Note: Can I Say This at Church is produced for audio listening and is transcribed from Patreon version of the conversation. If able, I strongly encourage you to listen to the audio, which has inflection, emotion, sarcasm where applicable, and emphasis for points that may not come across well in written word. This transcript is generated using a combination of my ears and software, and may contain errors. Please check the episode for clarity before quoting in print.
Jason Miller 0:00
I think that the church has to be really careful. I think in the progressive spaces, there can be a temptation to mirror some of the stuff I saw in conservative spaces growing up. Which is to like think that the way that we're going to bring God's Kingdom is if we can gain institutional power and political structures, we start betting all of our chips on that strategy. And I think there's idolatry lurking everywhere there if we're not careful.
So I think it's really high stakes, right. But I don't think because it's high stakes, we get to opt out of it. And I think playing it safe, has created church spaces that have nothing to say to the real world right now. And especially has created church spaces that leave marginalized people really abandoned by their sisters and brothers who enjoy enough privilege to not understand why the world needs to get better.
Music 0:52
Seth Price Intro 1:10
We're knocking the rust off, right? I haven't recorded anything in a while. But we're here together. Thank you for downloading. By the way, this is the Can I Say This at Church podcast. I am Seth, your host, I realized that there is something that I'm not very good at telling people. And so I wanted to put that right at the beginning here. There is a transcript of this show. It is in the shownotes. It's also on the website. At canIsaythisatchurch.com and there's a transcript for pretty much every show. Tell a friend use that if you need it!
Now, a listener of the show recently sent me a message and said, Hey, I think that you and this pastor at South Bend City Church, Jason Miller, who's the guest today could have a good conversation. And they were not wrong. So Merinda, thank you!
And I'll also say, if there's someone or something that you want discussed or spoken about, shoot me an email, head over to the website, shoot me an email, let me know. I mean, yeah, let's go. You all know way more people than I do. But had Jason on and I really liked the convo I loved…I love what Jason is doing. And his team there and the congregation there. I think that he is beginning or trying to model away to do church in a way that ensures the church is still a thing for my kids and maybe my kids kids. And it's an evolution of a way to approach community. And I like it. So here we go. Let’s roll it.
Music 3:01
Seth Price 3:18
Jay Miller, welcome to the podcast! We did it. We made it on what did it take? 72 hours. 86 hours? To plan this? We are professionals!
Jason Miller 3:29
Yeah, it was a quick turnaround I was impressed professionals.
Seth Price 3:30
Well, I only have so many days off work. You alluded to it earlier, but I get really busy on most days. So on those days that I have off I just jam everything in there—jam it in.
Jason Miller 3:41
Yeah, I’m sure and I like that because I tend to get lost in the process of things (if it) take(s) too long. And then I just end up accidentally ghosting people. So I'm glad we got to it.
Seth Price 3:49
(Laughs)
Accidentally ghosting people, that's not a thing. That's the band's name, “accidentally ghosting people”. So well, what do you want people to know about you? When people say hey, who and what are you? What do you answer to that?
Jason Miller 4:01
Yeah, I mean, it depends on the person and the context. But I guess for this conversation I am a part of the community called South Bend City Church. We've been at it for about five years. I live in South Bend, Indiana. The home of Mayor Pete, who recently ran for President, and also the home of Amy Coney Barrett, who recently became Supreme Court Justice right here in our little town of South Bend, yeah!
Seth Price 4:22
Look at you. Isn’t South Bend where Notre Dame is?
Jason Miller 4:25
Yep. Yeah. Barrett was a law professor there. And Pete parents taught at Norte Dame. So there you go.
Seth Price 4:33
Yeah. So you are have been a “subjugate”… “subject” of Mayor Pete. How did he do as a mayor?
Jason Miller 4:41
Mostly people around here were really happy with him. He did a roundtable with clergy every month. So he’d kind of cycle through local pastors, rabbis, (and) the imam and so we had a little bit of proximity there. Locally, I was always really impressed with him. He seemed like a really thoughtful guy and South Bend has been through a real turnaround in the last decade. Ten years ago, Newsweek magazine called South Bend “the ninth most dying city in America”.
(Laughs from Seth)
Really! Yeah.
Seth Price 5:10
What a title!
Jason Miller 5:11
Yeah, that's stung a little bit, you know, but what it did is it kind of rallied the troops and a whole bunch of us were like, “Not on our watch!” And so Pete was a good kind of morale booster-standard bearer for the community.
Seth Price 5:22
I can't imagine being that editor at Newsweek being like, alright guys pitch me the stories and the guy says, I want to talk about the top 10 Most dying cities in America.
Jason Miller 5:32
I want to take cities that are already struggling and just crap on them!
Seth Price 5:36
Yeah. And the editor is like, “ok, who?” You know, and then they just start randomly start naming names and he’s like, “you know, like South Bend. Oh, yeah. South Bend!” Absolutely. Yeah. Run the article; run it!
