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With Anna Robbins
144 Plays1 year ago
Everyone knows about the "culture wars" and some champion following Jesus as being "counter-cultural". What precisely is the relationship between the Christian faith and human culture? Reflecting well on that relationship and our own place in it can lead to some great insights into how we live out and share our faith. Helping us do that on PEP Talk today is a minister and academic with experience on both sides of the Atlantic.
Rev Dr Anna Robbins is President of Acadia Divinity College in Nova Scotia, Canada. She has served several churches as an ordained minister of the Canadian Baptists of Atlantic Canada. Near the end of her doctoral studies in Wales (PhD 2001), she was appointed to the faculty of the London School of Theology in the UK where she served for 12 years. In London, she was theological consultant to organisations including Theos, Christians in Politics, Tearfund, and the Evangelical Alliance. She returned to Nova Scotia in 2012, where she lives with her husband and son.
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Transcript
Introduction of Hosts and Guest
00:00:10
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to another exciting edition of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I am, as ever, Andy Bannister, and I'm joined my co-host today. I'm joined by my Solas colleague, Gavin Matthews. Gavin, how are you doing? I'm good. How are you? I am pretty good. Well, I'm good because I'm really excited, actually, because actually, I'll be really
Anna Robbins' Role and Leadership Philosophy
00:00:31
Speaker
cheeky. And so we have a blast in the past, actually, joining us on the podcast today because we are joined all the way from the other side of the Atlantic from Nova Scotia in Canada.
00:00:39
Speaker
by Anna Robbins. In a minute, I'll get Anna to introduce herself, but Anna actually had the joy or the curse of teaching me when I was an undergraduate. There is only actually five years between us, but she taught me, among other things, ethics and whatnot. So all the areas I've made huge mess ups in ministry. I can basically blame Anna because she taught me this stuff, but she's pulling faces at me over the video links. So Anna, welcome to pep talk. How are you doing today?
00:01:07
Speaker
Thanks, Andy. It's always a pleasure and I'm looking forward to our conversation and great to meet Gavin today as well. Yeah. So why don't you tell us a bit about yourself because you have one of those quite impressive resumes and different parts to your job and so many sort of titles
Church and Academia: Robbins' Perspective
00:01:21
Speaker
flying around there. You've done so many things. So why don't we let you introduce yourself. Who is Anna Robbins?
00:01:28
Speaker
I always laugh when people do these introductions when I'm speaking somewhere and they'll sometimes just read my bio off the website or something and I'm like, I don't even know who they're talking about because I will say this with all sincerity. At the end of the day, DT Niles talked about a beggar telling other beggars where to find bread and everything that I do really is summed up in that phrase, I have to be honest.
00:01:52
Speaker
So, but God's opened some really interesting doors for me to do that in some interesting ways over the years. And what I'm doing now, I serve as president of Katie Divinity College. And we are equipping leaders to serve the church today in, you know, the work that God's about in church in the world with transformative impact.
00:02:12
Speaker
And so that's an exciting outlet for my passion for people to come to know Jesus, but to equip the equippers. Sometimes that's depressing because I want to be out there on the front line, but it's not always your call to be on the front line all the time. So I enjoy opportunities for that.
00:02:30
Speaker
Yeah that's why i am i'm married to peter i am mother to david and those are my relationships and and i have an amazing team here those are also some key relationships for me and as you know i was at for those who are listening the podcast might be interested that i was teaching in lennon school of theology for 12 years and back in the day when you were there. Back in the day.
00:02:54
Speaker
And he introduced you as Anna Robbins, but to give you your full title, it's the Reverend Dr. Robbins, which is an interesting array of titles. And interesting, I think, because one of those is an ecclesiastical title, and one is an academic title. And you've worked across those two fields of academia and church for a long time. And I'm just wondering,
00:03:13
Speaker
What is the relationship or should the relationship between those two things be? What can those of us in the church learn from academia? Why do we need academia? And indeed, what does the church offer the academy?
00:03:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I'm absolutely committed to not only both of those things, but the interaction of both of those things. So you picked up on that helpfully, although the titles I don't think impress anybody, including Jesus, and probably especially not Jesus, but there they are. They do represent two aspects of my life that I hope are intertwined always. So for me, the ecclesial call comes first, the call to the church to serve the church.
