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With Sarah Irving-Stonebraker
94 Plays2 years ago
We have recently heard more stories of Christians "deconstructing" their faith before eventually leaving it. But today we speak with an academic and historian about how her atheism was "deconstructed" when she discovered its true implications for morality, value and equality. She goes on to show how hospitality and relationship can be radical evangelistic tools in the context of our secular individualised culture.
Sarah Irving-Stonebraker is an Australian-based academic, focusing on the history of Britain and the colonial world and especially the intersection of religion, science, and politics. She was awarded her PhD in History from Cambridge University and has lectured at Western Sydney University since 2012. Sarah and her husband, Johnathan, have three children. The family lives in the Hawkesbury region outside of Sydney where they are active members of a Sydney Anglican Church.
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Transcript
Introduction and Co-host Absence
00:00:10
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to another episode of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister from the Sola Center for Public Christianity. And I am sadly, again, not joined by my co-host and partner in crime, Christy Mayer, who is somewhere in Romania, trying to find a flight home. And so we're thinking of her, but I am flying solo today. I did threaten her. I'll just do Christy Mayer impressions and speak in a quirky voice and make Anglican references. But I've been told not to even dare to do that this morning.
Guest Introduction: Sarah Irving Stonebreaker
00:00:40
Speaker
Well, we have an exciting guest for you all the way from the other side of the world. I am joined on pep talk today by Sarah Irving Stonebreaker. Sarah, welcome to pep talk. Oh, it's great to be here. Thank you.
00:00:54
Speaker
And Sarah, you're an academic, you're a senior lecturer in modern European history at the University of Western Sydney. If I got that right, probably mangled that somewhere. That's right. Yes. Fantastic. And I mean, what a time to be a historian of modern European history, because history is being made every day, it seems. Now,
From Atheism to Faith: Sarah's Journey
00:01:15
Speaker
It's an interesting time, but of course, you've also got an interesting story because you are a follower of Jesus now, you're a Christian now, but you weren't always, you weren't raised in a Christian home, right? You grew up very much in a secular environment. Yeah, that's right. Like really loving, secular family. But I actually came to faith after a pretty interesting journey because I explicitly defined myself as an atheist. And the short kind of story is that I
00:01:44
Speaker
basically had to deconstruct my atheism. I was quite confident in my atheism. And then I ended up in, did my PhD at Cambridge and then ended up at the University of Oxford as a junior research fellow. And there I went to a series of lectures by Peter Singer, famous atheist. And that basically set me on a pathway of having to reconsider
00:02:09
Speaker
what exactly atheism entailed. And so through that process and then through finally being given mere Christianity by a friend and then reading theology and being pointedly asked to by actually a professor of nanomaterials
00:02:33
Speaker
who I was at a dinner with, like an academic dinner. But this professor was a Christian, a scientist and a Christian. And he said to me, and are you a believer? This is after we talked about my work. And I kind of said, well, look, I used to be an atheist. I'm not an atheist anymore. But I think I'm I'm an agnostic. And he just said, like, not in a contentious way at all. But he said, do you really think this is the kind of issue you can just sit on the fence about?
00:03:03
Speaker
And that really made me question, it made me have to consider what exactly the claims of the Gospel were. And eventually, a few years later, I found myself on the other side of the world again, not in the UK this time, but in Florida.
00:03:21
Speaker
There, finally, I walked into a church for the first time as somebody earnestly seeking God. And in church, I encountered the Lord's Supper. And I heard about this God who had redeemed a broken humanity. And
00:03:42
Speaker
in observing. I wasn't baptized, so I just sat there and observed the Lord's Supper. But I observed a story embodied that I'd never encountered. I don't think anything that was sacred or transcendent, and yet here it was, a God who was transcendent and yet who was going to remake this broken world and love me.
00:04:03
Speaker
Um,
Faith in Academia
00:04:04
Speaker
and so anyway, that in short is kind of how I took a while after that as well. But that's a kind of short version of that story from atheism to Christianity.
