Melissa Kruger | Top Theology Stories of 2021 | Gospel Bound | Word First

[Music] this is gospel bound a podcast from the gospel coalition for those searching for resolute hope and an anxious age wherever you're listening from welcome i'm your host colin hansen and i'm glad you're here for today's conversation [Music] welcome to a special edition of gospel bound and let's talk i'm colin hansen and i'm the host of gospelbound and i'm joined by my good friend my dear friend and colleague melissa kruger one of the hosts of let's talk you're listening to bonus season end episode of our podcast which launched in 2020 last year thank you everybody for your faithful listening and support we wanted to take you behind the scenes with this podcast look back on the big stories and trends from 2021 and of course also thank you for listening and encouraging us in this work well a lot has happened since our last podcast together um i think we were maybe hopeful last year at this time that covid would be a distant memory and unfortunately it is like a recurring nightmare instead um and we're going to jump to your top 10 theology stories in just a moment but let me start first with the tgc related question because you never get to sit on the other side of the interview seat and be interviewed yourself so you have changed roles this year at tgc and you have traveled internationally to speak um you actually got in at a narrow little window that you could get in and it was such a direct answer to prayer it was um it was really sweet to see but can you share a little bit about um your changing role and just where you got to go and what you saw when you were there yeah so this this year melissa has been a whirlwind i i stepped in at the invitation of our president julius kim to become vice president of content and also editor-in-chief those are distinct roles but overlapping roles in editor-in-chief from overseeing our publications across our uh just day-to-day articles to podcasts and videos and and uh conference planning things like that working with you in those areas but as vice president of content i'm thinking also broader institutionally more long-term about ways that we need to adapt and ways that we need to grow as you know melissa this is an ever-changing uh landscape for publishing so that's it's been a fun responsibility there and part of that one of the great joys i had was working with two of our international groups and one of them tgc nordic which the nordic countries range anywhere from from finland all the way over to iceland and including the scandinavian countries of of sweden and norway and denmark and so i got to participate in the first ever tgc nordic conference in copenhagen in september and shout out to christian roth and to all of our our leaders out there and for the great work what an encouragement melissa to be able to be not only in a place that felt more normal because at the time there were fewer covet restrictions there but also because it's got a chance to hear from believers talking about jesus and their hope for what he was doing in their city and even though they had small numbers they were still dedicated to evangelism and discipleship and and there was a church plant right there in downtown uh copenhagen that i got to to preach for is actually their their first service um and first public service and met a a study abroad student who had come from texas i mean it was just a fun a fun situation and then as you mentioned what uh an open door to prayer that just the day before i was supposed to fly to the netherlands it was still closed to american travelers without quarantine but then that opened up was able to travel over there in a similar dynamic for our first ever tgc netherlands flanders conference and the theme of that conference was the postcovid church and we were celebrating the translation into dutch of my book from this last year rediscover church why the body of christ is essential so talk with them about that but again just the privilege what an amazing thing melissa i'm sitting there and i'm noticing one of the staffers in the background and he'd been presenting on different books but it was in dutch so i had no idea what was going on and i and i come up to him afterward and and sure enough he shows he opens up his computer and he says hey just so you know i'm working with crossway to build the site for all of the 20 translations of your book that we've been working with you and crossway and 9 marks on and i had no idea uh shout out to marcel but i had no idea who was working on that how that was looking what the plan was for that i just knew that i was excited with this global pandemic this call to re-gather in the church was going out in 20 different languages and with free editions digitally being available for theirs i think it's at rediscoverchurchbook.com if i remember correctly but so just a joy to be able to do that and then the theme at the nordic conference was on the post-christian west reaching the post-christian west with the gospel and just given my own heritage my family having come from denmark in the 1920s um less than 100 years ago in fact um and just an area that i um have been studying a lot this year in preparation for some 2023 projects that lord willing will get around to but um that's the long answer to your question but that was a real um that was just that was just a a real highlight from 2021 that's so great it's been so nice i think for us all to see the joy of being together again i mean you write about it in your book but the reality is i think we've all felt it as we've walked back into places of worship and even for us you know even going to the conferences we had back-to-back conferences oh wow in april this year which yeah when we rescheduled them we thought oh of course we'll have these conferences next april it's so far away and then it really was much more difficult than we realized and they turned out to be the the first events that were held not sports related in that convention center and my goodness special thanks to seth magnussen and andrea salek and all the other different people on our staff who put that together and i'm just glad melissa that we didn't have to say hey melissa how about we just bump back another year this conference i think yeah i think you may have died if then it happened i think or at least quit i was like well one of one of the two may have happened quit before dying yes i know hopefully it was great it was great i remember walking in that room and seeing everybody and you know a lot of our speakers speak a lot and they go a lot of places and no one had gone anywhere for a year and a half and so it was this everybody was so happy and joyful to see each other i i think the withholding of some of the fellowship almost made us get to a little foretaste of heaven um and how how sweet it is to be together and folks were we had we had restrictions that we needed to put into place and folks were very honoring about dealing with that we had no evidence of any kind of outbreaks or anything and also the difficulty leads to innovation and one of my things i was most excited about i know that you were as well was the you know the the leadership that our team from seth magnussen and stephen morales and others gave to this the simulcast of being able to watch all of our different breakouts at the same time and you can still go and sign up to be able to watch all of those on our site from the 2021 events but um it's also the first time ever that we did the events back to back yeah um which which was uh maybe the last time hopefully i think that's safe to say um but um but i just um it was a it was a joy melissa to be able to work with you on all of that and um it was it was wonderful to see the lord provide for us in that way so thanks for your leadership in in those