So this is gonna bother me if I don't ask it; for people that aren't patrons subscribers, they won't see it. Why is this room so empty? Or it's maybe a fake zoom background? Because it looks like 50 feet away from you what is going on in here?
Jason Miller 5:58
I get that question all the time. In fact, those two bookshelves that your supporters can see, I put those there because it was just a cinderblock wall, and I was tired of people making fun of me. I had a friend, I’d always do Zoom meetings, and he asked me to hold up a copy of today's newspaper to prove that I was a hostage that was still alive! (Seth laughs)
No, I, just honestly, man like I just have a little more square footage than I need where I live. And I just can't stand the idea of just filling space to fill space with stuff. So this is my, like, lower level work area. And I got my desk, I got some resources and I’m pretty good.
Seth Price 6:30
So you enjoy that 37 yard pace behind you so that you can think about your thoughts before you get the book that you need to come back to.
Jason Miller 6:40
Thats how I keep the blood flowing (just a) little calisthenics.
Seth Price 6:44
That is how he writes the sermon. What you can't see is directly below your shoulders. There's just no carpet there. It's just worn from the pacing. Yeah, yeah. Well, good. So a listener of the show put us in connection with one another. We spoke briefly, I can't even remember what day, last week. And on that you had said a possible topic, and I like it. Something and I'm gonna paraphrase. So forgive me if I do it wrong. Something about what is it like to try to be in a church that is intentionally trying to create a place for people to say things that normally you don't? Or you're not allowed to say at church? Am I saying that right?
Jason Miller 7:19
Exactly.
Seth Price 7:21
Yeah, yeah. So that then is South Bend Church? That's what you're telling me?
Jason Miller 7:24
That's what we're aiming for, for sure.
Seth Price 7:27
Yeah. So what is that? What does that look like compared to like, the normal church that people get dressed up for? This is how I usually dress up for church, but whatever, you know, get dressed up and they go. What is the differences there? How do you intentionally go about doing something like that?
Jason Miller 7:39
Yeah, a little bit of background, maybe, and then maybe a few ways that we try to live it out. So I've worked in church, my whole adult life. And at the same time, I had some theological mentors, like I did undergrad at a Christian college where I had a theology professor who, in particular, was really, he was the kind of person that you just knew, was never going to be offended by a question, and go to his office and talk about anything and didn't feel like he was toeing the party line. So I had a friend and mentor like that. And then I, you know, I get to go to grad school at Notre Dame, and Notre Dame was a more theologically diverse environment. Tt's really rigorous but it was a place where like, there wasn't really anything you couldn't talk about or explore. So I had all those experiences while I was working at church, and I realized a bunch of my friends had pretty much given up on church. And it wasn't because they'd given up on faith or uninterested in God. And it wasn't because they were flaky or just like, too selfish to give their time to it. It was really because there was such a disconnect between their actual questions and their actual life with God. And then what was like happening in church spaces. And I think I felt kind of selfish that I had the advantage of some of these kind of privileged spaces where there was no question that was out of bounds, and I got to work some stuff out.
And I realized these friends of mine, all they had anymore was, frankly, podcasts like yours. Like, you know, that was the one space they're able to turn to where they can kind of like have even like a digital partner, even if it's not a “real” relationship, to kind of work through some of these questions, you know. So that was an early thing that like really kind of bothered me. It was like, if I were going to start a church, I'm not, I can't do it, I'm not gonna put my life in my heart into another space, where there's all of these sacred cows and sort of weird arbitrary lines drawn. I just don’t want to do it. So that was like an impulse as we got started.
I'll also say I feel like there's kind of like two big kind of categories of things that we feel like we couldn't talk about. One was stuff that you might just kind of call like theological or doctrinal. Like, can you talk about the fact that the church has actually understood salvation in a lot of different ways over the last few 1000 years? Or is that allowed? Right? So it's kind of like theological/doctrinal.
The other stuff, which I also think is theological and doctrinal, but you might also call it like, real issue stuff, right? Sexuality, inclusion, race, the ways the world is breaking politically and otherwise, like that other stuff too. Like, can we talk about that stuff? And I think that's also theological. But it feels more kind of contemporary. Right?
So yeah, so going into the church space, we did a few things out of the gate to try to like drive that home. One is we instituted a practice that we held onto ever since that's just an open floor. Where probably once a month, we open up the room and we'll ask a question, or a prompt, and anybody in the room can speak. And I think that because we've done it from the very beginning, when we were small enough, and we were kind of scrappy enough that people didn't feel like there was much risk involved. I think out of the gate, people felt like they could really push some stuff there.
We also like there's a guy named Peter Rollins, who's an Irish philosopher who talks a lot about doubt. And he has a very kind of radical and unexpected interpretation of the Christian story. And for our second experimental gathering, we just we brought Peter out from LA, and we just like set him loose in the room. And just had him do, he's a very kind of disruptive, subversive thinker. And I think having him at the very beginning, also kind of set a tone that if this is the kind of community where a guy like Peter Rollins can say the things that he thinks, then this is probably gonna be the kind of place where you can say the things that you think.
