospel bound and i'm joined by my good friend and colleague melissa krueger one of the hosts of let's talk melissa it's great to be talking with you it's so fun to be here with you we wanted to take you behind the scenes look back on the big stories and trends of 2020 and thank all of you our listeners for encouraging us in this work it's just been a tremendous year even amid all of the chaos none of which we anticipated when we launched both of these podcasts so it's been pretty wild but again i think a very rewarding experience absolutely before we begin actually colin you know a lot of people may know you as the host of gospel bound but anyone who works with you knows that you actually do a ton more work at tgc in fact you've been at tgc longer than anyone other than don carson you know who basically helped found tgc and so can you tell us a little bit about what you do for tgc yeah so i've been here for for more than a decade now uh celebrated that 10-year mark back in july which you and my colleagues were very kind to send me encouraging notes and a gift and things like that that was really it was really a highlight for 2020 for me for his birthday we sang for him and that was not a kindness to you when we speak to you well everybody knows you can't sing together over zoom but you know you cannot get in sync it just does not work there are things that we've learned in 2020 so i've been responsible for all of the content development since so that would be the books that we publish the articles the podcast content that we come up with a vision for multimedia and social media just helping on the idea side of things also hiring new editors and i hired you of course one of one of my best moves if i might say so we could talk about that but uh yeah and then also it includes the events and i know we want to talk about uh what we're looking forward to in 2021 with the events here as well so choosing the speakers and the topics and and things like that working especially with the president to tgc who is who is julius kim on developing that so now melissa i'm trying to remember usually i say something like melissa so you've been working with tgc now for two years and you're like yeah six years colin thank you very much so so how long has it been at tgc for you and i'm also wondering just how many different jobs have you held since that in that time i know that's a good question i'm terrible with dates too i really i really judge most states by how it was my kid when i started doing this and that helps me to count back i initially came on i wasn't working for tgc i think in around 2016 you asked me to come on as a blogger so that was really the first thing i started doing tgc started hosting my blog and then a year later you asked me to come on as an editor and i'm so glad that you did because i've loved being a part of that team and then i worked as an editor i think about a year and a half i can't really remember or maybe last summer i came on full time with tgc um in our women's content and women's initiatives and so that's what i do now and i i really love it but i do just want to say on collin's job if you don't know this if there's any content that you've enjoyed across the board podcast you know articles books he's got a hand in it somewhere i'm so thankful for your vision in that and how how it has grown through the years i mean you know we're not just a website anymore we have all these different areas um in which it's grown and i'm just so thankful for the ways the lord has gifted you to serve on this organization in such a broad way it's a real gift thank you melissa now you've also notified everybody to whom to send all of their hate emails so now you've clued in all of the angry facebook groups about how to reach out and where they can direct all their complaints i've been trying for 10 years for people to not find out any of that i'll send you this email well one thing we want to talk about today um we want to really kind of recap 2020 it's been a year there's always it's been it's been a year that's true there's a ton that's um gone on and we can't really talk talk about theological stories without talking about words like coven 19 and pandemic and mask when i found myself shopping online for cute masks i thought the world has really changed in dramatic ways and the fact that every store i like had cute masks to shop from but it's been it's been a year that i think none of us could have predicted in any way and it's had huge impact on our conversations about the church and our relationships in the church and can you just speak a little bit into how you've seen those conversations develop throughout 2020. you and i melissa were together with the rest of tgc's senior leadership team just the week before the shutdown right so i remember back in those crazy days that seemed like forever ago and also yesterday somehow at the same time i had flown on a sunday night out to san diego we'd been together for a few days i got up and had like a four a.m or something like that crazy flight all the way across to greenville south carolina to speak there came back to birmingham and once i once i mean you were of course going back to charlotte since then it's been nothing we've shifted from a moment of almost of of initial panic of sorts of imagining all kinds of worst case scenarios we switched from that into almost a kind of well this is different and almost in some ways a little bit relieving because i had all these things that i had to do and now i have some extra time and here in alabama at least we had the most beautiful spring wow so all kinds of time spent outdoors with family and and then all of a sudden it gets into oh things are going to get better oh no i mean they actually are not really getting better and one of the key moments and this is related to one of the other stories that we want to talk about was george floyd's death and the protests that followed there then from there things got in deeper into the presidential election and when you tie those three things together in my top 10 theology stories of 2020 i i've i've written that the top three stories of this year uh coveted 19 george floyd's death and president trump's laws all of them would have been number one in any other year but all three of them happened in 2020 and all three of them are related to each other they're all connected they would not have happened without the other at some level and that's what it's done for us in terms of theology and culture and church because it has put almost all of our churches under a kind of siege and it's not only because of the pandemic if that were just in and of itself we would be mourning here about how we're not going to be singing christmas carols together and we're not going to be having candlelight services and things like that which is you know set in of itself but when you add on to that friendships that have been broken permanently pastors who have left the ministry which i'm hearing a lot of groups of leaders within churches who share almost all of the same theology and yet can't even speak to each other anymore it just seems as though of all years that we did not need to be spending more time by ourselves and online it was 2020 and yet that's exactly what was delivered up to us under the good providence of god and so i think just as a in retrospect would