events this year it was great it was great we produced five books for those conferences but we won't get into all that so even leading up to it it was crazy ivan is a saint um ivan mesa we love lots lots going on but um let's jump into our top 10 theology stories or your top 10 theology stories don't don't take the blame melissa these are colin's top 10 theology stories not mine send all emails to colin i'll give you an email yeah please don't do that well let's actually this was one of our book topics that we wrote about we published a book for the conference called before you lose your faith um and it was talking about this concept of deconstruction which for some people might be a newer word um yeah and there were a lot of books out this year that were critiquing conservative protestant theology um and then your top 10 stories you mentioned a healthy version of deconstruction i had never heard this term called and i'm probably going to say it wrong disinculturation disenculturation yes okay disinculturation okay thank you for helping me pronounce that now i will have it um it's like complementarian you can't spell can you explain the difference between you call this a healthy version of um rather than deconstruction can you explain kind of the differences in compare and contrast those for us so that we can understand a little more what you're talking about you know i'm so glad you asked that melissa because that concept was what led ivan mesa and me to put together this book before you lose your faith deconstructing doubt in the church because we'd gotten a submission from hunter beaumont a pastor out in colorado and he was proposing that in all this conversation about deconstruction which means a lot of things to a lot of different people but it can mean anything from i'm rethinking some of the beliefs and practices that i inherited as a christian growing up to i am changing many of my significant beliefs that are bringing me into significant conflict with my parents church leaders whatnot or i am leaving the faith altogether because i don't buy any of this stuff anymore so it's it's one of those terms that's been popular uh for a number of years in the academy and now it's broken out into popular usage and as it's broken out of popular usage it's lost any coherent uh definition but what this enculturation does is it's essentially it gives you a version of deconstruction that is healthy that is essentially melissa whatever you think about missionaries needing to do so you think about a missionary you're going overseas you're presenting the gospel you need to think through a few different things one of them is that what's the core gospel message that does not change from any place or any time as revealed in god's timeless word okay don't change one iota of that second what are those things that they might be practices that are very important to me they might mean a lot to me think about certain songs or even think about certain styles of music they're not biblical they're cultural but they're also not necessarily bad they're not something that you need to you need to throw out from your faith but if it becomes a stumbling block to somebody from hearing the gospel then you may need to change that and adapt that so think about the difference between say 19th and early 20th century missions where there was a sense that you when they would go you'd have to change your dress you'd have to change your education you have to change your speaking you have to change your language you have to change your music style okay well missions has changed quite a bit since that toward more indigenous expressions of the faith then at the third level there's also the perspective of actually there were some things that i learned in my faith and now that i have a little bit of critical distance from them they're just flat wrong and they're unbiblical and i cannot hold to those things anymore okay that's what distance culturation does is instead of just reserving that for missionaries it brings it home so that every one of us actually has to do that process that's just part of maturity as a believer so we we set off in this book through hunter's example to be able to say hey we understand this is part of growing up this is part of the challenge of this time uh there's a lot of things swirling out there and all of us do have to enter into this process of disinculturation to be able to get back to the basics of the gospel and to hold all of god's word as as truthful to us in all places and all times so i'm excited melissa early in january i'm going to be leading uh teaching a class at beast and divinity school on cultural apologetics where i'm going to ask all of the students to write a personal statement of disenculturation and so a lot of that was spurred by my work on this book it's just been a concept very helpful to me yeah that's interesting so whereas deconstruction might take you away from scripture it doesn't have to but it can't but disenculturation forces you to look more deeply at scripture to say where has what i believe maybe not maybe been a man-made right expression of or you know for us a western expression of christianity that might not be actually biblical um it's it's almost like you could have said jesus came and was asking the first century pharisee to do that yeah you're listening to man-made laws and i'm telling you if you had actually listened to moses you would understand jesus says you'd understand who i am and they added and they added to the law yes as well which is part of what we see here as well and i would say melissa with one of the major theological stories of this year has especially been how this lens has been turned on evangelicals as you alluded to historically and especially related to issues between men and women in the church and that's always the difficulty is how do you hold fast to what the bible explicitly teaches without at the same time imposing a whole lot of cultural demands that the bible does not put on men and women what the same time recognizing that there is no culture-less experience of the faith yeah those are three distinct steps that i think a lot of times get lost in the confusion and the polemics of no how dare you abandon the faith by tweaking this thing oh no how do i mean it no this is part of a maturation process but ultimately it should be guiding us back to god back to his word yeah and it requires that deep time in the word more time in the word than on twitter more time in the word than even reading other people's ideas about these concepts and it really i think also even like hebrews mentions it not just takes time in the word but then the discernment to know how to apply it takes a lot of practice and years of being led by the spirit so i think it's it's really um it's really complicated for that reason but it hopefully we we know that our minds are being transformed and renewed so hopefully in 10 years we will think differently even about what the bible teaches not not the basic core truths but that we will have grown in our understanding and knowledge and wisdom so that's hopeful for all of us um on a somewhat related topic you write about the podcast that everyone's been listening to this year i think i mean i'm amazed when i've talked to friends all over you know my my christian world so to speak almost all of them have been listening to the rise and fall of morris hill hosted by mike cosper um you were interviewed on the podcast numerous times it was always fun to hear you on there um but you said it's the most important breakthrough in christian media why do you think this podcast was listened to by so many people and what can we learn from it yeah i haven't seen anything as innovative as this and wide reaching in in christian media in the last decade and um it's kind of crazy melissa but as you