00:04:15
Speaker
I love the fact that Peter Singer was part of that journey. Because I've debated Singer. I did a radio debate with him a few years ago and I found him an absolutely fascinating character. But boy, he does force people to really realize that atheism has many entailments. Right? He's not afraid of ducking away from those.
00:04:33
Speaker
And this is I think one of the great things about Singer is that he understands he has an incredible amount of intellectual integrity because he understands that from atheism, you can't hold that every human life is equally of equal value, nor that every human life is inherently precious. And that was one of the key
00:04:58
Speaker
claims that I actually had to encounter because it basically forced me to realise, well, hold on a minute, atheism can't sustain the moral beliefs that I take to be absolutely central to what it is to be human and to human flourishing, which is that every human life is infinitely precious, but also that we human beings are of equal moral worth. But of course, yeah, the great thing, like you say about Singer is
00:05:23
Speaker
that he quite well points out that this is, it's a, well, as he puts it, it's a Christian myth. Like it's, it requires the belief in a God who created every human being in his own image. Because if you just look to the natural world, well, nature shows us that there's an incredible hierarchy in human abilities and disabilities and so forth. So where does that idea come from? So yeah, that's the great, one of the great, ironically, things about engaging with Singer's work.
00:05:51
Speaker
Yeah. And now, of course, you inhabit the world of academia as a lecturer and a professor and all the kind of things that you do. So you are now a follower of Christ. How do those two worlds intersect, Sarah? Are you somebody who has found that being in the world of education is a good platform for your faith? How do the worlds of
Living the Gospel in a Post-Christian Culture
00:06:15
Speaker
the academy and faith fit together?
00:06:18
Speaker
Yes. Well, I think it depends on what part of the Academy. I am in a secular public university. And so what that means is that I can't or nobody can use the university or their job or whatever to evangelize. But I think what it does mean, though, I mean, God has called every person to what we were elected to serve him.
00:06:44
Speaker
And I have found, and I know there's another, you know, there are a few Christians at my university, and I've found that you can still serve God in a secular university. And now for me, one of the ways that I managed to do this is that, look, I'm actually a historian of
00:07:04
Speaker
of course, of modern European history is the job title. But effectively, I end up teaching the whole kind of history of Europe and of the kind of the West broadly defined. And this effectively means, look, I teach the history of Christianity, and it means I actually have to teach about
00:07:23
Speaker
what the history of Christianity has looked like, but also, of course, as part of teaching the history of Christianity, you have to teach, well, what is it that these people believed? So, for example, when I lecture on the Protestant Reformation, I have to actually explain, well, what is it that, say, Martin Luther and his followers believed? So there is a way of actually being quite clear about, well, what are these ideas that Christians believe in? And there are opportunities, too, to ask and to talk
00:07:53
Speaker
in what we call tutorials in Australia, so the smaller group of students. We have a number of fascinating conversations about, well, what are some of the legacies of these ideas? And as people will know, you don't have to be a Christian at all to
00:08:08
Speaker
write about and to recognise the profound influence of Christian ideas on shaping principles that have been incredibly important in shaping the modern world. So human rights, for example. So even the non-Christian historian Tom Holland, his works are very popular, has written about that kind of thing. So you can still have, even in academia,
00:08:32
Speaker
I think you can still talk about the big questions. You can still talk about, well, what is it that we believe in? Where do these ideas come from? And so on.
