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With Natasha Moore
67 Plays2 years ago
All the way from Australia, today Andy speaks with Natasha Moore on PEP Talk. Both there and here in the UK, there are similar needs to speak into our changing cultures, whilst retaining the winsomeness and grace that remains attractive whether we have a public platform or a private conversation.
Natasha Moore is a Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity. She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and is the author of For the Love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined and, most recently, The Pleasures of Pessimism. She has worked for CPX since 2014 and written on topics that include books, movies, politics, food, domestic violence, Scripture in schools, war, Thanksgiving, and freedom of speech.
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Overview
00:00:11
Speaker
Well hello everybody and welcome to another brand new edition of Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister and that's normally the point at which I'd say, and I'm joined by my co-host, Christie Mayer. Christie has been in Romania for the last week visiting family and everything that could go wrong has gone wrong on the way to the airport this morning.
00:00:29
Speaker
And as we record this, she is stuck in a taxi somewhere in Romania, hoping to catch her flight. I did challenge her to do the podcast from the taxi, but she went out of that. So you can email in and just tease her around that one. She'll be back for the next episode, we hope. But I'm joined by a guest who has so much to say she will make up for the fact. We have only one presenter this morning. I'm joined all the way from Sydney, Australia by Natasha Moore. Natasha, welcome to PepTalk. Thank you for having me.
00:00:59
Speaker
So Natasha, you are a senior research fellow at the Center for Public Christianity down there in Australia, an organisation we have so much respect for and a lot of in common with, a lot of common friendships and stuff. But for folks who've never come across CPX, what do you folks do in a nutshell? What is CPX all about?
00:01:19
Speaker
Yeah, we want to be a Christian voice in the public square that is reasonable and gracious and generous and inviting, which is, those are not things that people always associate with Christians speaking in public. There's a lot about our public discourse that encourages people to be shouty and trill and combative. And we, you know, the Christian gospel is not like that.
00:01:46
Speaker
And so we really want to be contributing to the public conversation in ways that are distinctively Christian. We think that's good for the public conversation. We think it's good for the gospel. And so, you know, we do things like write for mainstream media outlets.
Public Discourse and Christian Engagement
00:02:02
Speaker
We have a podcast of our own called Life and Faith, which you've been on before, Andy. We do speaking and events. We produce documentaries and write books and all that kind of thing.
00:02:15
Speaker
talking about the things that matter to people from a Christian perspective, because we think that whoever you are, whatever you believe, that perspective has something to offer you.
00:02:27
Speaker
Yeah, we'll put a link to CPX into the show notes for this episode. Folks who haven't come across your stuff, hugely encourage people to go. Look, there's some amazing resources. That documentary you did for the love of God a few years ago, it was just incredibly helpful. I'm always recommending that to people. But Natasha Tone, we talked about there a moment, and we were talking about before I pressed record. And we live in this very shrill,
00:02:54
Speaker
age where the you know media and social media really encourage people to start you know effectively war against each other and there are culture wars going on um do you think the christian times about can have a tendency we're not careful of getting sucked into that can we we're not careful suddenly realize that we're we know we're engaging in combat mode rather than the perhaps engagement winsome this mode and how do we step back from that how do we avoid
00:03:19
Speaker
doing that. We're not ducking some of the big issues out there that need to be talked about. What advice would you have for that? Yeah, I mean I think it's easy for everybody to get sucked into that because that's the gravitational pull. Like that's the nature of polarisation is that it puts us in our corners and entrenches us in our position and the further away that
00:03:38
Speaker
other people go in their views, the more extreme our own views become. This is kind of the cycle and it's a difficult one to break, but if anything can break it, it's kind of the grace that we believe in that's been offered to us in response to our own combativeness, our own hostility to God. And therefore, Christians of anyone, we're often not great at this,
00:04:03
Speaker
particularly if Christians feel in the secular West, like they're under siege or they're becoming more of a minority and they feel fearful about that for various reasons. It's very easy to respond defensively, to kind of, yeah, kind of speak from a place of fear or anger or frustration. And those are not kind of hallmarks of the gospel.
00:04:32
Speaker
We talk about tone a lot because we want to not just say things that are true, we want to say them in ways that can be heard by people who don't already agree with us. Like what's the point in having a public conversation about stuff if all you're ever doing is preaching to the choir? And that's so much of what is in the public square, right? We read publications where we're likely to have our own worldviews reinforced, our own opinions on stuff reinforced.