know not much unifies us in the church anymore especially with with different media and this podcast oddly enough unified lots of people because you could be working for tgc and having had a lot of the difficult experiences that i talk about on the podcast um you could be somebody who is deeply involved in acts 29 and still thinks maybe that in some ways mark wasn't treated as well mark driscoll was not treated as well as he should have been you could be somebody who has completely deconstructed your faith because you see it as being a retrograde patriarchal religion as exemplified through mark driscoll's misogyny you could be somebody like my friends and just sort of acquaintances in birmingham who you don't know anything about mark driscoll you don't know anything about mars hill you know anything about the gospel coalition or acts 29 the resurgence but you just heard about this wild podcast and you would have to listen to this guy to believe him and so oddly enough it just had a little bit of something for everybody in ways that most media doesn't anymore it's just so niche and so so many different people had an accent access point into this podcast in his podcast and i think it's also a perfect storm of of a time when the young restless reform movement that i've written so much about has has seen a lot of fragmentation and one of those first breaks was with mark um eight nine years ago which we talked about in the podcast there and there have been many other breaks and uh things since then but that was one of the major major shifts then um but it but then at the same time it hits exactly when as we're as we just talked about in the last question all these accusations of you know jesus and john wayne and the ways that that christianity has been manipulated for misogynistic reasons that those books are really popular as well and so really just a perfect storm and i mean i'm i'm really looking forward to a certain someone's book coming out in 2022 about spiritual abuse because we desperately need healthy biblical wise categories to be thinking about this because just to give you an example melissa in my everyday ministry and you and you know that as we're working as editors and leaders at tgc we're looking to serve ordinary church leaders ordinary christians we're just trying to serve them and so we take very seriously the experiences that we have in the church and i was interviewing this last weekend a new couple and it was clear to join our church as members and it was clear as i was looking through their story that they had experienced a lot of pain in christian ministry and sure enough at the end the wife just asked me hey if you have any experience or resources on spiritual abuse i would love to know about them because i'm still trying to work through the struggles of what i've experienced and just the week before one of my closest friends in ministry had written and said hey i need some help because uh my leaders have been listening to this podcast and they're convinced that anything that just looks like normal good leadership is actually just a form of spiritual abuse and so you can just see this range of people of there are so many people with real painful experiences out there that have connected with this and we need to learn about why so many of us and i'm just putting myself in this category not you um have tolerated it for whatever reason and and have put up with it when we never should have and people got hurt for that and that's one of the reasons i wanted to go on that podcast was to confess that and at the same time that there will be some people who struggle to discern between good godly convictional leadership and will use the term spiritual abuse as a way of dismissing people and ideas that they don't like and we're just going to be in that tension for quite a while yeah yeah it's definitely made me actually related to the earlier story go back and really look at what is the nature of christian leadership i think i just assumed it kind of looked like worldly leadership you know you want the person who can walk in and command the room and has charisma and um paul tripp has an excellent book did it come out this year on leadership or was that last uh i think that was last year yeah i think it was yeah yeah one of the things he said when you look at the list of pastoring is there's one gift and the restless character teaching is the gift and the rest are all character traits and i think i think it's been a good um check on the church just to say what are we looking for do we want the guy who can be ceo of the bank or do we want yeah want someone who leads in a really different way and i think it's a good it's been a it's been a helpful thing to consider i i'm enjoying imagining mark driscoll as ceo of a bank i think we would just settle for somebody who just wasn't a shock jock so but you're right that i think you make a good point there melissa that spiritual abuse comes in many different packages and also i think i feel the need to clarify this as well many different church sizes yeah yeah and it doesn't have to be some sort of mega church that wants to be the biggest church in the country or this is a problem that's right it's right it's really using spiritual power to yield it over others rather than serve and i love i love jesus we just see such a different example he says it you know when i think it's um the sons of zebedee when they want to call lightning down on their enemies and he's like no no no no that's how the gentiles do it yeah we're not gonna lead that way the greatest among you is the one who serves and i think it's made me really pay attention to that from moses to paul they they called themselves not leaders but they called themselves servants sir moses servant of god paul servant of jesus christ yeah it's just an interesting it's it's a little bit of a word change but it really matters how we view ourselves um and how different people view themselves in the church i uh i think if we all just took jesus more seriously we would be in a better situation i mean mark 10 45 right there the son of man came not to be served but sir not to be sir but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many yeah it's very clear what leadership looks like it looks like taking the blows for the sake of others it looks like not considering yourself like in philippians but considering others more important than yourself and in so many of the divisions that i talk about in my top 10 theology stories a lot of it comes down to not taking jesus seriously and not doing basic things that we were told to do in the word and if you have a church if we have churches or people or ministries like tgc where people do not consider the interests of others more important than themselves and are looking to serve then you do end up with strife envy malice and all the all those sins that that we see in those vice lisps in scripture so that's just um that's just straight up that's just that's just what the bible tells us yeah yeah yeah that's right and i think one area that we have seen this in so much in the church this year lots of strife lots of division about another one of your stories is the continual effects of covet coveted and coven mandates um and i would say covet exhaustion on the local church and i i i'd love to hear your thoughts you hear from a lot of pastors there's a lot of exhaustion out there more pastors may be thinking about leaving altogether because of some of the strife and division and you think about it you've served families you've loved families you've baptized well i was going to say baptist babies sorry yeah that's fine that's kind of them as adults you loved people and then because of a mass mandate you know they're like oh i'm out i'm leaving whichever way it might be we've seen on both sides of the spectrum