Practical Gospel Living
00:08:41
Speaker
Well, I also know we were talking before we pressed the record button in this episode. The other thing I find fascinating, Sarah, is you've obviously figured out ways that as you say, you have those conversations and then that arise naturally in your discipline. But also,
00:08:55
Speaker
you've also figured out and thought begun thinking through some of the ways that perhaps more and a more practical and down-to-earth way that you can be reaching kind of friends and neighbors and your community because not not everyone of course is a lecturer in history and can sort of figure out ways of you know weaving the gospel or you know allusions of the gospel into into what they teach but some of the other stuff you were sharing um it's very practical tell me a bit about tell us a bit about that
00:09:19
Speaker
Yeah, so I am a layperson in a local Sydney Anglican church in Sydney with my husband. And one of the things that has just become so striking to us in the last few years
00:09:35
Speaker
We've always been people who have loved sharing the Gospel, but one of the things we've noticed in the last few years is that it seems that now there is
00:09:49
Speaker
a different kind of cultural moment that we're living in, which necessitates a sort of different way of presenting the gospel and what it is to live as a Christian. And what I mean by that is that a generation or two ago, and in fact, even when I was converted, there was a kind of attempt by churches to think that, look, the way that we reach culture is to become like the culture.
00:10:18
Speaker
But now I think we live in a very different cultural moment. And what I'm seeing, and I see this in my university students as well in particular, this gives me, because they're so much, you know, they're basically a generation younger than me now. I see the kind of culture that they inhabit and it's a culture which is so profoundly post-Christian and so lost.
00:10:40
Speaker
that actually the way to speak into it is by being so unlike culture that and actually embodying, like kind of presenting the gospel, not as a series of kind of abstract propositions that people can believe in, but rather actually inviting people into seeing a glimpse of lives lived differently.
00:11:05
Speaker
So, like, what I mean by that is that it used to be the case that, you know, sometimes that people and, you know, there's still a place for this of kind of there's a tendency to talk about the gospel as a series of propositions, right, beliefs that you believe in. And look, that is true. But in a culture in which, look, we live in a kind of information age,
00:11:28
Speaker
And in a culture too, and this is a kind of brief, this is me as a historian here, but we live in a culture in which in the past several hundred years in the Protestant West, we have increasingly incarnated the faith. What I mean by that is we've kind of disembodied Christianity. We've kind of increasingly reduced the Christian life to a series of ideas that you subscribe to. Now, the problem with that is that, well, look, we all,
00:11:58
Speaker
know people who would say, oh yes, I believe this, this, and this. And you know that they're not living a life in relationship with God. They're not living a changed life, right? So it's easy to believe certain things. And that's one of the reasons why that in the kind of cultural moment that we live in, that's so different to even the way it was 15 or 20 years ago.
00:12:19
Speaker
that now I think the way to present the gospel is to invite people into your life and do this kind of in small groups. This is what we've been trying in a haphazard way in the last few years, that inviting people into your life
00:12:36
Speaker
and inviting them into hospitality and to seeing a life which is actually going to look to them profoundly weird. And paradoxically, that's the way to kind of seem relevant. And what I mean by weird is, so here's an example. Look, we don't by in any means do this perfectly. We're very imperfect people. But so we're part of a small group in church.
00:13:00
Speaker
And we meet together during the week for meal and Bible study. A lot of churches do that.
00:13:08
Speaker
We're also, this small group too is intergenerational. The youngest member is 18 and we've got young single and celibate people. We've got married couples. We've got some retirees. Our oldest member just turned 70. And so this is, first of all, this is kind of weird because this is not how people gather together in the outside world, is it? Like what brings us together is our fellowship as brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus.
00:13:34
Speaker
So we meet together, we, you know, there's always an invitation that people can people can come and join. But
00:13:42
Speaker
It's also the case that we kind of try to practice hospitality in ways that are very open. We do it as a group. It's very much a kind of group work here. After our Sunday church service, we leave pretty near the church. A small group gets together and we write it on the notice board of church. There's often an announcement. We say, look, lunch every Sunday is on at the Stonebreaker's house. Bring a plate.
00:14:06
Speaker
And the funny thing is that people, people come and it's, it's part of partly, you know, that's making disciples. It's partly, you know, discipling the people in your church. But goodness, we, what we've noticed though, is that people are so in our culture are so lonely and in so, so much need of pastoral care and of relationships with people.