00:03:49
Speaker
church with whatever gifts God's given me and to approach that as a servant leader to say, what do I have to offer that is helpful to build up the church? So I've been interested over the years in issues like justice and apologetics. I'm a keen evangelist. I want people to know Jesus just because Jesus already knows them and it just changes everything once you realize that.
00:04:12
Speaker
And that led me into all kinds of questions, which was what led me into the academic side because I wanted my questions answered and questions begat more questions. And so you just keep studying until you have a collection of these degrees. But at the same time, for me, the heart is still
00:04:27
Speaker
serving the church. And so in the position that I have now, that's very much tied in. We're part of a secular university campus, but we're a Christian seminary and our focus is not necessarily to equip people for the academy, but we sometimes do that. I don't think you can separate the two, but our main focus is preparing leaders for the equipping leaders for the church. And so we're very much entwined in that. At the same time, I think that
Engaging Culture and Spiritual Awakening
00:04:54
Speaker
You know, particularly today, the church suffers from a lack of thoughtfulness and its approach to ministry and so on. Increasingly, churches think they don't need qualified leaders, perhaps in some places. They think that, you know, as long as it's someone they know who's come up through their church, that that's sufficient or they can, you know, give them what they need to know in terms of here's how you do this and here's how you do that.
00:05:17
Speaker
More than ever, we need leaders who know how to think clearly about a whole lot of different things because we all know what's coming at the church fast and furious and what the church is throwing at the world sometimes and helpfully. And so we need people who are fully equipped to deal not only with those issues, but to relate to people
00:05:37
Speaker
out of a self-knowledge that doesn't just visit their own stuff on other people. So that's another thing that we're about here is, you know, come to know yourself as a pastor or leader so that you can actually help other people come to know themselves so they can come to know Jesus in an integral way.
00:05:54
Speaker
rather than just, well, now I'm a leader and I'm going to visit all my negative things on you. So we need this. We need the interplay between the two. This is a very rich environment for me here to do that because, you know, I've got colleagues on this campus who have
00:06:11
Speaker
Different belief, no belief, they love to engage in debate. It's a free kind of environment that way and I just think it's rich and we're the better for it because we can't get away with stuff that, you know, the kinds of platitudes that Christians often put forward, they see through that pretty quick.
00:06:31
Speaker
On the other hand, I'll say, if I may, being on a secular campus is hugely encouraging for us as a Christian seminary. It's not a battleground. It is a garden because there are students who come through our door regularly from the rest of the university, not seminary students who see something here, not only students, but staff to faculty. They see something that intrigues them. They see something that is winsome, something that
00:06:59
Speaker
it connects them with who they are in a way that they had not experienced before. And they can't articulate what that is a lot of the time, but they come through and they engage conversation and they realize there is a spiritual side to their life and it's awakening in some way, but there's no real way of addressing it in the wider culture.
00:07:20
Speaker
I think that's hugely encouraging and actually one of the things that I think the same is beginning in Canada as over here. There is a sort of shifting culture happening that I think there is slightly more of an openness to spiritual questions. The days of the new atheism are very much behind us.
00:07:39
Speaker
The challenge though Anna is I think sometimes the church lags behind so sometimes in apologetics and evangelism We're still fighting the debates and the battles of you know 2006 when everything was Dawkins now things are different and the questions are different the culture is different What do you see some of the challenges now for the church and the in the current culture? because I'm struck by the fact that Canada and the UK are actually very very similar and
00:08:02
Speaker
cultures. So what do you see is what's going on. Some of the things is that perhaps for the church leaders listening to this, we need to be aware of if we're going to engage well in today's age.