but yeah these pastors who came to your hospital bed and sat beside you and you know were there for you and we're seeing this i think pastoral exhaustion and weariness maybe at a different level how have you seen that or heard that um and have you seen the effects in the local church of all that's happened with coven melissa this cuts across so many different ways because on the one hand who among us in seminary studied epidemiology infectious diseases and you know scott james my friend out there you're the exception you're one of the few elders who can claim you actually have studied these things so on our council yeah miguel nino it's also true if if your pastor is miguel nunez you're totally accepted like this you better listen to him but um even even those experts have struggled to understand what's going on around us these last two years and i think that's the key aspect here of what made this toward the top of my theology stories is that we're living through an epistemological crisis and that is that we don't know what or who we can trust what information we can trust what orders we we we must obey um because that's what the government demands us to do for our own good or what needs to be resisted for the greater good and that that is just a struggle that i don't think melissa we've come close to resolving and we told everybody in this podcast that we were going to take them behind the scenes so i want to take them behind the scenes to the year 2019 and joe carter we love joe carter um long-time colleague of ours at tgc and um he and i he was working on a piece on vaccines and he and i were both shocked shocked by the negative response that we got to that which meant that in 2021 i was not shocked because i'd experienced that shock in 2019 and as you know we're talking about this and about how surprised we were we started thinking about all kinds of different things that at one point in government and science had been incontrovertible truth and we realized how many of those things turned out to be wrong and then it just kind of dawned on us of how do we know when it's different now that's where a lot of us are i'm not i'm not actually i'm not a vaccine skeptic myself um i'm very grateful i see that as in a different world maybe this would be evidence of one of the greatest common graces of our lifetime and how many countless lives have been saved by these vaccines praise god answer to prayer but it's because it comes in the context of a revolution of the infant information age that makes it difficult for us to know who and what to trust and that has you know led to that has played itself out in churches where pastors don't know what to do and congregations have a built-in distrust toward them as leaders an expectation they will conform to their preconceived notions and that is just basically a a recipe for leadership disaster and i said there were two sides of it that's the side of what's making this so hard for pastors what's making this so hard from the other direction is that no pastors are perfect no leader is perfect if you had any leadership problems or pastoral problems in your congregation going into 2019 and most of us did 20 20 20 going into 2020 you they were going to be exposed like a like a like a magnifying glass times five in 2020 and then into 2021 so a lot of what we're dealing with melissa is not just because of confusion about masks or vaccines it's because of the stress placed on congregations where there were already fractures that have been expanded and um and i don't think that's just churches i think that's just about every institution uh today and so we need a lot of grace from god and we need to show a lot of grace toward each other yeah it's really difficult when you think of all that we expect of pastors i mean it it's a lot um and against i mean i mean we're stuck in a situation melissa where we expect a lot from pastors on the one hand and at the same time we also expect basic basic decency from them so you just got from the mars hill story where you can't even expect basic decency but at the same time to a situation where we expect too much and expertise that they simply can't have yeah yeah and that's uh no wonder no wonder these things are difficult yeah yeah it's tough well your last story or your top story sorry from last year happened almost a full year ago um it happened on january 6th it's hard to remember that far um it's been almost a year since the us capital was stormed and your article you mentioned topics like christian nationalism over realized eschatology and mistaken views of the covenant as potential reasons for christians angry responses to the election results uh can you kind of flesh out those three terms for us and kind of how you see them shaping what's happening um with america what what it means to be a christian in america how how did these terms i mean some people might not know what it means to be have an overrealized eschatology i tell my husband that all the time everyone's i think i think of all places the krueger household would be one of those places i'm just waiting for your kids to use it on you guys oh yeah i'm sure they mom that is an over realized eschatology you need to clean your room i'm sorry that isn't over realized i live in the already i live in the already not yet and it is not yet time for me to clean my room i'll take some pictures if you saw my son's room it's definitely the night yet oh man we love you john all right so um so we uh christian nationalism would be in the same category i would say as deconstruction as these a hot button theological issues or terms of that are nevertheless quite disputed and used very broadly and because they're used so broadly they're not necessarily very helpful unless you define what you're saying so i keep my definition of christian nationalism very clear and simple and that is the belief that the old testament promises to the people of god israel can be applied to the united states of america today okay that is what i mean by that now that actually does have quite an expanded purview because even before there was a united states of america there were puritan notions that did identify the their religious colonies very closely with old testament israel so this is not something that just emerged like with donald trump in the 2020 election it is something that is really woven into our dna in the united states and even before that so that's how i define it i don't mean to say that patriotism is bad or loving your country or having no loyalty or serving your country i think the early church settled that question long ago augustine and others with romans 13 that you can properly bear arms to serve your nation your country your people in obedience to god by keeping the order of the sword of romans 13. so i don't have any problem with that but i would say where things go wrong is when you think the old testament promises can be realized by the united states of america and i just i don't i think theologians have made it very clear that that is not the way the covenants work in terms of an over eschatology what what i'm referring to there is a sense i get from christians that the world should be expected to conform to biblical laws and again especially related to the old testament now this can range all the way on the one hand from you and i simply saying we want roe v wade to be overturned okay well i i don't think that's an overrealized eschatology that's just a plain old evil that needs to be redressed um and i pray fervently that god would do that as soon as possible and then he would end the scourge of abortion in this country okay on the other end though is for example the rise of of a sort of a constellation of beliefs related to things like theonomy which is an expectation that we should realize communities of faith geographically