be pretty foolish to look back on 2020 and think that we had a good sense of what was coming i don't think we have a real great sense right now of how this is all going to to play out except i will say that um as it always does advent comes at a good time it does it does and i think um it is just hard to measure the impact it's had on churches even we had just switched churches about five months before covet happened and you know it's always hard to to get to know others in a new congregation and then when you're not meeting every week it's it's just been this loss and i think people have a hard time even quantifying what that loss has been we've had some great articles i remember one from our co-editor megan hill it it actually makes it harder to dig into the truth that we need from scripture when we don't have that regular meeting every week and i know i've seen that my own life there it's one thing to go on line and you get to have this church service in your den kind of in your pajamas but there is something about being together collectively and worshiping the lord collectively and sitting there with others hearing the truth that it's a huge huge blessing and i know we're all mourning that loss but hopefully we will have those meetings soon lord willing as we've all learned to say about everything this year again you also talked about the effects of the tragic death of george floyd on conversations that we're having in the church and probably how it's prompted conversations that definitely needed to happen can you speak to that a little more and how the deaths of multiple americans in different communities have really spurred on some healthy discussions some unhealthy acts of violence that maybe haven't been helpful in in in ways but can you discuss how in the church this is a conversation we really need to have about racial injustice and how these deaths have prompted that and how you've seen that going as people are having those conversations yeah we remember also ahmad arberry brianna taylor jacob blake all of them different circumstances and yet one of the things that i've seen reiterated in 2020 is the need for majority culture christians like you and me to be patient and to listen attentively attentively to african americans about their experiences and how they receive the news how they watch the videos how they process that i would love to say that what we've seen in 2020 has been an outpouring of empathy and collaboration about tangible reforms that we might be able to bring and actually find consensus around because thankfully i don't see anybody saying that any of these things happening was good okay i mean there were some times when people did think that doing these things was somehow a good thing okay at least nobody is arguing that we disagree strongly some of us um about exactly how to fix that but at least we do recognize that these things should not be happening that these are tragic okay you'd think that that would be a starting point and then be able to connect that to minority experiences and how they see things through their particular perspective and i do think there has been some of that and certainly at tgc i think about shylynn's article george floyd and me was one of our most read and best appreciated articles of this year and i think that contributed a lot of of helpful theological discourse in terms of how do we bring our faith to bear on these current events and on these experiences that some of us can't relate to but do want to do want to address or want to at least at some level acknowledge the problem is that what we've mostly seen in 2020 and i think this is very closely related to the partisan dynamics of the presidential election is how almost the entire discussion has been deviated away from these experiences and how minorities connect them and how they experience them then to what we might be able to do collaborate and you can blame whoever you want on that you could blame the defund the police movement for veering that off you could blame public health officials for saying that pro mass protests are okay but meeting in schools is not nonsensical you know public health advice and a pandemic like that you can blame whatever you want but it just seems like we're called to a different higher standard in the church and what's been discouraging to me in is a trend that we've actually seen develop going all the way back to ferguson in 2014 which is that there isn't a lot of patience for being able to wrestle with very complicated history very complicated sociology complicated theology complicated history all of which are some of which may implicate some of us in our study instead it's far easier to fall into familiar partisan patterns to label people who are different and ideas that are different and foreign to you lump them all together under sort of a broad terms and then seek to condemn and to ostracize and to penalize people who hold to those supposed views even if those people don't hold to those views so that's where the theological discourse has gone the only thing i'll say in terms of context there is if we are surprised that it's gone that direction then we do need to study our history more carefully because that's been a pattern within the evangelical church and so i continue to believe that there that we can break the pattern i see in birmingham uh where i live a lot of people especially younger christians who are motivated to learn more and what they do with that information i'm not really sure but learning is at least a necessary place to start in this local context and so but like i said i think they're all related i mentioned how it's related to the protest i think it's also related to a presidential election i think also melissa i don't know if you've noticed this but if you've looked back on many of the major racial flare-ups in our country they've tacked on two election years not in every case but a lot of them have been during election years that's really really helpful i think the one one takeaway i've had from this year reflecting on these issues is just the importance and i know you'll share this with me of reading and the importance of history and it's one thing to read a hot take online and we can have good articles i mean you and i we work in a business that talks about articles online but sitting in stories and really listening to them i think is profoundly important in this discussion and i know for me i've been shocked um about stories that i never heard even i love history i love american history and you know for the first time this year i finally read the warmth of other suns it's been sitting on my nightstand for about three years and i have to admit that it was a little thick and it intimidated me before i jumped in but i i had never even heard of this great migration you know i've heard of lots of other things trail of tears all these other stories that you've heard manifest destiny you've studied in american history and i've never heard of this great migration that happened from the south to the north um and it's it's just you sit in the stories for a long time when you read a book instead of just reading an article with this opinion or that opinion and so as the church continues these discussions one things i've been encouraged by is how many books i saw even on amazon that were being purchased