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With Stuart and Cameron McAllister
77 Plays4 years ago
Is there any mission field as close to our hearts as our own family? If you are a parent, it can be an overwhelming burden to pass on your faith to your children. It is a unique form of "evangelism", much different to sharing with other adults but still has some similarities. Today Andy and Kristi speak to the authors of Faith That Lasts: A Father and Son on Cultivating Lifelong Belief where they outline three dangerous myths that we all too easily buy into: that fear can protect our children, that information can save them, and that their spiritual education belongs to the experts.
Stuart McAllister comes from a non-Christian home in Glasgow. He joined Operation Mobilization in 1978 and was once imprisoned for distributing Bibles in Yugoslavia. Stuart joined RZIM in 1998 as the International Director and today serves as Global Support Specialist. He regularly speaks in churches, universities, and other forums (including a Solas conference in 2010) all over the world.
Stuart's son Cameron McAllister was born on the mission field in Vienna. Cameron is now an itinerant speaker at RZIM. He is the host of the Vital Signs podcast, a weekly podcast exploring signs of life in today’s culture, and the co-host of Thinking Out Loud, a podcast that considers current events and Christian hope.
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Transcript
Introduction and Listener Perks
00:00:00
Speaker
Hi, thanks for downloading PepTalk. If you enjoy today's episode, why not get a free copy of Andy's book or my book by becoming a regular supporter? Visit us at solas-cpc.org and donate just £3 per month. Thanks so much. On with the show.
Meet the Guests: Stuart and Cameron McAllister
00:00:28
Speaker
Well, hello and welcome to Pep Talk, the persuasive evangelism podcast. I'm Andy Bannister with the Sola Centre for Public Christianity in Scotland, and I'm joined as ever by my effervescent co-host, Kristy Bear. And it goes this afternoon all the way from London. How are you doing today, Kristy?
00:00:43
Speaker
very effervescently well thank you about yourself I'm doing well I'm doing well well we've got not one but two guests on the show this afternoon in fact pep talk is going international and so we have joining us all the way from Atlanta in the USA we have father and son team of Stuart and Cameron McAllister Stuart and Cameron welcome to the show thank you thank you very much
Stuart's Journey to Faith
00:01:10
Speaker
Well, Stuart and Cameron, you both work for an organization called RZAM. You're both evangelists, apologists. You've written a book together, Faith That Lasts, that's coming out with IVP in the new year. But I'm intrigued that you've got quite different stories about how you became Christians. Stuart, why don't we start with you? What's your story about how you became a follower of Jesus?
00:01:34
Speaker
Well, thanks, guys. It's great to be with you. Well, I grew up in Glasgow in Scotland. I was a product of my dad had been in the Second World War, as most Brits were. Dad was in the Royal Air Force. And really, the world that shaped my early life was post-war Britain, the austerity and
00:01:52
Speaker
struggling with that. Dad was in the kind of a Fabian socialist type of ideology and sort of the heavy Darwinism, almost social Darwinism. So the home I grew up in, there was a kind of a narrative running of big dogs and little dogs. And to be honest, my father and I, like, again, many Scots homes, we clashed seriously. So I ended up leaving home when I was 15. I went out, got on my own. I worked
00:02:17
Speaker
ended up working as a bouncer in a dance hall and was living my free life until in my early just around my late teens actually I took up with a young woman and one day she came in and asked me what did I think about Christ
00:02:33
Speaker
had never given a moment's thought in my life, was disgusted by the very idea, ended up coming to faith, and then joined a mission, Operation Mobilization, was a Bible smuggler for a number of years, met my wife Mary, who was an American there, and then had my kids were born in Cameron and first and then Catherine in Austria.
00:02:56
Speaker
So the whole introduction initially to Christianity and to parenting was something, it was a bit of a dread to me because I came from a background where I had a lot of fear and concern over who I had been, who I needed to become, and how could I raise now kids and not inoculate them or scale them or take responsibility for being a Christian. So it was a learning curve.
Cameron's Faith Challenges and Growth
00:03:24
Speaker
And Cameron, you have quite a different kind of story and a background to your dad, don't you? Could you share some of that with us? Absolutely. And may I just say, I've always wanted to be described as effervescent, so... I'm living the dream. One day, one day, you two can be... One day may arrive, one day you can be in the fire. Yeah, we can do that. We can sort that out.
00:03:47
Speaker
Well, yes. So my story I'm tempted to almost say is a non-story. And kind of I challenge that a little bit in the book. We both have biographical interludes in between the sections where we do tell our story. So for a while I felt this strange pressure because in Christianity everybody wants to hear your story. But what if
00:04:09
Speaker
your parents didn't do you the courtesy of giving you a really compelling testimony. What if you were born into a loving Christian household and you just don't have a great psychic well of pain to draw from to give a great story? In some ways, my story looks a little bit like I had no demons, so I went looking for some.
00:04:30
Speaker
Which will sound really strange, but so I was born as a missionary kid on the mission field in Vienna, Austria. And then we moved in 1998 and I went from a school in Austria of 126 kids, count them, that's crates 1 through 12, to a high school in the states of nearly 4,000. So at the time that was one of the biggest schools in the nation. So this was a dramatic change for me.
00:04:53
Speaker
And i felt very much like the outsider because i was most of my classmates had grown up together they they really do one another really well. And so i thought i'm gonna fit in somehow there's a teenage social hierarchy here so what i'm gonna do is i've got this kind of these outsider credentials already so i need to play into this a little bit.