on earth today equivalent to the old testament but under the christian covenant that's probably not the best technical definition of theonomy but it is an expectation that we would realize the law of god in our communities in this place and in this time and i would describe that as an overrealized eschatology because i would say that we should not expect that to happen until christ comes again and until then i think the clear message from first peter and elsewhere is that we are pilgrims in exile wandering through blessing our neighbors as much as we can seeking first the kingdom of god and and asking maranatha jesus christ come again quickly so that's what i mean by that and so you do get these mistaken covenants and you will often hear americans talk about the country in covenantal terms before god and i think that's led to all manner of mistaken expectations and confusion and i think one of those manifestations not the only not the not the end all beyond but one of those manifestations was a lot of the the anger and almost apocalyptic fervor that was demonstrated by some christians and the january 6th storming of the capital yeah and there's also maybe a misguided even understanding of law that there are three types of law in the old testament we have civil ceremonial and then we have moral law so even as christians you know what we're trying to follow are not the civil laws of israel even as believers um you know and we don't follow the ceremonial laws in the same way we consider those fulfilled in christ um that's why we'll have some bacon and shellfish and things like that but yeah to the moral law of god which is summed up in the ten commandments and we we believe the spirit teaches us how to live that way it's different but it's it is a so it's a theological understanding and it's also i think what we're putting our hope in right um there's just it's there's just a temptation to put our hope in a in a kingdom that we can see and i think it's easy for us as americans to put our hope in america you know and i mean all of us face that temptation oh what's happening in that other nation will never happen to me because i'm safe here rather than whatever may happen to me i'm safe because i'm a child of the lord and he saved me and in some sense not safe from physical harm but i'm safe that my soul is kept by him and so we probably have a mistaken sense of where we really place our ultimate hope and and and it's something for us all to check i have to check it um you know and say oh my hope is in the lord you know because we can get pretty wrote even praying for our meals oh thank you lord but you know it's just like of course i have a meal of course i have lunch breakfast lunch and dinner and it's um it's just something um i think we we grow almost because of our um plenty we we sometimes forget to put our hope in the lord um and it's it's a good call for all of us um we both have continued to do podcasts this year um and you have interviewed 33 people this year um are there any interviews that stood out to you um that you might say hey go back and listen to this one or any interviews that are upcoming that you're really excited about in the coming year i'll mention three uh one of them was with andy crouch and it was on the one year anniversary of kovid if you did not listen to that one please go back and listen to that one andy was correct about what was going to happen at the very beginning of kovid march 2020 united states and so far what he told me in march of 2021 has borne out the rest of 2021. he had mentioned that the historical models show that the a pandemic is followed by economic um basically a burst in consumerism and a decrease of religiosity and i would say that's exactly what we're seeing right now play out there as well so listen for just the the godly wisdom that you get from andy crouch in that um that episode i also want to give a shout out to the the president morty shapiro of my alma mater northwestern as well as my old professor saul morrison they did an interview with me about their book on the new fundamentalisms and how they divide us and one of the great treats was was hearing morty shapiro talk about other episodes of gospel bound and how he listened to the podcast and he's uh he's jewish um and i just like wow okay and i was startled on the podcast he's like yeah that's right bet you didn't think i was a listener colin i thought it's true i did not think and then i i had the privilege of being published in the new york times in in august about um i think that was in august yeah about the church and about physical presence in church and sure enough he wrote me about that as well and just congratulated me on that article and said he really appreciated it so that was a a fun memory from 2021 and uh then you know oddly enough this is one that just came out an interview with ryan burge about the rise of the nuns uh those people who claim no religious affiliation you never know melissa i mean when you're doing let's talk you guys have chemistry you have rapport with each other you have friendship and so you know you have consistency there when i'm doing interviews you really never know um what you're gonna get with an interview there well with ryan burge i got a lot more than i anticipated i would just describe that thing as rollicking and it works out really well when i'm when i end up debating the person that i'm talking with because normally i'm pretty passive but sometimes we get into an area that i know a little bit about and in this area of sociology and statistical method and post-christianity and apologetics and evangelism that's just really my my bailiwick at um at gospelbound and so he and i just got into a really fun discussion debate about politics and history and and all the different contributing factors to the largest transformation of religion in american history which we're in the midst of right now so check out that interview with ryan burge and um let's give a little preview and i love doing this melissa because other than my interview with tom nelson i haven't even invited anybody else yet so if you're listening out there these are the people you can look forward to being interviewed isaac adams gavin ortland sandra mccracken george yancey john tyson michael horton just a few of the folks whose books that i'm hoping to read over the christmas uh is it a break is that what it is when you have three young kids is that what it's called melissa christmas break well we just call vacation relocation that's what we used to call it so i don't know what you call christmas break i don't know well well let's let's let's talk about let's talk melissa i'm i'm really eager you guys have another season already in the can as we say ready to roll in early 2022 is that the plan yeah it's coming out the last week of january okay um is when we're we're gonna be it should come out then um lord willing and we are talking about lots of different topics i mean and none of them were easy every time we sat down to talk we're like wow this is a tough one too do we blame betsy for that we all agreed to it so it's all about betsy does amazing work we love you betsy thank you but we talk about work we talk about shame we actually talk about obedience and law something that we just got into a minute ago we talk about how to talk about race we talk about when others fall away deconstruction apostasy all of that um idolatry spotting false teachers a lot of the topics that are in your top ten actually and then so so it's really um it's always a joy to sit down with jasmine and jackie and um they are were both pregnant at the time and i was still not and so i am going to continue that friend so they can keep having babies but i think yeah so yeah i'm also embarrassed because i'm so exhausted at the end of the day and they're both you know