about racial issues and so that was hugely encouraging to me as we looked at this conversation and wilkerson she also came out with cast this year which i don't recommend the same way that i would worm with the other sons um but yeah i mean it's that we're not lacking for resources and there's a lot of i think ketchup that a lot of us have to do which is one reason why melissa i've just focused primarily on the deep south and primarily on birmingham of just trying to understand my own context there now i think i'd be remiss without mentioning on this topic the fact that let's talk which has been a wonderful podcast this year i think we're very proud of at tgc and you're joining there by jasmine holmes and jackie hill perry i don't think you guys talked about racial topics this year did you we we did have an episode on friendships with people who aren't like you so that was where we touched on all sorts of things though i mean not just you know friends of different races but friends of different genders yeah i mean friends of different seasons so we kind of broadly talked about it there um and how important it is actually to have people in our lives who are different than us so we talked about that a little bit well the reason i bring that up is because like you said with amazon it's such an overwhelming space uh you you don't know what you're gonna get you might see oh jamar tisby's book is doing really well okay that's interesting maybe i'll pick that up also with white fragility or i'll pick this up with stamped from the beginning it can be very confusing as to know how to discern one of the things that's guided me in this process has been african-americans who i have known for a very long time have had many opportunities to be able to to get to know and to learn from over the years and have developed friendship and also trust there and jasmine and jackie are two of the most impressive people i know in their demeanor in their learning in their godliness i had the blessing and i know many of you out there listening to gospel bound it was one of our best listened to episodes talking with jasmine about mother to son and her book that excellent book that came out this year interestingly that interview came about because of let's talk so we had in decided of course you know this working with our good friend and colleague betsy howard we decided to invite and work with jackie and jasmine with you on that podcast and i think i think that the chemistry has just been great i mean i love to listen to you guys talk on on whatever subject but then our our producer heather who works on both of the podcasts she was making recommendations to me about gospelbound and she said colin if you thought about having jasmine on your show and i said well i mean i love jasmine's work i i mean she's just incredibly impressive but for some reason it just had not occurred to me she gave one of the best interviews it was outstanding i've got kids around the same age but growing up in such a i mean both in the deep south but in in very different environments in many different ways and so just being able to see through her eyes as a parent and as a mother and we're talking about boys specifically was just very illuminating and i would just commend more of us to take time like melissa's saying listen to the podcast read the books exercise some discernment offer a little bit of trust of other members of the body of christ who are seeking the lord and the holy spirit is working through them and they have something to offer that that you don't but generally that's what gospel bound is all about is being able to find those people and just being able to listen to them and defer to them and i think what let's talk is a lot about is how you reach that sort of spiritual discernment and growth within companionship and friendship within community at least that's one of the things that i love seeing about let's talk and i think has made it so popular for people to listen to yeah i've enjoyed so much my time with both jackie and with jasmine and i actually in between our recording sessions read both of their books this year and i told them they are both so wonderful with words and with writing but it made me feel like i got to know them better even even after i'd been sitting at a table with them for days talking i knew parts of their story from reading their books that i wouldn't have known otherwise and so i highly recommend jasmine's mother-to-son and jackie's is gay girl good god and both of those are just excellent resources to read and to listen and to learn and just on on many topics but i think it's just really helpful another author that we want to talk about today and is part of your top 10 theological stories is the death of j.i packer at age 93 who has had an impact on so many of us can you share a little bit about what his writings and his books have meant in your own life and how you've seen them impact generations i mean kids are still reading them today you know i mean it's it's not like his words you know he's not the new author they're still reading these books and talking about these concepts today but how how were you first introduced and how have those words impacted you and melissa you're my go-to on what the kids these days are reading you're my you're my inside source on that kind of stuff i've gotten really old because i have college age students or children oh that's awesome that's right um i also should say i had a funny aside here uh melissa's talking about big books that intimidate her you always got to be able to see through uh melissa's bluster um mussa reads a lot of books and plenty of them are pretty big um but i do appreciate when she took my recommendation on one book and she just you know unthinkingly decided to click on it on amazon and then this like 1200 page book arrives on her doorstep and i think she may have uh said some inappropriate things under her breath about me you got to give like warnings like you know warnings about this book contains 1200 pages before you recommend them it's actually yeah it's actually a trilogy that's just been bound into one uh book but you liked it it was really good okay so you can't complain let's talk about packer you know i i have the blessing of actually having known him personally even sort of more so than through the books uh i mean i do i mean i can jump in line and recommend knowing god i think my personal favorite favorite of his is evangelism and the sovereignty of god um i just find it to be and kind of inescapably obvious argument i suppose for calvinism and evangelism and i grew up in an environment that valued both you know evangelism and the sovereignty of god and calvinistic theology so all of that came pretty naturally to me at an early stage which is where packers writings were especially important to me he was working still at the time as one of the advisory editors for christianity today when i started so i got to see him on a regular basis uh i would often go to dinner with him usually my wife would come along usually we'd bring one of our friends as well um and i'd call up usually my friends from college and say hey do you want to drive out to the suburbs tonight we're going to some random you know usually he loved indian food and it could never be too spicy for him but i'm not an indian food fan so we usually settled