00:14:31
Speaker
That I mean, how rare is it to actually be invited into somebody's home, especially someone like you don't even know? So come
Counter-Cultural Community Practices
00:14:37
Speaker
and eat with us. And then one of the ways that we do this in and then kind of attempt to really point to Jesus.
00:14:45
Speaker
is that at three o'clock, we say to people, for anyone who wants to stay, we open. Now I'm going to maybe do what Christy did and make all these Anglican references, but it's not necessarily Anglican. We get out the Book of Common Prayer and we say, look, for anyone who wants to stay, and the people in our small group often stay, there's always a small group who stays. We're going to do evening prayer. And so there's food that everyone kind of works together to bring. We work together to clean up. And then we pray together from the Book of Common Prayer and more often a bit of open prayer as well.
00:15:15
Speaker
And...
00:15:17
Speaker
It's funny because sometimes you think about those kinds of things in terms of discipleship. But actually, I think this is a way that people can really present the gospel because when you invite people in and often, like it's interesting, we'll have people and it's open invitation. So, yeah, there'll be people that we've never met before. We've like met at church and it's so weird. But it's actually precisely by being weird that people see that, hold on, to be invited to
00:15:46
Speaker
to know Jesus Christ is to be invited into a community, to be saved into a people who are set apart from the world.
00:15:58
Speaker
And look, again, this is now for a moment, I'll be a bit of a bit of a historian again. We live in a culture, too, in an age in which we are basically a historical like in an age in which this is a conversation I've had with my my undergraduates, too. Life is about self-fulfillment and constant reinvention of themselves.
00:16:18
Speaker
And so this is an age in which we don't think of ourselves any longer as being historical beings. We don't think generally in our secular post kind of Christian Western culture that we are anything but self-created autonomous individuals. But to invite people into a community where they see this glimpse of people who are saved into this historic people called the church who call themselves brothers and sisters of different age groups and ethnic backgrounds who
00:16:47
Speaker
care for each other and make each other meals and get alongside each other and care for people a generation older or younger than them, that is a glimpse of the gospel in action. And that's something that we've really discovered, funnily enough, has been really quite effective.
00:17:09
Speaker
So many things I want to ask about there, Sarah, because there's so much wisdom in there. I mean, I think one of the first things that strikes me, of course, is this is, bizarrely, of course, not new, because in the gospels, you know, we see that Jesus so often so much happens around meals. And I think there's something universal about the way that meals can be quite disarming. But there was something you said really struck me. You know, they use that phrase, you talk about your group being intergenerational, full of different ages. My wife and I were talking about this just the other
00:17:39
Speaker
week, actually, and saying that if you think about it outside of a church context, when do you meet in today's culture with people of a different age and do something together other than the one exception might be like a family Christmas you get together with, you know, mum and dad or grandparents and, you know, so forth, extended family. But outside of that setting, there is no setting where you where you get together. So there is I love where you say it's weird, but it's but it's good, weird.
00:18:07
Speaker
And I think there's something really powerful in that. So I suppose just very practical, because I love to be practical, because then people listening to this can go, OK, this is interesting. You say, obviously, you know, your husband and you do this. How did you begin? How do you have someone listening to this who thinks, hey, this is a really interesting idea. Where do I start? It sounds like a red daft question. But how would you recommend somebody perhaps just begin taking the first little steps on this journey? Because I think it's really interesting.
00:18:36
Speaker
Yeah, being part of a small group who are on board with the idea, I think is so important. We couldn't do this every Sunday without our small group. And they,
Addressing Cultural Loneliness
00:18:49
Speaker
you know, they clean up, they leave food in the pantry and make, you know, we'll bring the meal and clean up. So, yeah, the first thing I would say is hopefully, you know, part of a small group in church and share that idea and talk about it and see if the small group will get on board.
00:19:06
Speaker
That's one thing that I think has been really, really quite helpful. Another thing is making it a bring a plate lunch as well and very low key. And again, one of the things I love about this is that in our age of social media news feeds where everyone is so image conscious and trying to take photos of things that will look good on Instagram or whatever it is.