carrying these children and they they stuck with it for all of our days so we had a great time had a great time talking that's great um well every year at the end of the year we do a couple of different book review type things yeah so ivan is always in charge of keeping us organized he does an amazing job i wish everybody could know what happens behind the scenes to do those book awards it is a multi-month process ivan mesa hero thank you yes it is it is it involves a lot of people and a lot of organization and ivan does that um he also always puts together a list that i love to read because our fellow editors at tgc are some of my favorite um book advice givers i always love to see oh what's colin read this year what what 800 page book has colin read melissa and i are book buddies i think we probably said this last year we're book buddies we have a lot of overlap in our reading i know i know i was of course because i was telling colin i'm reading this book on peter the great and he goes i've read that book and i was like of course you have of course you have of course who else has read i was right there on my shelf i was even looking at it at the time i was like wait this book i mean how many other books are there but let me ask you that was not the book i'll say it has impacted me this year that's the book i've been struggling through for a long time to torture myself but is there a book this past year that you would say has really kind of impacted how you think about things made you think differently or just encouraged you in some way yes um whenever i ask this question on gospelbound i expect people to just give me their first answer not their political answer calculated answer so the easiest one for me is simply the bomber mafia by malcolm gladwell oh my god i know about that you will you'll be done with it by the end of this week melissa trust me so so let me explain this and why it's made a big difference for me so first of all started as a series of podcasts um uh from from his is this very popular history podcast so that's where it started he expanded that into essentially an audio book and so the whole thing is an audiobook experience and i think he uses the audiobook medium closer to its full capacity meaning you're hearing directly from the interviews you're hearing directly from the people who participated you're hearing from curtis lemay talking years later about his bombing strategy in world war ii and so that's um you know that's part of the genius of it but then also from there you can go to a website and you can do a deeper dive you can see the documents you can see the pictures you can see the different characters that you've just gotten to know through this book and then of course it's also a book so you run the full range there yeah all the way from revisionist history to then just walk into your bookstore go to amazon and get this short little quick book the bomber mafi and you can just read it there if you prefer um and so i i would say i mean of course i'm a sucker for world war ii stuff i'm a sucker for malcolm gladwell um and then on top of that also and i think since malcolm gladwell's self-admitted return to christianity he really does a lot with christian ethics in his books people may not necessarily agree with that but there's a whole christian ethical dimension to the bom this this bomber mafia basically the people who developed strategic bombing strategy for the united states uh leading up to world war ii and i think what we remember about world war ii so much is how it ended the atomic bombs this is the story that how did bombing start as the humane way to avoid carnage and ended to our day with the ability to destroy the world with one command that's a pretty darn compelling story and malcolm gladwell handles it well so the bomber mafia by malcolm gladwell you can listen to it on revisionist history buy the book you know or you do what i do you download all your audio books for free through your local library thanks to the textbook it's a plug for the library i know i put everything in i still get the real books but i put everything in through the library and then it just i get the notice that it's ready for me that's great well what about you melissa what's your book that uh stood out this year yeah yeah it's one i just finished it's and i i kind of i don't i think it was sent to me i can't even remember but it's sharon james how christianity changed the world um and it was kind it was a surprise um encouragement to me because i think when we've you know listened to mars hill and we've seen a lot of people deconstructing and sometimes in maybe negative ways um it can be a discouragement on is christianity just a big mess um and so this book is really extremely readable i mean rodney stark has done a lot of work in this area he has the book um the triumph of christianity you know a big thick book this is a really thin book but so encouraging um she traces basically the notion of where the gospel has gone how life has improved in in the areas of health care human dignity justice women education and it's just a really um beautiful look at god's people i think we can be so discouraged sometimes when we look around us when we look at our own hearts and we say ah you know is are we any different than our neighbor yeah it can be a little discouraging and so to see wow christians really have gone out into the world and they have made massive impacts um in ways that you wouldn't even even know i mean the last story i read was about mccormick who yeah mccormick spices and things like that but his goal was to help end hunger and he was a christian and so he developed a lot of the methods of preserving food to help end hunger but you know it's just it's these really encouraging stories that a lot of people have never heard of before um and so it's a beautiful when was that book published i think it was just published in either 2021 earlier in 2021 or 2020 i gotta go check that out sounds like uh it sounds like a similar to tom holland's book dominion uh which is one of one of my best reads from the year before yeah they're one of those long books but um that would be i'm gonna i'm add this to my list you might have just added a new gospel bound yeah it was it was a very sharon james if you're listening yeah you're invited you're here and you're invited we're gonna have you on well i mean i i mean i love hearing that again i could talk about books with you forever melissa but but we don't have time because you've got tgcw 22 our women's conference coming up this summer tell us a little bit about what you're looking forward to with our women's conference in june yeah i'm super excited we are talking about the theme remember your joy looking at old testament salvation stories and i'm hoping that it will be one of those conferences where we really study the old testament in light of the new and see the beautiful continuity of scripture and for me as courtney and i were working on the bible study that goes with it it was just one of those times i'd call her up and i'd be like i mean there is so clearly one author to this book because yeah you can't you can't have this written by moses and then this you know so clearly related by john um and so it's pretty it's it's been a fun thing to study but i'm really excited to study it together with women and then we have over 50 breakout sessions on a ton of different topics we have auxiliary events i'm i'm always loved this time together it's it's amazing to me how many women we have gathered together i always my high school friends come in i have my mom coming my daughter's coming and it's pretty sweet my daughter came with a group of six of her college friends and they looked at me the last night of the last conference and they were all gathered in my hotel room and they said this has