for some kind of pan-asian cuisine if we weren't eating in like the holiday inn hotel um restaurant or something like that where he was staying in carroll stream illinois but i got to see him guess behind the scenes in those environments and that's what sticks with me and that's what i take away with my top 10 theology stories of the year is how in our responses to him we see something in him that has been hard for us to emulate which is holding together very strong theological convictions while holding optimistic views toward other people and i wrote in college about all of my disagreements with him about evangelicals and catholics together and i maintain all of those disagreements and yet several of my closest mentors including him were heavily involved in that group but in my experience with them it was never about theological compromise it was about a kind of optimism and hope about what the lord could do to reform the church and i think it's interesting that a lot of those men are historians who are heavily invested in especially the reformation period or in packers case the puritan era where they were seeking to bring reform to the church and so they held out more hope than i have of reform in rome and through the papacy and yet it didn't come from a place of doctrinal compromise but from a place of hope that through the spirit's work that he would be pleased to answer and fulfill the prayers of john 17. again i'm too skeptical i'm the journalist so you know i'm too skeptical about that but um that's that's what we've seen in him and so it's it's increasingly hard these days to be able to hold strong theological positions but to have a hopeful attitude toward other people uh unless are there any packer works that stood out to you in particular i mean you were kind of from that era of ivp in inner varsity where packers stuff was was really spreading quickly you'll laugh about this um the first christmas mike and i mike's my husband now mike and i were dating which was about i think like 28 christmases ago um he gave me for christmas three books and he kind of always hates when i tell the story he's like i sound so terrible i gave you three books for christmas i was like this is what made me know that you were the one are you kidding um he he gave me pilgrim's progress he gave me through the gates of splendor and he gave me evangelism and the sovereignty of god um three books i mean yeah it's not a winner like you look at that and you're like he is a winner yeah i mean um but all of those books i still love today they've all profoundly impacted me um but packers evangelism and the sovereignty of god was the first one i read by him and i still understand man's responsibility human responsibility and god sovereignty in different ways because of that book it's it's still what i go to when i want to refresh on how to explain that well to others and so i'm so thankful i never met him in person i didn't know that you had worked for him or worked with him that's really great but his clarity of thinking and um his willingness to say really hard things i mean even in knowing god when he talks about the wrath of god it is i mean it is hard to to walk in that and read it and he explains it so well and you walk away with the sense of even this is part of the beauty of knowing god even these hard doctrines we can say that this is the god we serve and he is beautiful and lovely in all of these ways and so he had a real passion that came through in his writing which i appreciate so much um the last story i want to cover you actually have 10 stories you cover in your article but the last one i really want to talk about for just a little a little bit um is about social media and our lives i think as a mom social media caught me a little bit off guard um my daughter was coming to those first teenage years right when things like instagram were beginning and so i looked at it like oh how cute you share your little pictures on this little platform and i didn't really think about any of the negative effects for instance of what it does to a teenage girl when one friend gets 100 likes and another friend gets 200 likes i maybe recognize oh someone might share bad pictures like i had those concerns you know when i looked at it but one thing i hadn't heard anything about until this year with um this documentary that came out i believe it was on netflix um social dilemma yeah on the social dilemma was that they're actually using an algorithmic formula um to encourage us to constantly be on our phones so we might know the the out front concerns we have about social media like it really does affect where we get our news it affects how we relate with other people and it even reflects our view of normalcy like i did not know that as a family we were supposed to go apple picking every fall until i started to see it on social media all the time i'm like oh good families go apple picking in the fall i need to be a good family you know it really does affect what we even think is normal but what i was unaware was this algorithmic technology behind these apps and what they're doing in our lives can you explain a little bit about what's going on there and what that documentary really exposed for us what we talk about on gospelbound is the search for firm faith in an anxious age and in the book that i have coming out next year called gospel bound resolute hope living with resolute hope for an anxious age has really built off that basic concept and it's because melissa we're fighting in an uphill battle in a worldly sense now in the divine sense we're good to go but in a worldly sense we're fighting an uphill battle because all of these technologies are working to make us angry and to make us afraid and when they make us angry and they make us afraid they keep our attention and they make us vigilant to then spread that information to other people so that they can be similarly vigilant this is powerful in many different kinds of communities but it can be especially powerful within mom online because you can valorize all of it under the banner of i'm taking care of my kids i'm doing my job to protect them not realizing that you are being assimilated into a culture of fear and loathing and that whatever you might profess with your mouth about jesus christ and about what you believe theologically in your heart you believe that you can only accomplish and achieve these goals of protecting your family through this ever constant online vigilance against all of the people who are out there trying to destroy you not realizing that the people who are actually trying to destroy you are the ones who are feeding you this material through the alchemism on your very phone which you think is the tool that you are using to fight against the tool that you are using to fight against this problem is actually the tool that is destroying you it is the conduit that is turning you into a person who is not trusting in god not loving in other people um not able to to see god for who he is in scripture but instead filtering all of it through a kind of a lens that suggests that this is my only way to protect what i love from everything that's trying to destroy us and if that doesn't have theological implications i don't know what does and if we can't see this year of all years of how that has happened remember i mentioned how all