00:05:02
Speaker
And it's difficult to speak across lines of difference in ways that can genuinely be heard. And so we want to work really hard at that. We want to meet people where they're at, people who don't already agree with us, and we want to
00:05:15
Speaker
Adopt a tone
Cultural Perception of Christians
00:05:17
Speaker
that is in keeping with what we believe, this kind of gospel of grace, which means that even if we're saying things that are like they might be offensive, they might be difficult to hear, we want to say them in a way that is warm and gracious and loving because you can't offer a truth that is all about love and grace in a way that is ungracious.
00:05:38
Speaker
I mean, you can, and people do it all the time. And we're all guilty of it at times, but it's unlikely to convey to people what we think God is actually like.
00:05:49
Speaker
It reminds me, I had a friend of mine once tell me a story that he was in the States and he was driving with his wife in the car and he was listening to one of his favorite preachers on the radio. And he'd come from a Christian background growing up in the church. His wife had come from an atheist background and been a Christian much more recently. And at one point his wife turned to him and she said, why are you listening to this really shouty man on the radio?
00:06:11
Speaker
And my friend went, oh, he's not shouting. She said, he's very angry. Oh, no, he's not angry. And then she said to him, imagine he was trying to sell you a refrigerator in that tone of voice. What would you do? My buddy was like, oh, man, I turn right off. She's like, let's actually practice. I saw an attack. Let's actually practice. How can we
00:06:32
Speaker
How can we do that? How can we, you know, you've given the theory, are there any sort of practical steps? Obviously, you're speaking to public square, you guys have a platform, but for people who perhaps Christians in the workplace or the non-Christians we interact with, whether in the neighborhood or in our universities or for students, is there any kind of just down to earth practical wisdom you
Online Interactions and Communication Strategies
00:06:53
Speaker
can offer for how we can really be leading well in tone?
00:06:57
Speaker
Yeah, great question. I mean, I think a lot of it is, this won't sound very practical, but a lot of it is, I think, about the place we're coming from and getting our lens right when we look at the world around us. So, you know, everything encourages us to look at the world through a lens of fear and of outrage. But actually, you know, for the Christian, if you genuinely believe that
00:07:27
Speaker
The God that we worship is the sovereign Lord over all of history who directs people's hearts like streams of water in his hands. There's no reason to be afraid or to feel threatened. So if we look around at a world where we're like, things are pretty terrible in lots of ways, but God is actually still God and his kingdom is not
00:07:52
Speaker
compromised or threatened by anything that's going on, then we can speak from a place of confidence and love and not a place of fear. So one of the things that I've been thinking about recently is that so much of what goes on around us that we might disagree with or be concerned by
00:08:13
Speaker
is easy to read as threat. This person disagrees with me, this person sees things differently to me, that's threatening to me. And I actually have been deliberately trying to read those things instead as thirst.
00:08:29
Speaker
that actually everyone around me, even if they're pursuing these things in different ways, we're seeking after the same things. We're longing for the same things. We want security and we want fullness.
00:08:45
Speaker
We want to flourish. We want to rest. We want meaning. And we're pursuing those things in different ways, but we're not on opposite teams. We're looking for the same things. And so to see those differences as points where we can have a conversation, where we can ask questions, where we can kind of be like, hey, you're looking for that, and I'm looking for that. Tell me about
00:09:06
Speaker
how you're going about it. So I think from that starting point of thirst rather than threat, we're all thirsty. And we think that you find satisfaction for that thirst in a particular place, that God provides that.
Communicating the Gospel Effectively
00:09:22
Speaker
But other people are also, they have the same thirsts. On a more practical kind of note, one of the things that
00:09:34
Speaker
I think it's really challenging, but also promising about the ways that we argue and interact now. We do a lot of this online. We do this on Facebook. We do this on Twitter, wherever, whatever other platforms we use. And that's often a thing that encourages hostility and dehumanizing each other. Not really, we say things that we wouldn't say if the person were sitting in front of us and we could see they were a real person and we could see their reaction to how we're talking.
00:10:04
Speaker
we would moderate that because of that face in front of us, because of that person. So there are disadvantages to interacting in that format. But also I think there are advantages because you can pause, you can wait, you can
00:10:21
Speaker
choose to be silent. And those are such important things to be practicing. We don't always have to air our opinion. We don't always have to say everything that we want to say. So I think social media particularly gives us the opportunity to go, OK, is what I want to say to this person coming from a place of fear and anger or from a place of love and grace? And if it's not from a place of love and grace,
00:10:51
Speaker
I cannot say anything, at least for a while. Let me sleep on it. Let me think about this. Because one of the other questions that we often ask ourselves at CPX when we're looking at something that's going on around us, something people are kind of upset about or concerned about,
00:11:12
Speaker
We look at that situation and we go, how is the gospel good news in this situation? Because if we believe the gospel is true, then we really do think it's good news for everybody in every situation. And that's not always gonna be obvious to them or to us. Sometimes you have to do some work to join up those dots. So rather than speaking from a place of like, well, I think I'm right and you're wrong, being like, okay, what can I say here?