00:08:15
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I used to teach, as you know, probably know, you know, the new atheism as part of, you know, my courses and so on. I haven't taught that now for a few years because we all know it's dead. The old atheism is still alive in places where the old atheism always thrived, I think. And there's more of a
00:08:36
Speaker
apathy, perhaps, even if there's an interest in spirituality, there is an apathy to the church. Yes. And I follow really, you know, Charles Taylor in secular age, for a lot of this, I think he's analyzed that turn very well, in terms of, you know, how how people have
00:08:58
Speaker
After modernism, in other words, after going through a period where humans have convinced themselves they're in control of their lives and of the future and all of these things, we've kind of relegated God to a place of imminence where there's no longer a transcendence, there's no
00:09:15
Speaker
answerability, there's no higher power, there's just this. This is all there is. But I see this generation coming up recognizing that that isn't enough. The meh is not going to get them anywhere. The meh is not connecting with the whole of who they are. And so as long as the church is still fighting in silly, polarized,
00:09:35
Speaker
arguments online or wherever that is, they're not really scratching where it itches. And it's this much deeper sense of a lost transcendence and how do we reconnect that. I think that the church really needs to wrestle with because, yeah, I think we're still in many ways arguing things that nobody's even asking anymore.
00:09:57
Speaker
One of the things I'm observing is that there are certain more traditional churches which preach the same message century and
Cultural Differences and Church Context
00:10:04
Speaker
century out. Nothing changes. And others who are just disappearing into culture, you know, they want to be relevant, but then they lose a kind of an edge and they end up in culture wars. Others end up ignoring culture. How can we actually engage? One thing that grabbed my attention when I looked at your website was the kind of the threefold headline across your cultural thing, which is engage, expose, reflect.
00:10:26
Speaker
as ways of trying to engage. Can you tell us a little bit about what good engagement that holds onto our Christian message looks like in that context? Yeah, I mean, I think we have to recognize in a way that culture wars people maybe don't, that we all have a culture. And you can't really say that there's, well, there's the church culture and then there's the wider culture. When people gather in church, whether it's on a Sunday or Wednesday or whatever day of the week it is, they come out of,
00:10:54
Speaker
They don't even come out if they represent that culture as they gather together. So I think for a long time, some people in churches had this idea that, well, you know, there's the church and then there's culture and you still hear that language all the time. I find it super frustrating because people say, well, the culture says, I'm like, well, you're part of that culture.
00:11:11
Speaker
unless you've become a monk somewhere in a cave up on the mountain, you're part of that culture. And so we can't pretend like just because you're in the church that suddenly you have this kind of God's eye view on what has formed you from the womb outwards through the whole of your life. We are that culture. And so we have to recognize that when we're gathered as the church, we are a microcosm of that culture.
00:11:37
Speaker
Now we're seeking to be also formed in the likeness of Christ, but those are not two independent things. We bring that context to our faith and that faith speaks into and is formed within a context. That's who we are. And I had an experience some years ago with a colleague who, when we were talking about forging a partnership with some indigenous Christians to see Christianity more contextually, indigenously.
00:12:07
Speaker
They were quite infuriated and said, we don't do contextual theology. And I couldn't understand how you can do any other kind of theology because we all inhabit a context. And so Jesus comes to us in a context, in a place in time. Jesus lived in a context, a place in time. Jesus was
00:12:27
Speaker
shared the culture of the ancient Near East. I mean, of the Roman culture and so on, the Jewish culture, he would have touched into all of these things that would have been part of how he acted and so on. So I think we have to recapture that sense of who we are. And that is why we sometimes differ in our interpretations and so on, in our applications. And so we don't need to always fight about that. It's not always just simply how we understand Jesus. It's how we understand Jesus meeting us in the context in which we're rooted.
00:12:56
Speaker
And so I think if we could come to that sense of we are inculturated people.
Theology, Culture, and Personal Transformation
00:13:02
Speaker
We are formed in a context so that when we study Scripture and we worship God, we need to seek to be increasingly formed in Jesus' likeness, but that will always come in a package and we'll have, I think, we will be sometimes closer to the image of God and what we reflect and sometimes we'll be farther away from it. And I think it keeps us self-critical in a helpful way when we recognize that.