And then in 2018, we made a clarification on our our stance around sexuality and inclusion. Where South Bend City Church is a place where people can kind of access every level of our life together, including leadership and marriage and staffing, regardless of where they land on a sexual identity spectrum or gay marriage. So yeah, those are some pieces in play.
And I think my other job is to be the guy who says at first sometimes, right? Like, if you're the lead pastor, like if, if you're afraid to say things and ask things and and be honest about things, well, then nobody else is going to feel comfortable. Right? But I think the other pieces in frankly, when you're like a founder, lead pastor, you kind of have a level of permission maybe and I think my job is to use it, you know?
Seth Price 11:48
Yeah. Well, you also know, the corporate structure and the bylaws of what you can can't do. And so know where all the cracks are, you're like, Well, I'm gonna wedge myself in here.
Jason Miller 11:55
That's right.
Seth Price 11:57
And yeah, that's right. And I wrote it. So that's passive aggressive, and probably not true. But, but there's also that part of “I do know what I can and can't get away with because I helped draft the way that we're governed”.
Jason Miller 12:10
Yeah and then you start from the beginning, making sure that the other leaders that you bring around, you're on board with that, too.
Seth Price 12:15
Yeah. So let's back up a bit. So that's what you're doing now. And there was a lot there. Where did you begin, like, so where did you begin in faith? Like, what is…you said, You were struggling with questions. I think you said that. And then you had the ability to process that at Notre Dame. So where were you before all that, theologically?
Jason Miller 12:34
Yeah, so I grew up in Churches of Christ, Christian churches, you know small kind of conservative, largely rural congregations, parents were always really invested in that. My dad was always like an elder at church and mom was on the worship team. And these were churches that they're autonomous, you know, they didn't have like a creed, per se, they would have just said, we, you know, “we believe the Bible”. And I remember we moved around a fair amount growing up. And I think in middle school, I asked my parents one time when we moved, I just said, like, hey, “how do we pick a church”? Just kind of curious. Like, it seems like every time we move, we kind of look around a little bit, and then we land somewhere. And I remember my parents saying, like, “Well, we, you know, we try to go to a church that like, teaches the Bible”. And so like in middle school….
Seth Price 13:15
(sarcasm) Don’t they all?
Jason Miller 13:16
Yeah! And apparently, this book is like a big deal for our family, like we, you know, we make, you know, whatever church is going to be a part of ends up being a place, we spend a lot of time energy. And so like, I remember, I'm also kind of intrinsically bookish. And so I remember thinking I really should read the Bible. And this is like middle school, early high school, where I think like a lot of people the first time I really started reading the thing cover to cover, like, that's when the cracks started forming in the edifice of a certain version of faith. Because I think when you actually read the thing cover to cover and try to figure out how all the pieces fit together and wonder like why do we, you know, make a big deal out of some versus ignore others, and you know, all that pretty quickly. It felt like the Emperor's not wearing any clothes.
You know, the idea like, oh, we do the biblical thing. But I'm reading the book cover to cover, and nobody's explaining to me how we leave some of this behind and carry some of it forward. And so I’d say, more than anything, it was like an encounter with scripture at the beginning, that really kind of complicated things for me.
And then along the way, probably the other two encounters that really complicated things for me were a family member who's gay, a couple years older than me, and watching just how painful it was for him to navigate his own sense of identity in the church. And then also, for the last 11 years, I spent a fair amount of time overseas in conflict zones learning from and trying to support people in places that are really wracked by over in violent conflict. And asking myself if my understanding of Jesus, or the gospel, or my faith, had anything meaningful to say, to some of the most broken places in the world, and the answer 11 years ago was-not really. And so that was the other complicating factor that was requiring me to kind of go through a re-discovery of a different kind of version of faith.
Seth Price 15:05
Yeah, what are some of those prompts? Like what would be an example? Actually no. Before you answer that. So you would alluded to you had seminary, or graduate work. I'm not…I'm putting seminary there. Were you at seminary? Or is it something else?
Jason Miller 15:18
Just the Grad School of Theology?
Seth Price 15:19
I don't want to put words in your mouth from from an assumption. Um, and you'd said other people are doing it through like, podcasts like this one. Which honestly, is terrifying to hear someone say out loud, like, I don't…I don't want that responsibility. And I don't think anyone starts a podcast once that responsibility, and if they do, probably in the wrong line of work. I think you're right, though. Is that a good place to be?
Jason Miller 15:48
I think it serves a purpose. A really good one. I think, you know, first of all, for people who are carrying a lot of church trauma, a podcast is really safe. And I think there's a season when we're dealing with trauma, or safety is the most important thing. Not forever, we have to move out of that at some point. But I think if you're someplace where you really can't find a flesh and blood community that's safe or brave or willing to ask these questions, I think it's better than nothing. So I think there is some real strength there. You know, I think you miss out on relationship. You know, flesh and blood encounters. I think you miss out on being a participant in the community rather than just a recipient of its message. But I do think that there's a great purpose for stuff like what you're doing.