the three top stories are all related to one another and how would we not see this as undergirding all of them the very technologies that allow us to see the injustice and bring justice praise god for that praise god for that i think especially about the case of ahmad arberry what a horrible situation and only because of that kind of spread through social media and smartphones and things like that it's the only way that we have that i've seen justice there yet the same time the very sense of of panic and fear and hopelessness develops also through the same media which shape our very perception of things and whether or not these things are happening all the time or you know less often than we realize it's hard to be able to get perspective because of all things social media staring down at a phone in your hands is not designed to give you perspective it's just it's designed to destroy your perspective and to focus you in on only yourself um and all these other threats so i mean we could talk forever about that and maybe that's a a good let's talk episode you guys can cover in the future but uh that's i mean that's that's how i see it connected to theology at least yeah we often i think one of the biggest takeaways i had from watching the documentary was we think we're using social media and it's really using us i mean there there are advertise advertisements that come up you know i feel like i said i need a new purse and then all of a sudden on instagram like five new purses show themselves i don't even i don't even think melissa i'm saying it i literally think it's only in my head i mean melissa i will go to the refrigerator and i'll grab orange juice and then there's orange juice in my phone and my facebook feed yeah i don't know this isn't okay i mean this if you had said this five or ten years ago this would have been like tech dystopia that you put in some sort of futuristic thing to explain how we're all going to be ruined by big brother or something and now it's just like yeah i do need to order more orange juice because i just threw this in the trash yes it's it's kind of scary it's definitely kind of scary well i know that you did not spend the past year only on social media because you actually have three books coming out next year so you took this coveted time and um used it well in some level because i know what what other people might not know it might seem like oh he's doing all these books in january february march and they're coming out in april we'll know they all happen a year in advance so you've been busy um you often talk to other people about their books i would love to hear about these books why you wrote them and maybe even just their titles because i'm sure you can't get into all the reasons that you wrote all of them but i'd love to hear a little bit about them melissa how many books did you publish in 2020 yeah but publishing books is different than writing them i'm just saying how many books did you have come out in 2020 melissa i've had three but but only one was a kid's book i had like 60 words that's totally easy and one was an edited book that i didn't even write a chapter so really just one one really we'll come back later and talk about melissa's edited book uh check out her children's book also uh check out her book on on mentoring uh published through crossway and tgc this year um i mentioned a gospel bound living with resolute hope at an anxious age it's coming out in april co-written with our good friend our beloved friend sarah zalstra her first book very excited about that book i think if if you're looking for encouragement you're looking for a morale boost learning about what the scriptures tell us about this age about what christians are doing around the world i think you'll get that morale boost in this book i think you will also get a way forward of things that you can do things that you can tangibly put into practice to love your neighbors to show hospitality to care for the weak to um you know to love your enemies even this book will be able to help you with that so there's that book that's the one i'm super excited about have another book coming out in april with another one of our colleagues ivan mesa before you lose your faith deconstructing doubt in the church published by tgc that's an edited multi-author book you guys may have seen the huge sort of phenomenon of deconstruction about people with their perfect instagram pictures about how they're leaving the faith with this pure script that you write out we've got we've reached out to about 10 12 of our best uh most insightful friends to be able to um uh to be able to write about this phenomenon from different angles i think you guys are going to love that you got the karen pryor rachel gilson claude brett mccracken trevin wax some really great people in that book and then i have a co-writing a book with jonathan lehmann called rediscover church why the body of christ is essential that's coming out in august with crossway the goal there is some time lord willing next year we're going to be back in church together in person and when we do so we may be surprised by all the people who are not there either because of their jobs or because of their views on racial issues or political issues that we've been talking about on here and then many other people have simply drifted off without that regular rhythm of church this book is to give to the other everybody in your church everybody in your church to help remind them why the body of christ is essential and gives them a biblical road map for how they can rediscover the primacy of the gathering of the local church at a time of at least in our lifetime sort of unprecedented upheaval um with that so very excited about about that i think it's one of the things that we love most melissa about tgc is just all the different things we've got going on and i know you have uh you we're hoping this year to do a women's conference lord willing we're going to be doing it next year yeah i mean that's so so those are the books that we've been working on but yeah we're always we're always working on different things at tgc i'm really looking forward to all of them but they're all so necessary i mean we've come off this hard year to have a book that's about gospel bound that's about hope and looking at what we can do i i think it's such a contrast to like the social dilemma we we sometimes think act activism is by going online and posting something and there that's all i needed to do whereas i love what you and sarah have done you're telling real stories of people who are living hopeful gospel-centered lives and it changes the world in really small ways really really small ways in their area but it's so encouraging to hear those stories and then just it's a big effect i mean it's a big effect melissa when everybody's small stories are happening at the same time and all of a sudden when you see them from a broader perspective you realize god is at work i don't even necessarily realize realize it and that's the morale boost and again hopefully also the model for what we can do ourselves yeah and that's why we so need the church because when you're living with real people in real lives in real face to face you see that and the more we go to this online church situation i hope it's made us hungry for the real thing i hope we've seen how unsatisfying