00:11:40
Speaker
that helps convey to them that the Christian understanding of reality is going to be one that conduces to their flourishing. What do I need to, you know, not like smooth over or sweep under the carpet, but what points of connection are there between what they're going through, how they're seeing things, and what God is on about, what Jesus is on about.
Christianity in Western Society
00:12:07
Speaker
There's a lot of wisdom in there. Thank you so much for that. I want to come back to the first thing that you mentioned in a minute. That's a really, really interesting point. Before I get to that, just something you said there made me realize that I think I wonder whether, Natasha, you'd agree that one of the
00:12:29
Speaker
I think one of the other things that's going on in culture right now and that Christians are sort of struggling to catch up on is we've gone from a point in culture where the church was a majority voice. We had an authority and a standing in culture. So you could do, you could effectively evangelism from a place of power. We say, hey, we're the church. Listen to us. And people go, oh yeah, all right. Now about that ship.
00:12:50
Speaker
hasn't just sailed, that ship has sailed, sunk, no evidence of it whatsoever. I think of, you know, a fellow Australian to use, Stephen McAlpine's book, you know, Being the Bad Guys. Now in culture, we're a minority voice, we're a voice that aren't trusted. And so we need to be leading some of these ways, because this is how we build credibility for the gospel, where people are like, okay, I don't actually trust you in the church necessarily. Okay, wait a minute. You know, Natasha's willing to listen. She's not out to try and score points. She's willing to
00:13:20
Speaker
to engage. And then linked to that is also, if we're confident the gospel is true, we don't need to demonstrate it by shouting and dominating. The gospel is true. It can take its place in the marketplace of ideas and stand up because it's true. But I wonder sometimes we still have to realize, we have to learn that lesson. We think that I have to be strident, I have to win the argument, I have to be loud, or someone I've let the side down. Am I sort of... Yeah, I think I'm...
00:13:47
Speaker
One of the interesting things about the particular cultural moment we're in, I mean the configuration of this is a bit different in the UK to in Australia to in the United States and elsewhere. Each place has its own sort of configuration of what secular looks like.
00:14:06
Speaker
But we're in this weird situation where Christianity is and is not a minority faith. So you see this, I mean, we see this all the time in Australian kind of political and other discourse that people will be like, oh well, most people
00:14:24
Speaker
are not Christians. That's kind of a thing from the past. Everybody sort of used to be Christian, and now it's a shrinking or dying faith. Not that many people go to church. That sort of narrative is around, and the idea that Christians shouldn't dominate. You're just one voice. People are afraid to believe what they like, and that's a really good thing.
00:14:48
Speaker
But then there's also this strand where it's like, well, Christianity has been the majority faith for a long time in the West. And there are still lots of Christian institutions that have a lot of power or sway within our society. We have lots of Christians in parliament of various persuasions. And so there's kind of both things happening at the same time.
00:15:15
Speaker
And I think Christians need to be aware of how they come across, whether they, like we might think of ourselves as a minority, but other people are still going to see us as kind of speaking from a place of power and privilege. And that's not untrue either.
00:15:33
Speaker
You know, like there is still a passing familiarity with Christianity that there isn't with other faiths in a lot of cases. And there are still lots of things that are very Christian about our society, whether people know that or not.
00:15:46
Speaker
And so I think, you know, we may approach a conversation where we feel like the minority voice, but other people are going to see themselves as the minority voice. And so I think we need to work hard, you know, just to hear ourselves from other people's point of view, and not just assume that the way we see ourselves is the way that other people perceive us.
Connecting Through Universal Human Longings
00:16:10
Speaker
That's really helpful. Well, we've got about maybe five or six minutes left. So let's just use that then to talk about this last area that I think is fascinating. You mentioned that word thirst earlier, how actually, perhaps we have more in common with our quote unquote secular friends than we imagine. Because ultimately, for all made in God's image, we all have universal desires that are built into us, desire for intimacy, desire for connection, something bigger than ourselves, desire for meaning and purpose and identity. The list goes on, doesn't it?