Seth Price 16:41
So what would be some of those prompts? You said, you started with prompts. So if I was sitting there at your church? What do you mean? Like, like, in my church, we have a discipline of silence at the end of each service, which is one of my favorite parts, like intentionally and at first, it was weird. And our church was not “refounded” recently, like, it's one of the oldest churches in the city that I live in. But it's something our pastor did when he came, you know, many years ago. And I love it. But it is weird. And especially for guests they're like, what do we what do I do with my hands? Am I praying? I'm not praying, I am praying. I'm not praying. What do I do right now? Um, so what are some of those prompts? Because I like weirdness or things that get you out of a out of a comfort zone in a service? Like what would example that be?
Jason Miller 17:24
Yeah, they're all over the board. A few examples are…I taught a series on the book of Revelation a couple years ago, and it was just hey, when you hear that the preacher’s gonna talk about the book of Revelation, what do you feel?
Seth Price 17:39
Jason Miller 17:40
That's funny, nobody else said that! (laughs) But the responses were everything from like, I'm actually physically nervous right now because I've heard this book preached in such a way that was so terrifying or confusing, that I feel like I have physical anxiety right now. Somebody said like that, or, you know, kind of funny stuff, like, the response, you know, I think about the Left Behind books or whatever. But so it might be like, hey, we're going here but first, let's check in. How are you feeling right now, when you hear that? Sometimes, like, before we come to the table for the Eucharist, sometimes we'll do a simple exercise of like, what's one or two words for how you're arriving at the table? Like in what state are you coming today? And that's just an act of like, “own it”, wherever you are. Right. So we might hear words like grateful, thankful, frustrated, exhausted, you know, and just kinda like bring all that out. Just kind of emotional honesty. Yeah, those are a couple of examples.
Seth Price 18:39
Mm hmm. So how long does that take? Like, I find that I find that fascinating. I want to do that. I'm gonna tell Barrett, if you're listening. Let's do that. Let's just pick a Sunday and do it not tell anybody?
Jason Miller 18:51
It depends. Sometimes, every once in a while, it's actually the main event in the gathering. So we're teaching to the Sermon on the Mount right now. We did chapter five for like a couple of months. And when we got to the end of chapter five, with the whole gathering, just kind of like debrief to chapter five. So there was a centerpiece there, where it's like, reminding everybody kind of what we've done and then a few different kinds of prompts, like, first of all, anybody want to share a highlight from this experience? Anybody want to share a low light? Like, what did you hate about this? Or what did you disagree with? Or what did you find frustrating or stupid or confusing or whatever?
So that could last, you know, 20 minutes? Or it could be as brief as like two or three minutes. Like that one word prompt about how are you arriving? I will say like, 90% of the time, it's the most beautiful thing that happens in our gatherings. Just because the level of honesty and truth telling that happens in the room. And then every once in a while it gets a bit weird, or somebody kind of rambles and you got to find a gracious way to kind of let them say their piece but then kind of transition…
Seth Price 19:52
Slowly fade the mic down…
Jason Miller 19:55
Yeah, (laughs) we don't use mics for that. The room is small enough, thankfully we don’t have to hand around mics for that.
Seth Price 20:01
Yeah. So for a church like that created with intent…I'm going to say what I think and you can correct me if I'm wrong. So if a church created intentionally for people to wrestle with hard topics, which, that's great. How do you land on things doctrinally, in a way that people are like, yeah, we believe that when there's all this other space, I can see how that would work in my mind, but I'm curious how it works for y'all.
Jason Miller 20:28
Yes! That's a great question. And that's certainly one of the challenges that we've been, you know, every model has the things that are really easy and strong about it. And then the things that are really messy about it. We would say kind of like officially, the word Jesus following community, we trust the Bible as it points to Jesus. And that's really important language for us. Because that sort of specifies what are we asking about what to do for us? We're not asking the Bible to like, tell us how to interpret geopolitical warfare, vis-à-vis, some strange, you know, readings of Revelation, for example. We are kind of Jesus is the Center for us, the Bible is here to point us toward Christ. And then we would say, we trust the Apostles Creed as a guiding interpretation of Scripture. That's about what we nail down like, that's where the tent stakes are.
Here's the other trick, though, is like, I just think that belief is a function…it's less a choice, like the brain, I think the mind is not meant to like, be able to pretend to believe things that it hasn't found credible or that it hasn't experienced. And so I really shy away from saying like, what do like we believe as a community. Like we often say, like we're a community of believers and doubters, and everybody who's a bit of both. When we clarified our stance on sexuality, I pointed out that people always asked me, “well, what does South Bend City Church believe about LGBTQ identity and behavior”. And I would say like, well should ask them. Like, because South Bend City Church is the whole family, right? It's the whole community.