it is in the long term but all of those are going to be lord willing used in great ways to support and encourage the church um another thing that two of them will come out in april just in time for the national conference which we just just launched just launched registration now open yeah so i want to keep things as simple as possible the theme for 2021 which i can't think of a better one jesus is greater jesus is greater than all these divisions we've been talking about all of this turmoil all of the hatreds all of the fears um even you know the the money the stock i mean just politics on and on and on jesus is greater that's the theme of the book of hebrews um certainly walks through the entire old testament i know you love this book as well mike your husband's got a commentary coming out on hebrews next year um this is the consistent theme he's greater than moses he's greater than the angels he's great i mean on and on and on so we're going to be looking at the book of hebrews that way um we've got the typical lineup of all kinds of different breakout sessions and whatnot that the theme for this year is one conference but with an online version and also with an in-person version in person if everything's going great you're comfortable you can join us in indianapolis uh this april coming right on the heels uh the women's conference in there so you can join us for that um and we'll probably be doing limited capacity probably with social distancing probably with masks that's what i would expect though we don't know exactly what's going to be happening with the vaccine and things like that so that's the plan for the for the in-person version there's also going to be an online version with special interviews special features some on-demand options for you to be able to access that material it's actually the only way for you to be able to access all of the different material will be to sign up for the online version of the conference here's the key now through january 1 sign up for 139 dollars which is one of the best rates we've ever given on any of our national events and you'll choose next year next year you can choose do you want to come in person or do you want to join us online and the key is i think either way you get five free books you get books by tim keller you get a book by trevin wax by rebecca mclaughlin you get the book that we were just talking about right there on deconstructing doubt in the church before you lose your faith you get a book by our friend jeff robinson on speech and the gospel uh from the book of james which is the women's conference theme uh so you get that whether you come in person or you can get that through our online store but that's the key we're gonna be doing same rate and you sign up now for that best rate through january 1 and then later you get to choose whether or not your comfort level on joining us in person or staying at home online and so i'm pretty excited about this i actually think that we're going to maintain some of these different characteristics coming into next year i mean in future years meeting some of the online versions some of the books that you get when you sign up for the conference um i mean melissa you know i've been working to forever on the women's conference slated to be our biggest conference of all time the lord had different plans for 2020 somehow better plans we're waiting to see exactly how how you feeling about the women's conference then heading into next april by the way the week after easter case people are wondering week after easter is when our conferences kick in my biggest lesson learned is never entitle a conference steadfast because that living parable and it definitely it's been amazing i i actually memorized the first chapter james when we were working through and studying it before like just preparing it preparing my heart for this book that we were gonna study and the words of of you know count it all joy when you meet trials of various kinds for you know that the testing of your faith produces steadfastness and lets steadfastness have its full effect that you may be perfect and complete lacking in nothing but then the next verse is if any of you lacks wisdom let him ask god and i i think for us in this conference planning just so all of our listeners know i mean you know we we have lacked wisdom meaning we don't know what to do we have prayed and prayed and prayed and asked the lord to show us what is best and so we are really hopeful that providing an online option for both conferences that will be really robust and really hopefully encouraging whether we're in your living room or whether you're in indianapolis um lord willing and that's the other thing we keep saying from james four if the lord wills that's the new tagline for this year if the lord wills um we just really hope to be able to encourage our hearts in that way that we all need through these conferences so i'm looking forward to them i'm hopeful for what the lord can do through them um and just thankful that he provides these ways for us to do it um i want to ask you one other question we're we're getting down on time i could talk to you our normal conversation it's going to be an hour and a half yeah this is this is like we're just warming up now for our normal conversations melissa people are just getting to see what our lives are like uh off the podcast i know i wanna i wanna jump and ask um not only we work these jobs for tgc but i i think i can speak for you when we say this is that we love working for tgc and i'd love for this opportunity at the end of the year for you to share a little bit about why you choose this there are a ton of other jobs you could be doing in the world why tgc why this organization why this mission do you spend to choose the life you've been given really to spend your life working here why this organization well i think melissa when you just listen to all the things that you and i get to do it's a bit of a no-brainer just on that level i mean i think about the next season of gospel bound and all the people that i want to talk to with that russell moore rebecca mclaughlin brett mccrack and jen wilke and just these friends of mine whose writings i've benefited from so much that be able to brainstorm with you about another season of of let's talk i mean we could go on and on when it comes to the podcast when it comes to the books when it comes to the conferences it is a privilege that we do not take lightly at all of being able to do these things in ways that will produce resources that we believe can fundamentally build up the local church and help all christians to live in a gospel-centered way applying the gospel to all of life when i go back to it though melissa uh it just goes back to the foundation documents of tgc that don carson and tim keller took the lead with that men like you know john piper and john yates and on and on and on then shaped into these documents that we that we advance here at tgc um going back to 2007 when you look at that vision for the church a lot was different back in 2007 and yet still today that's what encourages my soul as the spirit works within me to say that's a beautiful church that is that is worthy of the blood of the lamb that was shed to purchase these lives for eternity this is a church that lives out our biblical callings that that lives them