00:16:39
Speaker
How can we use that area, those desires, Natasha, to build a connection to the gospel? You know, we were talking before the show again about pre-evangelism, this idea that if you simply walk up to a random passing person in the street these days and say, hey, you know, have you found Jesus yet? They'll look at you like you're mad. But there are perhaps more helpful ways we might start conversations about spirituality with friends and neighbors and colleagues by playing into this kind of era of thirst and desires and longings.
00:17:07
Speaker
Give us a little bit of a sort of overview of how, how that worked. How have you found that the CPX or even have you found that personally in some of your own conversations with friends and ladies.
00:17:17
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting because I used to think of pre-evangelism in terms of another term that has often been thrown around in the last couple of decades. I think it originated with Tim Keller, this idea of defeat of beliefs, that those things that people believe that it's impossible for them to accept Christianity. So if they're like, oh, well, Christianity is bigoted in these particular ways, so I couldn't possibly believe that.
00:17:41
Speaker
So you need to kind of address those before people are willing to hear what Christians are actually on about. But I wonder if we're thinking about thirst and longing, that one of the key things in what we might call pre-evangelism is that we want people to want it to be true.
00:18:06
Speaker
You know, it's very important that it is true. We don't want people to just go, oh, this is wishful thinking and that's fine. It'll work out for me. Like we want people to believe the gospel because we think it's true. But it also is beautiful and satisfying and it works in terms of wisdom for life and living a particular way.
00:18:28
Speaker
And so I think having those conversations about longings, about beauty, really tap into that, that people go, oh, this is something, like there's something there that I actually want.
00:18:44
Speaker
Now, one of the ways to have that conversation, the things that we do as CPX, we're kind of a media company, so we're doing this in the public square in a very kind of high level sort of way. And we think that's really important to do, but we're under no illusions that like the place where the real stuff happens, hopefully we contribute to it in what we do in the media. But it's in personal relationship, it's in the church down the road, it's in neighborhoods.
00:19:13
Speaker
where people are doing life alongside each other, where people know about each other's longings and each other's struggles. I think one of the great
00:19:23
Speaker
misconceptions about evangelism is that it's people who have it all together, telling people who don't, how they can also have it all together. And that you have to kind of know all the answers, you have to, you know, present this life that's so shiny to them. So they will want that. Whereas actually, and I think the past few years have made that quite clear, like we've we've gone through a couple of years of struggle of
00:19:53
Speaker
collapse in various ways of things not working out, cancel plans, life is not always shiny. It doesn't work out the way we think it will. And my understanding is that people have become more willing to say, hey, I'm not okay. Hey, lots of things aren't okay. And to meet in that place of vulnerability. And I think that that's so powerful to be able to say, you know, as Christians, we don't have to present some
00:20:19
Speaker
face to our non-Christian friends and family, that you can fall apart and that that's actually exactly the kind of circumstance in which God excels at showing His grace, His peace, His might through our weakness, that people don't want someone to come in and say, here's how you can get your life together.
00:20:45
Speaker
I mean, they sort of do self-help section of the bookstore, but actually people want someone to come alongside them and go, yeah, I'm vulnerable and struggling too. Here's where you can find water. Here's where I found it. So I'd really encourage people to just speak to others from that place of honesty, from that place of your own thirst. I think people really respond to that.
00:21:11
Speaker
Yeah, it's interesting. We found that even personally, I think during the early stages of the pandemic back in 2020, that if you said to friends and neighbors, hey, it's really struggling. This is just really depressing right now. How do you get through it? And then out of that conversation, to be able to share the difference that Christian faith meant, not in the context of, hey, it makes everything wonderful and OK.
00:21:35
Speaker
um you know we the christians have always known right the life is messy but to be able to then share the hope that christ can bring in the middle of that messiness that was quite a game changer actually because as you say we can have this pressure on us can't we to think we have to have it all together um and people can see right that through that a mile away too absolutely
Conclusion and Resource Sharing
00:21:55
Speaker
Well, Natasha, we're really grateful for you taking the time. Hugely grateful for all that you and your colleagues at CPX do. Lots of great resources there. Again, for folks listening who have not come across CPX before, follow the link in the show notes. We'll put a link through to their website where you can dive into all the great resources they have available. But we're grateful for you taking the time. Thanks for joining us, Natasha. Thanks for having me.
00:22:18
Speaker
Well, it's been great to have you. And so for those listening at home or on the car or on your run, wherever you're catching this episode, we'll be back in two weeks time with another episode of Pep Talk. And hopefully Christie will have made it back from the badlands of Romania, at least the taxi ride to the airport. And we'll have another guest for you. So in the meantime, have a great fortnight.