Seth Price 21:57
Yeah, you speak for you [only]
Jason Miller 21:58
Yeah, exactly. So like on that one, what I’m saying is that I'm not gonna pretend to speak for the beliefs of every person in this room. But I do think we owe one another a clarification about our behavior as an organization.
So I did a long thing about belief and Scripture and these questions, but at the end of it, the clarity that I tried to offer was not “so now we all believe this”, because of course, that's not how it works. But I didn't want to say so going forward, we're gonna we're going to behave like this. And you can expect this from us. I've tried to explain why we're going to behave that way. But I also want to make sure you know that if you disagree with me on this (that) our belonging to one another is not going to be predicated on agreeing on this. Because I just think like, if when you create these like, well, we as a community believe XYZ, the more you kind of build that out, the more you're asking people to lie. Yeah, because I just don't know anybody who believes the same or you're asking people to have to leave your community in the season of evolution or change right rather than for this community the journey together even while we are working out belief in life.
Music/Ad Break 22:53
Seth Price 23:27
This is the benefit of not having a book to go off of so all these are just like…like if we were having a drink together. I don’t know if you drink but I'm a bourbon guy. If we were having a bourbon right now...
Jason Miller 23:35
We would be having a bourbon right now.
Seth Price 23:37
Excellent. Yeah. Yeah, I've got some Elijah Craig upstairs, come on down.
Jason Miller 23:42
Beautiful!
Seth Price 23:43
It's gonna be great. One cube of ice, you put more in than that and I'm going to take your drink back, and I would drink. Now you drink it however you want.
So thinking through the way churches are so like, for instance, my church, I don't know how old it is, let's say 120 years old, it's probably older. There is a lot of inherent structure. And I think for a lot of people listening, if they're pastors, or if they're deacons, or they’re whatever, at their church, or they've just jettisoned church, because like, “absolutely not that's not how my church was”. And there's no hope for that. How do you get there when you have this already existing infrastructure tied to budgets, and people got mortgages, and there's a light bill and we've made commitments to this mission alliance? Like, how do you begin because honestly, I like the way that you're doing church. I think it could have some hard parts. But all churches have that, but yeah, I don't know how to get there from a church that someone possibly attends today. You know, like the Methodist Church in Rural County, Minnesota, or the First Baptist Church of wherever, wherever Arizona, like I'm just picking random cities. How do you transition from all of that legacy into something willing to question things without literally exploding it and being like, yeah, well, we're either going to just shut it down. And sorry about that or how do you get there?
Jason Miller 25:00
Yeah. So I'll say I have a few thoughts. Because this comes up a lot with pastor friends, however, that my disclaimer is, I don't want to be one of those guys who talks about things I haven't done. And I've never transitioned to community, right? So I'm about to be one of those guys, because I do have some thoughts. But I want to acknowledge that it's probably easy for me, from where I sit to have opinions about that. So take it with a grain of salt.
First of all, I will say, I mean, we're five years old, but we already have, you know, we pay, we have a lease, like we have a multi $100,000 commitment every year just to pay rent. So that happens pretty quickly, you start finding yourself, right, in a situation where there are layers built upon what you're creating.
A few thoughts.
First of all, I think there's one way of trying to argue for like evolution, or change, that essentially like, asks people to get over their attachments to the way things are. And I think that can be really disrespectful and really immature. I think there's this appeal, especially for young leaders I think, to like they get really excited about Jesus flipping the tables. And they fail to recognize how nuanced Jesus was in the ways that he worked with the law. And, kind of like, brought people along with him to help them evolve. I also think it's important to like, if people aren't familiar with things like stages of faith, or spiral dynamics, or other frameworks that try to understand like how individuals and communities evolve. If you're not familiar with those, I think you really ought to educate yourself on that stuff. Because you're not just up against the ideas in people's heads.
Seth Price 26:33
Spiral dynamics is easy to explain to people. I've done this at the bank often. And they'll say, No, it's not. And I'm like, Yeah, well, you got a maintenance fee, and I'm not refunding it, and they instantly get angry. And I'm like, there it is, there was you went from here, all the way down to hear and now you're mad, and you're irrationally angry? Because I just made that up. But there you go there’s spiral dynamics, there's a lot in between there but.
Jason Miller 26:56
Yeah, no, that's exactly right. Right. So you're up against more than just the ideas in their head. So I think like to be a wise leader is to be to understand that.