00:13:29
Speaker
I'm also struck, Anna, as you were talking there, that one of the things I find quite intriguing about the Christian faith, quite beautiful about the Christian faith, actually, is the way that, perhaps among all the world's religious traditions, it has this place for affirming and embracing and enjoying culture properly. When we take it seriously, I was reading one of my favourite authors, Lamin Sanah, African theologians, whose religion is Christianity, re-reading it this morning. He talks about the fact that it's interesting if you look at, say, other religious traditions like Islam,
00:13:59
Speaker
Everything is Arabized, but Christianity, when it's really taken seriously, African Christianity should look African. Indigenous Christianity should look Indigenous. We don't change what we preach, but it should look different. How do we get, how do we perhaps recapture some of that in the church? Because I think we have fallen a little bit into the trap of, as you say, there's a Christian culture and it looks like X.
00:14:21
Speaker
rather than, I wonder if we worked a little bit harder again, what's the culture around us like? What are the bits that reflect the image of God beautifully? Because every culture reflects something of God well, and every culture has things which need challenging. How do we break some of that tendency to create churchianity as a culture, rather than try and incarnate the gospel into the culture where we're found?
00:14:45
Speaker
Yeah, I think about it in two ways. There's the academic side I think of, and then there's the working outside. Do the working outside then, because I know you're good at bridging that gap. We've done the kind of academic background. Take it down to grassroots for us. Well, I think we have this impression that if we are in church for an hour a week, we are therefore formed in the likeness of Christ. And then we are able to walk out of the church and judge the rest of culture.
00:15:14
Speaker
And I think that actually we are far more formed by the culture. And if you're in church for an hour a week, and some of that itself will be a reflection of culture, you're actually getting very little that is counter culture in any real sense. And so we have to do that work ourselves and that engagement.
00:15:34
Speaker
And I think it's something that could come very natural to us. We tend to, as the transformation happens, identify Jesus maybe with some of the material culture in a way that is unhelpful and then
00:15:49
Speaker
paralyzes our thinking or hardens our thinking in that place and time. So, for example, you know, I think about places where the church would have a much better connection with community and could serve its community much better with a different facility. But we are so
00:16:12
Speaker
committed to our church building, for example, that it has to happen in the church building, and this is the church building. And you think, look at McDonald's restaurants. It's still a McDonald's restaurant. It's still a Big Mac. You go anywhere in the world, they taste the same. But the decor has changed. If you look at a McDonald's from the 60s and 70s, 80s, 90s, you keep watching. The decor has changed. This is a simple example, but I'm trying to give a simple example.
00:16:41
Speaker
you know, but we sit in our churches and we're like, no, the whole world has changed. You're taking this carpet, this sanctuary, this whatever out of my cold dead hands, you know, if ever at all. And rather than saying, well, you know, this is a representation of a culture in a place in a time, how the faith looked at a place in a time. What if
00:17:04
Speaker
you know, we thought differently about how we serve our culture. So I think that's a material example of what I'm trying to say in terms of how we articulate, you know, the gospel. For some people, you're not actually sharing the gospel unless you tick certain boxes, unless you use certain key phrases, unless
00:17:22
Speaker
someone shows up at church the next Sunday in a suit and with a big Bible. I mean, that's a metaphor, but you know what I'm saying, already their life has changed, rather than saying, this is actually for most people, a long process. Some people will be converted in a moment, but for many, probably most, it's a long process. So you have to have the hard work of walking with people, journeying with people and so on. And that can't be,
00:17:48
Speaker
simply an invitation to participate in a culture from another time and place. I don't know if I'm making any sense or if maybe I should just start that part again. But am I making any sense? You are. No, you're making perfect sense.
Anticipating Cultural Shifts in Church
00:18:03
Speaker
One other thing I wanted to pick up on, something you mentioned earlier on was that you felt that the church is very often reacting to what's going on in culture. And so we're constantly playing catch up with yesterday's agendas.
00:18:15
Speaker
But corporations are spending vast amounts of money trying to see where culture and things are going, so that they're prepared for the next waves of what's happening. And you're involved in a major research project looking at where you think culture might be going and preparing the church for the future. Can you tell us a little bit about why you're doing that? And where things, I mean, aside from sort of stunning prophetic insight, in terms of the serious academic thinking through these things, where do you think we need to be ready for and prepared for in Western culture at this present moment?