in a way that is universal to time and place meaning orthodox but at the same time it's contextualized to different places in different times it's not an american vision it's not a 21st century vision and yet at the same time it works perfectly well for the 21st century in the united states it's flexible and yet it's it's um you know it's it's trusted and it's true and it's ancient and that's just what's beautiful that the same things that we've been calling for um in a different time in 2007 or the same things that we uphold today the same beauty and the same hope that we'll have a church that's that that that seeks prophetic wisdom and obedience as opposed to just partisanship i mean on and on and i could go on forever on this but um in the interest of time i'll just say in addition to being able to do so many fun things with excellent godly colleagues like yourself doing all of it together for a vision that transcends presbyterian and non-denominational and baptist and anglican churches around the country because it's all around the world because it's all centered on the unchanging gospel of jesus christ is simply beautiful and um you know melissa likewise you you've had so many different jobs at tgc you started out as a math teacher um you've been working at home with your kids over the years there's a lot of different things that you could be doing and you do the impossible in your work you go above and beyond i mean literally people the the stories i could tell of projects that i've pitched to melissa that are completely ludicrous in terms of timeline that she actually pulls off are are pretty amazing but you could be doing a lot of things mostly one of the most capable people that i know so why tgc you know i have to say um the first introduction i really had to tgc i can remember mike years ago telling me you should read articles on this website and i was like okay yeah i mean that was when reading online was fairly new but um the first real introduction i had was the tgc women's conference in 2012. it was the very first conference that was put on for women and it was so unique and different from any women's conference i had been to and i can i can still remember john piper describing the robe of god in the temple in isaiah 6. like i can still hear his voice talking about it how it filled the temple and i can still hear paige ben brown saying after the better comes the best and it basically each passage was just all through scripture and we it was just teaching um the storyline of scripture and since then you know we've done um different books of the bible like nehemiah and we've done first peter and what i've appreciated so much was just this deep effort to put women teaching and teaching god's word not not a concept not a kind of a a new topic but just teach god's word and i have to say when i look at what tgc has done it's done so many wonderful things but it's just hard for me to share well what i think it's done for women in the church i really um what i see happening among our teams and just the people who we work together it's such a beautiful picture of complementarity i wish people could be on our editorial calls and hear how we really are brothers and sisters and we you know and like that sometimes we get in squabbles sometimes fight our brothers um but you know we have these great conversations and i'm so thankful to get to work in an organization where um we can uphold the truth that we firmly believe that men and women are are created beautifully equal but also distinct equal in their reflection of god but distinct in what we're called to do as embodied males and females however what i love is that both voices are at the table men and women and we're working through these things together and we're talking about these ideas together and i really just love getting to to serve with brothers in ministry and that it's not an organization that's all females or all males but it's we're doing this together and so i've been so thankful for that it's been just a great encouragement to to my soul and when you look at our website i think it reflects that you know we have men and women women have this place to write um that i don't think was really available in the same way there were a lot of mommy blogs which are fine and we need those but there wasn't a place for really women to write about theological subjects and be heard by the church at large and i have to say colin you open that door for so many of us i know i would not be writing for tgc i went to a session in 2012 and colin was up there interviewing someone and he said we really want female writers so if you'd like to write for us and that's when i met matt i walked up and talked to matt smithhurst one of our editors and i said i can write for you if you need writers i never in a million years would have sent an article into tgc but the saying when you said we need female authors just the invitation to come and write for tgc was such a powerful thing and you opened that door for so many female authors and i'm so thankful i'm so thankful for that well i think i think melissa the best way to show the truth of complementarity from god's word is to as we teach it to live it and to show that it is what god has intended for human flourishing for men and women you and i have both been in environments both complementarian and egalitarian that do not live out these values as well as they should and i think that's both it's been motivating to both of us to be able to show a better way um because god's word is true and because he's good to all of us men and women and um yeah i mean that's just you just talk about why is it a privilege to work here it's because we get to live out those values best as we can praying for wisdom repenting sometimes after those fights um i love i got i got an email on saturday from one of our colleagues who was a little miffed at me for some things that i had published and had a good little back and forth with that colleague and uh i mean i just appreciate that i love that we can have that conversation i love that we can disagree on things i love we can sometimes even be a little sharp with each other and still come back in love um because there's a shared um trust in christ there well we think about all this and and yeah typical for us melissa we've talked longer than we expected and wanted to um but uh this is a this is an opportunity to say thank you to literally tens and tens and tens of thousands of of men and women this year who have listened to gospelbound who have listened to let's talk who have made those podcasts successful and make it possible for us to do this for you so we'd love to have your help here especially as it comes to the end of the year we'd love for you to partner with us to support this work that we're doing here some ways that you can do it the first way that is i think the easiest is to become a monthly giver to tgc just go to tgc.org give and we do want to be able to give you a tangible thank you not only the thank you from this podcast but we have something we'd like to share with you everybody who signs up uh to give tgc at least 25 a month or more we're going to send you a copy of two books two books we're going to send them appropriately for what we've just been talking about here we're going to send the book that i edited a couple years ago with jeff