I also think like actually use the resources in your tradition to propel it forward, don't try to override those resources. So whatever tradition it is, I think if you become a student of the tradition, you know, you’re Presbyterian, you’re Baptist whatever, appeal to the roots, and, and make the case for where those take you if you let them fully grow, right. Like for us, like from the beginning, not having, you know, pre existing roots as a community we just we spent the first year in the book of Acts, and one of the cases that we kept asking, so what's the church? What's the church? What's the church, and we kept reading the book of Acts. And the argument that I made for like a year and a half over and over and over again is that you could say that a church is this inheritor of a tradition. So you just kind of receive it as it came to you. And your job is to stay there, right, just hold on to those ideas, those conclusions. And then you kind of look at the changing world around us. And you just kind of see that stuff as, you know, this soft version of this is you’re like the stuff we've inherited, that's our business. And all this change happening around us…that’s a distraction. So it's kind of a soft version of this, the more intense version is we inherited this stuff, we trust it, our job is to protect it. And all this stuff changing around us is actually a threat. And so you get kind of more militantly defended against it. So these are different models of church that you can see in a lot of different traditions.
The third thing I'd say is probably like “oh, man, the stuff we've inherited. It's just so antiquated and unfortunate. So let's just get hip and modern and go with where things are right now”. And that's to assume that the current thinking on any questions is always the best thinking. But I think that completely misses the point of what faith and church is to, right. So then we turn the book of Acts. And we would argue over and over and over again, the book of Acts shows a community that's none of those three things I just described. But rather, it shows a community that's like living in the interpretive tension between, you know, the law they've inherited as Jewish believers, and the Spirit showing up in the life of these Gentiles, which they have no clear precedent for. But they got together and they worked it out together.
And I think you can either say that our job is to just run with their conclusions. Or you can say our job is to do what they did. And what they did is they didn't let go of what they'd inherited, but they put it in conversation with everything happening around them and they trusted that the Spirit might be birthing something new between those two things.
So that was my version of trying to like make a case for it. Not like “oh, forget that part of the Bible” but like “no it's in it's there! In the heart”, you know?
Seth Price 29:28
Yeah. Can I ask some sarcastic and slightly unfair questions?
Jason Miller 29:32
Yes please.
Seth Price 29:34
So what's the only valid view of salvation? You brought it up earlier.
Jason Miller 29:37
(Laughs) Uh…the only valid view of salvation is one that leaves enough room for all the metaphors in Scripture.
Seth Price 29:44
(Laughs) Fair enough. And how about alright, fine, let me rephrase it. So you talked about salvation earlier. What would you preach salvation and then the inverse of that is hell or whatever you want to call that what are those for you? What are they for you?
Jason Miller 29:59
How about this, I would say the gospel is, first of all, located in the Gospel according to Matthew, the Gospel according to Mark, the Gospel according to Luke, and the Gospel according to John, I think Paul also talks about the gospel like First Corinthians 15.
Seth Price 30:08
But I'm looking for the Gospel according to Jay, though. That's what I'm looking for.
Jason Miller 30:12
Yeah, I'm getting. What I see there. Matthew 4 says that Jesus preached the gospel, it literally says, Jesus preached the gospel of the kingdom of God. And then he spends five, six and seven describing it. My understanding of that is the Beatitudes are his big opening frame, which is, God wants to give God's life to you, and live God's life through you. Regardless of your circumstance, regardless of anything that's happened to you. And you know, these categories, poor in spirit, those who are mourning. It's like he's saying, I'm imagining anything about you that might make you most convinced that you are ineligible for God to give God's life to you. I'm trying to help you understand God wants to give God's life to you and live God’s life in you.
So now already, we're in the language of grace. And we're in the language of union, right of the union of God and us. And then I think the rest of the sermon on the mount is all these pictures of life made possible in a world made possible by that. And like right now going to the sermon on the mount with the baptisms on Easter. And that's like our big frame.
And then I think forgiveness is sort of the essential piece that's folded into it. Because of course, every one of us has lived a life that's in pretty radical rebellion against or a rejection of that life. And so there has to be something worked out there about how would we understand that God has forgiven all that. But for me, the big frame is God wants to give God's life to you, which is my way of talking about the Kingdom of God. And salvation is to trust that gift and then to surrender to it and live in it.
Seth Price 31:44
If you were not preaching that week. I'm assuming you don't preach every week. But assume you weren't preaching in a few weeks from now. What is the prompt that would scare you the most for someone to ask you?
Jason Miller 31:57
Wait, if I weren't, weren't preaching,…
Seth Price 31:58
Yes, so you're sitting in the crowd…
Jason Miller 32:00
Oh!
Seth Price 32:01
And I come to preach. And I'm like, “Hey, we're gonna have a prompt. What's the one you're like, Please, God, don't ask me that. What's the one right now for you that you're like, oh, man. Don't ask me. Yeah.
Jason Miller 32:10
Don't ask me?
Huh. That's a good question. Uh…wow. I…I'm trying I'm trying to make sure I'm not being a coy. I don't know if…I guess I just haven't seen where questions responded to thoughtfully are ever a threat. Like I mean, that. I just…I have this core conviction that. With enough graciousness, and thoughtfulness, I just don't think there's anything that we should be scared of in terms of a question. Yeah, again…I'm trying not to I'm trying to make sure I'm not being coy about that.