been the best weekend of our lives and i was like oh you've got a lot of good things coming your way um but but it was so encouraging to hear just how much they love being there um and so you know what that's like melissa the first time you're able to experience an event like that i mean you and i will talk often about when we met at the 2012 women's conference and how that changed the trajectory of both of our lives and it's a it's a joy for us to look back and remember an unknown author named jen wilkin you know back in 2012 and melissa melissa krueger who never would have approached an editor about writing and then ends up running the whole thing um just a few short years later and so yeah i mean god god meets us in those places and that's why we that's why you work so hard on them it's a real choice being out there someone who's gonna come to this one and we'll be running it in four years that's what i'm looking for melissa and i are on the lookout you just just sign up you might get a [Laughter] um job we also have tgcw20 leave the w out all the women can come that's college oh we want women to come it is not the men's conference 30 typically who come to our national conference our women so please do come up can you give us any any spoiler information look melissa folks have been on this podcast with us for more than an hour so we got to give the people something we got to give them something after this so this is your this is your little uh throwback to the metaverse throwback to ernest klein's the ready player one this is your easter egg okay so i'll just go ahead and i'll share with you some inside info on tgc 23. i think it's important actually melissa that we tell people about this because one of the major themes of 2021 was that 2022 will bring the last together for the gospel conference you know i both participated spoken there before and um that uh we're gonna miss that conference and as people will know on the off years tgc will will be in april and then t4g will be in april and so on the on the other years and i think that people might be wondering well maybe tgc won't be coming back well i'm here to say we are coming back in but we're not coming back in april we're going to come back in september so that is primarily due to the fact that so many conferences were postponed in 2020 that the calendar has been pushed back years ahead and so we're going to try something different this time we're going to meet september 25 to 27 in 2023 we're going to meet lord willing again in indianapolis i'm not saying that's going to be our permanent home but it has been a good home to us and so we look forward to being back there in you're going to hear in 2023 lord willing some major announcements about the direction of tgc in the future but we can we can we can reasonably expect at this point that what you're going to be seeing from our national conference going forward is a perspective on the good news of jesus christ for all the world and for all of life and so look for more details about a more globally focused national conference we're not even going to think i call it a national conference but with a with a more global lineup of speakers with a broader array of exhibitors and and offerings in our breakout sessions uh from all kinds of different ministries and publishers and seminaries that you love that's what we're going to be working we need your prayers we're going to be working really hard on that in 2022 and building toward these exciting initiatives in 2023 so hope to see you back in indy in september and look for some information by september of 2022 at least that's what we're hoping to announce a year ahead of time uh for our 2023 event so yeah i mean you can just get a sense here we've been talking for more than an hour there's just always always a lot going on at tgc yeah and i think one thing that a lot of people don't know is um what how much of an international organization tgc is and we're constantly um doing work well beyond the states um can you tell us a little bit really quickly about some of our lesser known work that we were working on last year of getting getting the gospel into places um that it might not be able to reach by us actually physically going yeah i think it's it's reasonable for people to expect what what what do you guys do with all your time i mean i i have a hard time i have a hard time explaining my job sometimes to people and and and i would say that when when somebody supports tgc when they make an investment in our ministry when they want to help this work flourish hopefully they're they're doing a lot of things to build up the church but one of the key things that we try to accomplish is to use the the large and expansive global uh internet platform that god has given us to be able to provide what we describe as hope for the searching and people are out there all the time people we we have no idea about are just they've got questions and naturally when they've got questions they turn to the internet and they turn to the internet the main places that they are going to get answers from about christianity right now are from mormons and from jehovah's witnesses and we don't think that's okay that the gospel coalition we don't think that's okay we want to use the algorithms to the greatest wisdom and discernment that we have to provide hope for the searching that will guide people into historic biblical orthodoxy and so toward that end we've produced a number of what we would call an evergreen type resource it's just as true today as it's going to be in 10 years or 20 years or well beyond that where there are essays on on theological topics they're they are commentaries on books of the bible they're simple answers to common questions that people type into the search bars it's ranging all the way to to things of christian parents looking for help to deal with transgender identities with their kids or with their kids friends or their school district and melissa you know that's not the kind of stuff that people normally notice from the gospel coalition because they might not be those people searching for those answers but that's the tens of millions of people who visit our site on an annual basis that's that's where a lot of those people are and so it's not the kind of stuff that gets the attention but for those people who are wondering about you know why do i support tgc or why should i support tgc what's that going to do that's how we that's how we use those resources so i know melissa a lot of your work as well is behind the scenes i mean it's wonderful when you can stand in front of 10 000 plus women at our women's conference and welcomed them to indianapolis and to into a weekend of worship through song and and um and fellowship and through the word but you're always doing a lot of stuff behind the scenes so what are you excited about behind the scenes absolutely i think one of the things i've been most excited about this year we've done some women's ministry leadership cohorts um and these were on zoom that's one thing kova taught us how to do extremely well and but it opened up some opportunities that we hadn't really taken hold of before and so it was a wonderful way to help support the local church by really just getting women together and connecting through zoom so you know a lot of women's ministry leaders and i know a lot of pastors feel this as well might be having troubles in their church that they can talk to no one in their church or really even their city about because it's not it's it's maybe not a wise thing to do but this allowed those opportunities for them to pray together to think through um ways to organize their ministries and do some things behind the scenes and so it was just the way we wanted to try to help women in the local church and what they're doing and support them but i