robinson called 12 faithful men and we're going to send everybody a copy of 12 faithful women edited by melissa and also our friend kristen wetherill so so you become a monthly giver to tgc at the end of the year tdc.org give you sign up 25 a month we will send you a copy each of those two books you can also support us if you don't want to become a monthly giver or if you'd like to give more uh feel free just give a one-time gift same place tdc.org give there's another way to support us beyond the prayers that we obviously covet from you as we deal with some difficult topics on these podcasts would also be simply to subscribe to them and to leave a rating and review especially apple podcasts but other places that'll help with as well what this does is help others who are searching for hope find gospel-centered resources like gospelbound and let's talk one of the things that we recognize often is that people stumble it's the internet they stumble across tgc.org they stumble across a podcast that maybe somebody recommended to them or maybe they simply searched and found or maybe they saw jackie hill perry on instagram and decided to somehow you know navigate over to tgc there um the way you can help us to do that if you love and appreciate the the content that we produce here is simply by leaving a rating and review of this um of this podcast so i know melissa you guys typically end with a favorite thing i don't know if we have time but i do want to ask about maybe a book that you enjoyed this year in closing that's what i love to do i mean i always do a book you always do you always do a favorite thing i always love to end with a book whenever i can remember to do it why don't you give me one book one book recommendation that people add to their christmas list for themselves or give to somebody else yeah the book i read this year that i loved the most and i'm going to read it i'm already rereading it again i'm showing it to colin you can't see it on on the podcast it's keeping the heart by john flavel um i think i've been i started reading it because i've been so concerned as we look in the world around us um for the deconstruction the deconversions the people who leave for more reasons who leave the faith the people who leave for intellectual reasons who leave the faith the people who leave because life is hard and they don't understand the god who brought them into a hard situation um and so i ordered this book and it is all about kind of our role in keeping the heart he says it is the most important work we do is to in some ways inflame our love for god throughout the lives now this does not all our lives this does not mean that we are responsible for our salvation or even our sanctification but he just really walks you through what does it mean to fight this battle of keeping our hearts centered on god through a long life of loving the lord and ministry um and so after the title give us the title game also keeping the heart how to maintain your love for god by john flavel probably written in the 1600s still extremely relevant for today and it's not even very thick it's not even i mean i'm going to give you the right it's only got 117 pages i'm a nice friend when i recommend books that are 115 pages like me keeping keeping the heart that's a good one that's a good one what about you do you have a book from the year well i will it's a little bit of a preview of next year i mean i got to talk with the most amazing i mean just some of the interviews that stood out this year paul tripp jamie smith carl truman their books that came out this year were simply simply spectacular well i mean jamie's came out last year i think but um anyway those books which both paul and carl both ended up in tgc's annual book awards um for their books you can go check those out there but um you know the one that i'm looking forward to with gospel bound for next year joseph henrik it's called the weirdest people in the world um the what this is about is he coined the term or helped to define the term weird which is western educated industrialized uh rich and democratic so essentially to describe the kind of makeup of what is the west and his thesis he's the chair of the department of of um evolutionary biology i think or something like that at harvard his entire thesis is that the west is created by christianity and it's created by christianity because of the ban on marrying your cousin so because you could not marry your cousin it destroyed clan structures around the you know what became christendom and when it did that it freed up people to be able to associate with one another outside of their narrow clan responsibilities and to be able to organize together around ideas and as they organized around ideas what did they do they created trade guilds what did they do they created universities they created science they could i mean all kinds they didn't create that but i mean so they they work to advance science so it says to this day you can continue to see that the most western educated industrialized rich and democratic countries are those that were christian for the longest time where you have the fewest incidences today of cousins marrying each other and especially where you have protestantism and then if you want to find the complete opposite you'll see the highest percentages correlate to places where the highest you know has percentages of cousins who continue to marry each other so the simple case is when somebody asks you what you think you have the space to be able to think about it yourself as an individual as opposed to simply saying i don't think because that's what some sort of person within my clan tells me i have to think um so it gives you a kind of independence of thought and independence of association that then ultimately radically transforms the world so people who listen to gospel bound they know this is the kind of thing that i love and that i love to talk with people about so hopefully we'll have that author on next you haven't asked him yet a little technicality but typically when people tell you you want to talk about their books they like to do it so um that's fascinating so we'll see but that's uh that's one of my favorite things and i haven't i think i can't remember if i put that on any of my book lists for this year but anyway that's a preview just for the podcast listeners speaking of which thank you thank you for listening to this special mashup slash crossover uh episode of gospelbound and let's talk it's a privilege throughout 2020 that we've been able to join you on your while you're washing dishes while you're commuting while you're working out however you decide to listen to us we're very grateful we appreciate the comments over email uh in person the kind of feedback that we get one of my people here at beast in divinity school who's next door to me he popped in the other day and said colin doing great with the podcast i had no idea he was even listening so that is a huge encouragement you can also encourage us rate us and review the podcast sign up to become a monthly donor of 25 or more we'll send you those books as a thank you just go to tgc.org give on behalf of melissa krueger and i can probably say also jasmine and jackie the hosts of let's talk i can also say as the host of gospel bound merry christmas everybody happy new year thanks for listening