Seth Price 32:50
Yeah. That's fine. That's fair. Um, so the big question on my mind, because I watch it rip apart my church every two years, is what happens, as soon as about three months from now, primaries start to get going, again, political advertisements is all that I see and or here, I don't even pay for cable and it's still the only advertisement that I see. As a pastor, how do you navigate a country, or a faith community, in a country as politically divided as this one happens to be?
Jason Miller 33:24
Yeah, this is very real for us.
A couple of anecdotes, just to kind of like put some flesh on it for us.
So first of all, you know, we began forming in 2016, you know, in the in the fall of 2016. So we began forming in the midst of the Trump-Hillary election. And I, really, quickly discovered this is more complicated than I realized having never been like a lead pastor before. I remember the week, at our gathering right after the Access Hollywood tape came out where Trump was saying really reprehensible things about women. I was trying to learn as a leader how it is that churches can be implicitly patriarchal even if you don't mean to be. And so you know, we would say we are egalitarian, we have women and men in leadership, all that stuff. And yeah, I was learning that like, if the women in your church have just heard one of two people running for president speak about them in such a reprehensible and violent way and you don’t mention it…well, that just kind of like plays into the the way this becomes a patriarchal environment. Right? So at that gathering I said like two sentences…I said, “By the way, if you're a woman in our congregation, I just want to say, I'm really sorry that we've created a world where men can talk about you and your body like we've heard this week and to have it laughed off his locker room talk or excused”. So that was one sentence in the whole gathering. And the thing that really caught me off guard is the number of emails I got from women in our church, who were livid with me for taking a pro-Hillary stance in a gathering.
Seth Price 35:01
I didn't say anything about Hillary.
Jason Miller 35:03
No! It's like….so that’s like my first like real, like, oh, wow, things are more charged than I thought, right. Things are more radioactive than I thought in this stuff right? At the same time South Bend as a city is 40%, non white, the median household income in South Bend is $30,000 a year, that's half the national average. That's a whole household, living on 30,000 a year. And so, I have personally, obviously, I'm white, and I've never had to figure out how to live in my household on $30,000 a year. And I don't even have, you know, a partner or kids. So it's been impressed upon me really painfully and clearly that like to not talk about anything political is to just an easy thing for privileged, white Christians to do, right, whether it's race or something else. So then we're like, okay, well, it's, it's really charged. The first lesson was like, this is radioactive. The second lesson is like, but we can't not talk about it at all. We cannot talk about justice or stuff like that.
So then fast forward, and things got really dicey. Going into gosh, this is February of last year, like a month and a half before the pandemic hit. Our worship pastor, he wrote and released a song that was a very prophetic critique of Christians voting for Trump. And not just voting for Trump, but supporting Trump. And (he) released on its own, it wasn't like a church project. But it went viral.
Seth Price 36:36
Wait. What's the name of this song?
Jason Miller 36:37
The song’s called Hymn for the 81%?
Seth Price 36:39
I do know that song. Yeah, love that song.
Jason Miller 36:41
So it gets picked up. It gets posted on the front page of Foxnews.com. And we get implied death threats, arson threats, hundreds of emails from people who are not just mad, but who feel violent toward our community because of it. And then combine that with the fact that sometime during that season, Mayor Pete's campaign team had asked if they could use our space for a meeting. And we really wrestled with this. But our responsibility is to have neutral policies on facility rental, right. And so we have policies and filters, and we ran it through the filters, and we debated it. But we ultimately felt that the most neutral stance was just to apply the policies and filters and they paid a fee. We didn't like donate the space for their use.
And then the New York Times writes an article about Pete's campaign and the first sentence says, on a day in whatever month the the entire team from air Pete's campaign met at South Bend City Church. So now I've got a Fox News front page that has this anti-Trump song and then I've got a New York Times article, tagging our church with Pete's campaign. And I just like, man, we've really stepped in it now. Right? So I did the thing you always do to fix something in church, I preached a sermon about it.
That's a joke. (Laughter)
Preachers like to think of sermons fix everything.
But we've tried to differentiate between the political and the partisan. And we tried to create a definition of the political that, I think, helps people understand that there are political implications for following Jesus. And what we've often said is, what do you mean by political? If by political, you mean, how do you use your power and what kind of world are we building? I think the Bible is really clear that God cares about how we use our power, and what kind of world we're building. And, by the way, voting is one thing that expresses our power and helps us build the world. I'm not going to tell you who to vote for, I think that crosses a line, it's not appropriate for pulpits in the church.
And I think that the church has to be really careful, I think in the progressive spaces, there can be a temptation to mirror some of the stuff I saw in conservative spaces growing up. Which is to like think that the way that we're going to bring God's Kingdom is if we can gain institutional power and political structures, we start betting all of our chips on that strategy. And I think there's idolatry lurking everywhere there if we're not careful.