think i'm always encouraged i don't know if you feel this way i know tgc sometimes is really known for you know the article that blows up the internet tomorrow about whatever hot topic and hopefully it's seen as a place to come and get a good book review and and things like that but i'm so thankful for some of the work that is done in the hidden hidden places um and actually that we're much more concerned with articles that will bless and resource the church than we are with the one that gets 100 000 page views tomorrow or whatever but those are the ones we're seeking to faithfully keep producing so that someone and a lot of them are translated into other languages and a lot of the things that blow up here really don't relate in other cultures um and so it's it's wonderful to see the way those go go forward um well it's it's our privilege to do this work and we're able to do this work because god gives us that that that honor to be able to serve him in this way and we never take that for granted and we're able to do this work because of listeners of gospel bound and listeners of let's talk and we know because we hear from you guys about this you you give us such encouraging feedback about the ways the lord has has used something that you've learned and that's one of the things i love about gospel bound is i can just give all these book recommendations to people um just say it's not my wisdom it's just i'm just trying to help orient you towards some some other people that god's using to do this and so that's really a good way of explaining what we get to do as we get to introduce to the church people god has gifted to be able to teach and to lead and to guide and to help and so we'd love for you anybody listening here your friends your family love for you to partner with us in the support of this work and there's a few ways that you can join us here first way you can do that is become a monthly giver to tgc go to tgc.org give tgc.org give um we we want to give an offer to everybody here who's listening you've stuck with us for this long you sign up you you give 25 a month we'll send you copies of my book with sarah zaleska from 2021 gospel bound i'll also give you melissa's book from 2020 growing together on mentoring something that melissa has not only writes eloquently about but herself has modeled lives what she teaches there so sign up to give tgc uh 25 a month help us to advance this work that we're talking about providing hope for the searching uh you know recognizing that search bar is a spiritual battleground that we want to take captive for christ so help us do that 25 a month we'll send you copies of gospel bound and growing together to help encourage you about what god's doing around the world in his church and how you can help raise up the next generation of course we'll take a one-time gift we're grateful for you to give a one-time gift and just say thank you for for these podcasts and other things we're able to do because of your generous support and also just whether you give 25 a month or you give a one-time gift you can also support our podcasts and help other people to discover what we're doing with the gospel bound and let's talk simply by subscribing leave a rating leave a review that's tremendously valuable for us it helps others who are searching for hope to find gospel centered resources like we share on gospel bound and let's talk so yeah thanks everybody for sticking with us on this podcast but also especially for listening all year and for your faithful support that allows us to be able to work do this work with joy yeah it is really a joy and we do want to say thank you i mean it means so much and um we just want to keep doing more so we thank you for for your support i have one last question calling yeah so that we can wrap this up for everybody because they're ready to go do something i hope they've been waiting in traffic somewhere so you have something to listen to and we've been washing dishes yeah washing dishes working out something um on let's talk we always do a favorite thing so my question for you and this will be eminem i'm intrigued by this um what's a favorite christmas gift you're excited about giving this yeah i love that love that question and you know how it works melissa you're you're a parent and christmas shifts from any expectation of excitement about what you're going to get to of course the excitement that you're excited to share and who was it but our lord himself who told us it was better to give than to receive um what i'm excited about this year is actually a gift that my son uh all right my my six about to be seven-year-old son already opened because it came in an amazon box and he just went ahead and opened it and uh didn't realize actually didn't come in amazon box but just came in a box he's like oh okay well it is um i grew up playing with castle legos and it was a great time in the 80s and 90s producing a lot of those wonderful sets putting them together playing with them having these big battles well they've just done a return castle lego set they're just like one special issue castle lego set this year and it's also fun because i got to go to copenhagen denmark of course is the headquarters of lego and so was able to to get him a get him one of these castles and i know that he's excited to put it together and he usually he's young enough where he needs a little bit of my help with that but um but i'm excited to be able to give that i mean i'll see your future before you lego land trips and hundreds of dollars going to more lego sets you may have a son who i anticipate probably expect probably was into that given his uh given his extraordinary engineering aptitude i think legos are brilliant for kids it teaches them let me just say what you see right now and those lego sets will one day become ikea furniture that they can put together for you because they just follow those same instructions um i'm looking forward i'm giving my daughter i'm going old school uh and i'm giving my youngest daughter thankfully she will not listen to this um a record player and um different records so let me tell you this had no idea how expensive vinyl records are good i didn't get it the hamilton vinyl record is like 60 some dollars so i can't afford that but i did find some that were affordable so i'm super excited to do that well very very good i love it i love it well i think probably should wrap up here so we'll wrap up just thank you everybody i hope you're looking forward to giving and also receiving this christmas thanks for listening to gospelbound and let's talk thanks for encouraging us it really does mean a lot encouraging us with your comments over email and in person especially we get to see you at the events help others to find these podcasts by rating and reviewing them sign up to become a monthly donor of 25 or more to tgc love to send you those two books uh gospel bound and growing together as a thank you just go to tgc.org give merry christmas everybody happy new year we look forward to joining you next year again melissa will restart end of january looks like i'll be starting sometime around then maybe early february we'll see just got that one episode recorded we've got some more reading to do you can pray for my reading there in that we look forward to joining you again next year whether you're washing dishes commuting working out however you enjoy listening to your podcasts thanks thanks melissa merry christmas [Music] thank you for listening to today's episode of gospelbound for more information including past episodes transcripts and to sign up for my newsletter go to tgc.org gospelbound if you like what you've heard you may also like my new book written with sarah zalistre called gospelbound living with resolute hope and an anxious age you can find it wherever books are sold [Music] you