00:18:43
Speaker
Well, I want to preface what I want to say about that, I think, because what we're doing is really exciting. I hope people will find it exciting. But I want to preface that with a bridge from what we were just talking about in that I think that a big issue with our churches as to why we got culturally stuck is because we became colonizers. And people are often not comfortable with that language when you're talking about evangelism, because they say, well, isn't that some kind of like, you know, left wing thing or whatever?
00:19:10
Speaker
I don't care if you call it left or right, if that's how things were, that's how they were. And churches, where many came to roost in a context where they were allied with culture, a voice of culture, were the only religious game in town, and had this idea that everybody has to look like us. And a lot of our evangelism took on that quality too.
00:19:35
Speaker
and failed then to recognize our own failures, our own mistakes, our own shortcomings, and sought to just keep perpetuating that culture year in and year out as if nothing had ever changed and continually wanting people to look like me, act like me, think like me. And I think until we're ready to let go of that idea of the colonizing church, we're not ready for innovation.
00:20:00
Speaker
And when we can let go of that idea, then we can say, aha, actually, Jesus didn't just come and live on earth and die and rise to life again, but he's alive today. He's walking in my town, right? He's walking into my neighbor's house. He's in my backyard. When I'm digging in the garden, Jesus is there.
00:20:22
Speaker
And I think when we're struck with that reality that this isn't some historical figure in a stained glass window, but Jesus is walking on our soil where we walk every day. If you're an urban person, he pounds the pavement with you. He's in the office building like Jesus is here.
00:20:39
Speaker
with us, the incarnational idea, I think then we're really ready to say, okay, so much of what we've done is always been responsive then. We're saying, okay, well, what's happening now? How do we respond to that? And there is a nature in which that is natural, I think, for the church that we do respond to what's around us to some degree, but there are resources available to us. So we know that the business community, for example, does this because they need to know what's coming next if they're gonna have the product that,
00:21:08
Speaker
you know, that they're going to convince us we need. They have to do these studies of what's coming next. And they spend a lot of time doing futures research and so on. And it occurred to us that maybe we could harness some of that work and do some of that work ourselves and process it theologically
00:21:24
Speaker
to equip churches and church leaders to be able to see what's coming next, not just always be responsive to what's happening now. So I think there are cues that we can read that are on the horizon of changes that are made in culture that we can begin to say, okay, we see what's happening now, we do need to respond to that, but look what's coming.
00:21:45
Speaker
So when we're responding now, we're preparing ourselves as well for what could be next. This is never a certainty. You never know for sure what's coming next. But you can read some of these signs and have a sense so that we can start to get ready for that and be the church that that future is going to need because it's going to be on us.
00:22:04
Speaker
faster than we even know what to do. And so oftentimes we hear church leaders say, you know, I, everything has changed so fast. I just don't even know what to do. But if we can say what, look, here's what's coming, what kind of, and we can ask them the dangerous questions,
00:22:19
Speaker
you know, what kind of community is needed? What kind of faith community? What does it look like? How is it shaped? Does it need a building? What kind? Does it not need a building? Where will it meet? What kind of, you know, how will we share faith in this context and so on? So then we can ask those questions and be much more prepared for the next wave of change that is already thrust upon us.
00:22:43
Speaker
It's pretty exciting because you can even get, you know, AI stuff that will scan and give you information about, you know, all kinds of things. But again, the unique thing is being able to take some of those things to filter them down and to think theologically about them. You know, so this is happening. Do we just copy it as the church? Or how do we think about it theologically to say, no, this is something actually that we should be prepared to take a stand on.
00:23:08
Speaker
or this is something that of course we can evolve into that context. But if we're going to take a stand on this, how are we going to equip ourselves now for that when it actually comes? And what does it mean to take a stand? Does it mean we're always going to be in a fight with culture? I hope it means that we'll actually, if we're far enough ahead of the game, I think we can actually become
00:23:31
Speaker
an institution, an organism in society that helps people to think well and clearly about things we need to think about with a sense of values. And we've really lost that opportunity as the church, and I think that's disappointing because everybody knows that the technological and the cultural advancements are way outstripping our ability to reflect on them ethically.