So I think it's really high stakes, right. But I don't think because it's high stakes we get to opt out of it. And I think playing it safe has created church spaces that have nothing to say to the real world right now. And especially has created spaces that leave marginalized people really abandoned by their sisters and brothers who enjoy enough privilege to not understand why the world needs to get better.
Seth Price 39:33
Yeah. Yeah.
I did not know that that song or that that happened with Mayor Pete or your church. I am familiar with that song. I had many 40 or 50 people send it to me when it released. Hey, you should listen…hey you should listen! And I was like, I love this song. How's your Tuesday? You know?
Yeah, that's insane. I can't imagine having to navigate that. I know one of the lines that my pastor has said before, and he said it during the election. Something about you know, I know that you people have issues with “this”, because you have told me and I know that this side of the aisle has issues with “this”, because you have told me and I'm here to tell you, I don't know what to do with that, you know?
Jason Miller 40:09
Yeah. And he just owns that right?
Seth Price 40:11
And he said something about if there is a place for both Peter and Paul to exist in the same Bible, and they can get along, well, obviously, there were some some big differences there. Now, I'm gonna need y'all to figure it out. Come on!
Jason Miller 40:24
Yes. Right! Yes.
Seth Price 40:25
We live here in this city. And we kind of need to do better. So yeah, yeah, I'm probably paraphrasing, badly, the words in his mouth, but whatever. I want to be respectful of your time, I know you've got a hard stop. And so I normally ask the question of what should be the things that we talk about at church. But that's been the entire episode. So I'm going to deflect that question.
But I am curious what your answer is to this. And so when you try to wrap words around what it is, you mean, when you say God, or whatever noun you want to put there, or adjective you want to put there, what is that for you?
Jason Miller 40:56
Well, what I mean by God…yeah. I mean, the the loving mystery at the center of reality.
I mean that which is lending being to all of this in every moment.
I mean, the mystery that I have met quite specifically in Jesus.
And I mean a….an unending generosity that gives us all that we see and all that we are.
Seth Price 41:37
Yeah. So in closing, where would you direct people to go to do things if they want to listen to some of your sermons if they want to get more engaged or some resources maybe to possibly get more engaged in their local faith congregations? Like, where would you direct people to go too?
Jason Miller 41:56
Yeah, so on kind of what's going on here, you can certainly South Bend City Church on any podcast app. I do a thing on my Instagram. So I'm @JasonAdamMiller, everywhere. Although I'm only really on Instagram. I've been doing this thing called Ask a pastor where people just submit questions, and I go live on some Tuesday nights, and I bring in some artists, friends, or some pastor friends, and we just kind of talk about stuff. And it has a similar heart to what I think you're doing here. It's like, hey, you may not feel like you know, where you could, like, hear somebody respond to this question, but I'll respond to it.
So Instagram, Jason Adam Miller. The church front, man, that's hard because we get emails like every week, right now. It's like, “Hey, I live in this place. Is there a church that might have kind of a similar ethos and heartbeat?” And the answer is, yeah, there's a lot. We're not alone. Right? It's not like we're the ones coming (on this). Like, yeah, I don't mean to pretend that South Bend City is this unique thing that's nowhere else.
But if one other resource I would recommend is a guy named Mike Goldsworthy. He's terrible at branding. So forgive, poor Mike. But Mike, we had a gathering of about 120 church leaders here in October, from like West Coast, the East Coast, who all kind of like showed up with a lot of the things I've talked about today would have described what they're trying to do in your churches. And it wasn't like a South Bend City Church branded conference. We were just hosting but it wasn't like our thing. Mike actually was the convener, and we kind of they…
Seth Price 43:17
They just rented a space and then the New York Times talks about it.
Jason Miller 43:20
Plausible deniability man!
Mike is kind of the convener, we call him the bishop. Mike a friend that I met a couple years ago, Mike pastored a church in Long Beach, California for 20 years. Mike's no longer pastor in a local congregation, but he has come alongside a bunch of us and help us find each other. Pastors and communities all over the country who are maybe coming from evangelical roots, but have found that either the politics of evangelicalism to be just something we can't affirm, or have found, like a theological container of evangelicalism to be too constraining for how we understand faith. There's a bunch of other stuff. But so if you follow my Goldsworthy, he's got a podcast where he interviews church leaders. All that to say, Mike's as good as anybody I know at kind of trying to keep a pulse.
He's putting cohorts together and helping pastors encourage each other because a lot of us kind of feel like we're out here in a bit of a wilderness, right, where there's less resources and less mutual encouragement, less funding, because you're a little outside the dominant consciousness, a little outside of the mainstream. So find a way to follow Mike Goldsworthy. That's probably another encouragement.
Seth Price 44:22
Yeah. Cool. Jay, thank you for your time this morning.
Jason Miller 44:26
Yeah, it is my pleasure man, really an honor. Shout out to Merinda for getting us together for being a matchmaker.
Seth Price 44:29
Definitely, definitely.
Music 44:33
Seth Price 44:43
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