00:19:28
Speaker
Let's be, so there's an Australian word called daggy. It doesn't like, let's do the opposite of image conscious. Let's do a very down to earth, bring a plate lunch where there's no pressure to make any kind of gourmet food. You can pick up a barbecue chicken from the supermarket or a bag of spinach. Let's make a salad. Everyone brings something too, which means that it's a lot, you know, it's not an enormous amount of cost, enormous cost on the host or anything like that. Bring a plate and it makes it really, really manageable.
00:19:58
Speaker
Yeah, and there are things you can do. We have various dietary requirements too, lots of gluten-free people. And there's things that you can do and it doesn't have to be expensive. But you know, the funny thing is about the way God works, like we started to do this a couple of years ago. Well, we'd always done hospitality. We read Rosaria Butterfield's book, a wonderful book, A Gospel Comes with a House Key. But then our senior minister died. He was diagnosed with a brain tumor and given about a year to live.
00:20:26
Speaker
And in that time, it was pretty clear that everyone, including ourselves, including Greg and his family, we needed to get alongside each other and care for each other. And so it just happened that God started bringing people together actually in suffering and sadness.
00:20:48
Speaker
yeah, to get alongside each other and to kind of meet and eat. What a
Final Thoughts on Community and Hospitality
00:20:53
Speaker
profound thing, too. You spoke about how important eating is. Jesus calling Zacchaeus, for example, or knocking on the door in Revelation saying, I'm going to come in. I'm going to eat with you. Isn't it a profound statement of God's love that he will call us into
00:21:10
Speaker
a community where we'll eat a meal together and cry together and bear suffering together. We can do that even if we happen to be at a moment in life when it's difficult.
00:21:24
Speaker
I think also, as you said earlier, you know, the cultural moment room right now where I think quite rightly, people need have an expectation to see the difference the gospel makes before they're going to hear the logical arguments behind it. You know, there is something about the gospel that's profoundly earthy, you know, that connects where people are. And you can't describe that. You can't sort of just talk to a colleague over the lunch break and say, hey, the Christian community is amazing.
00:21:50
Speaker
the best they'll just go, oh, that's nice for you. At worst, they'll disbelieve you. But if they see it in action, there's something very powerful, isn't there?
00:21:59
Speaker
Yes, and I think the other thing, when you asked me for sort of practical advice, the other thing that I found that is really quite striking is that it is so interesting, the number of younger people in the church, like in their early 20s, who are really yearning for people to, and maybe they haven't been, maybe they've grown up in the church, but maybe they haven't been Christian for a long time, maybe they're just exploring church, but they're,
00:22:28
Speaker
in a culture in which increasingly their lives are lived online, in which they don't have caring relationships, and they don't really have friendships or relationships with people who are even just 10 years older than them. But to get alongside them and to invite the younger people or even the older people,
00:22:45
Speaker
To invite people of different generations in, it is really striking the kind of discipling relationships you can have where you get alongside people, even just 10 years younger or 10 years older than you. And that too, I think is, like you were saying, it's something that we don't see in the outside world. That's the rule, brotherhood and sisterhood of Christ.
00:23:11
Speaker
Absolutely. And I think that's a great place to bring the conversation to an end. Sarah, I'm so grateful you've shared so much practical wisdom. I love that we started with your story from atheism to faith, but then landed on an approach to the gospel and evangelism that anybody can get involved in in their community. Thanks so much for taking the time to be on pep talk and for sharing some of that with us. Oh, you're welcome. It was great to be here.
00:23:37
Speaker
And I'm also always happy to find other fans of Rosaria's book, because I think that book has been helpful to so many. We'll put a link to that in the show notes. So again, thanks for being with us and all of you listening at home. I hope you enjoyed the episode. I, and hopefully Kristy, if she gets herself back from Urania, will be here in two weeks time for another episode and another guest. Meanwhile, goodbye.