00:23:53
Speaker
And if the church could just get ahead of some of this, instead of being combative in saying, well, we don't think this is right, or we don't think that is right, we can say, let's think about this. How do we think about this in a constructive way? How do we think about this in terms of what's good for humanity? What helps people to flourish? What helps the created world to flourish? And therefore, how do we respond to what we see coming on the horizon and so on?
00:24:19
Speaker
Anna, we've covered a lot of ground in the last 24
Optimism in Spiritual Engagement
00:24:22
Speaker
minutes. I'm almost out of time. We've looked at some of the challenges and, at the end, perhaps some of the opportunities. Last question, just briefly, I guess I'd love to ask is, so, you know, as someone who's watched culture and engaged with it and taught on these things for years and also engaged in ministry personally, I know over the years, I've loved some of the stories you've told about your own kind of conversations about faith with folks that come across your path.
00:24:44
Speaker
But what gives you hope for what's going on right now? Because what strikes me, you could be very pessimistic. You could go, there's all these challenges and the church has had these problems. What I love about talking about you, you're honest about where we're at, but you're also such a positive sort of source of joy too. So what gives you hope in all this stuff? Yeah, there's things to figure through, but there's also reason to be hopeful. What keeps you hoping amidst all of this?
00:25:08
Speaker
Well, for me, Andy, if you're going to be hopeful, you have to be honest about the reality. And it's taking stock of that first that enables hope to be rebirthed. If we're denying that or not dealing with it or confronting it, then I think it just sucks the hope out of us. I was speaking to a group of church leaders from a very different denomination from my own, who in Canada would be, yeah,
00:25:32
Speaker
very different from my own and I was surprised to even have an invitation to talk there and I told them about some of what was happening you know why the church this was happening and so on and and the moderator at the end there was this long pause and and she said wow that was dark
00:25:52
Speaker
And I laughed and I asked for an opportunity to just tie up that end because when you talk about things like decline of church and challenges and we all know the reality out there that it's a different time and that can be frightening for people and they are scared and that seems dark to them because what they are familiar with and comfortable with is passing away.
00:26:14
Speaker
But I am absolutely filled with hope because I don't have the illusion that the churches that we've built over the last several hundred years are going to continue into the future. And so I'm excited because something new has to happen. Something new will happen because God's Spirit is at work. There's the theological affirmation. God's Spirit is yet at work all around us. God wants to be known.
00:26:40
Speaker
Right? It's not that God is hiding somewhere. Jesus is the revelation of God. Jesus came so that God can be known. And so because I believe in God's ability to make himself known, I'm very hopeful. And I see every day, as I mentioned, you know, here on a secular campus, this is the greatest thrill for me is people who are not believers, as I've said, or, you know,
00:27:08
Speaker
to have different beliefs, they are interested. They know, they have a sense that there is something bigger, something more, something that they see brought out of them when we interact as people who are admittedly spiritual people seeking after the things of God. And God is chasing people down all over the place. I see God at work.
00:27:36
Speaker
all around me all the time in what are just crazy circumstances. And so if God is at work in that way, and I can see it, then I'm very convinced that God's at work in that way in the lives of people all over the place. And if the church hasn't brought in the harvest, then that's our failing.
00:28:00
Speaker
because the harvest is white. It's ready. And people are wanting Jesus. They want Jesus in a different package than perhaps we've packaged him in the church. And so that's what we have to reckon with. Yeah. That's a brilliant note on which to sort of tie all those different threads together. Thank you so much. And if people want to find out more about your work and where you work, where's the best place for them online to go and have a look?
00:28:26
Speaker
Yeah, kdaddiv.ca. I'm here at Acadia Divinity College. Students can study here from anywhere. All of our offerings are live and hybrid, everything that we do. And so, yeah, come and see us, find us, find what we're doing, and peruse the website. You can see all the exciting new stuff that's happening too.
00:28:45
Speaker
Thank you. We will put that URL into the show notes so that you can look that up later on. That is all we have time for on this episode. Thank you so much to my co-host, Andy, and of course, Reverend Dr. Anne Robbins away from Nova Scotia. Thank you so much for all your thought and insight. We will be back in a fortnight with probably a different presenter and definitely a different guest, but this topic will still be sharing the gospel of Jesus Christ in the world today. Thank you so much for listening and see you next time.