00:05:11
Speaker
And my means of acting that out was I got very into intensely aggressive music. It kind of matched my own sense of intensity. And so that's what I did. And then eventually my goal at this point was to be in a black metal band, be a singer, although we're using the term singer in the loosest sense here.
00:05:33
Speaker
But yeah, I guess my five-year plan was to move to Norway and howl into the Arctic winds. Now, understandably, there was some tension in the household over this career choice. But I think looking back now, and this is one of the important points to make, I had never encountered the phenomenon of cultural Christianity.
00:05:55
Speaker
And that was something for which I was unprepared because if, you know, when you're in a nation like Austria and really many Western European nations, which is, you know, Austria is a Catholic heritage, but it's largely secular. You either are a Christian or you are not. There's no in between. But suddenly I moved to the Bible Belt South and everybody was a Christian. No matter what they did or said, they could have had a voodoo shrine in their living room and they would still say, well, yeah, but I still worship at the Baptist Church at the street.
00:06:25
Speaker
So it was kind of the cognitive dissonance of that kind of pushed me a little bit to take up this line of Christians seem to just be hypocrites don't really believe what they say they believe.
00:06:38
Speaker
But the problem came to a head one morning when I was getting ready for school. And I noticed that my dad was in the kitchen, and he was sitting behind a big stack of books, which was a very bad sign. And he'd been up all night thinking, possibly about my future, which was deeply unsafe at that time. So my plan was to get out of there as quickly as possible and avoid eye contact. But he looked right at me. And he asked me a question that I had been avoiding all along, which is, why do you call yourself a Christian? Because I still did.
00:07:08
Speaker
I thought I could maintain this kind of dual existence. And so he forced on me the fact that I needed to confront my own hypocrisy. And that was, he took away that luxury of hiding from that and pushing that away to the margins of my mind. So that moment, it wasn't a light switch moment. Human beings never usually respond that quickly to great moral pushes, but it was instrumental
00:07:33
Speaker
in the recovery of my faithfulness to Christ. That's really where it began. It was my dad asking me that very honest question, which at the time was very alienating and made me very angry, but which I can now look back on and see as such a pivotal moment. It seems so marginal at the time, just a quick, tense conversation in the kitchen. How many of those do you have with your kids? But this turned out to be life-changing for me.
Faith Conversations with Children
00:07:58
Speaker
One of the things I love about the way those two stories intersect guys is that I think the struggle for a lot of Christian parents who've got a child where they're not sure where they are in their faith journey have just no way really knowing how to begin those conversations. There's often a lot of awkwardness, there's often dancing around it,
00:08:18
Speaker
Or there's the kind of, I know what I'll do, I'll dispatch little Johnny or little Jane to the church and just let the youth worker deal with them because I'm just afraid of going there. And the way you describe camera, Stuart sitting there at the table and just naming the elephant. And so, you know, is there anything you've learned from as you've you've reflect on your stories together, anything you've learned by way of advice to other kind of Christian parents who perhaps they've got a teenager they want to have that conversation with, they haven't got that ability to fire that zingy one liner that Stuart fired. What lessons are there that we can you could share with
00:08:47
Speaker
with other families in terms of how we have honest conversations around intergenerational faith, I guess. Well, I think that's part of the core and where we wanted to focus on the book, Andy. There's three particular issues we tried to deal with. One is that using fear or fear protects the idea that information saves or just dump a lot of data on your kids or outsourced them to experts where you hand them over to the youth group or somebody else.
00:09:12
Speaker
And really, the whole heart of the book is this couple of Bible passages that we feel very deeply about. Obviously, the whole idea to seek first the kingdom of God is righteousness in your daily life. But to be transformed with the renewing of your mind, Romans 12, 2, and then Proverbs 4, 23, you know, guard your heart with all diligence.
00:09:32
Speaker
for from it flow the issues of life. So creating a home in which the heart and the context of honesty and relationship are key. One of the things we were always working to do was how could the scriptures and God and truth be very normative in every aspect of life so that we could watch movies or books and films
00:09:52
Speaker
or we had tabletop discussions, so that discipline wasn't just a kind of a routinized control mechanism over our home, but that God was conversed into all of life, and discipline in that was equally there with fun and communication. So having a conversation with your kids means you can't ambush them with morality just when the moment comes up. You have to have a relationship that you cultivate in which then the normal context is to be able to speak with truth and honesty.
00:10:21
Speaker
Yeah, and I can safely say that dad had earned the right to speak into my life in those terms. Because early on, I can remember both my mom and dad had said, no question is off the table to you and your sister. If you have something that's nagging you, if you have something that's really bothering you, bring it to us. So our home was a conversation, safe zone.
00:10:44
Speaker
And that made all the difference in the world. And not to mention, for the younger people in the household, and this is so writing from the perspective of a son in this book, a son who is now a dad himself, but it was amazing the moments of what you see, the kind of the overhearing that happens. Because if you're living a life devoted to Christ, people will see it. So I saw my parents
00:11:11
Speaker
reading their Bibles. I saw them singing hymn together and on their own. I caught them in their devotional moments often, and they weren't perfect by any means, but I knew they believed, and I knew that this was not just a set of intellectual commitments for them. This was an entire way of life that they followed Christ.
00:11:32
Speaker
So when that question came to me, it carried considerable spiritual authority. It wasn't just the authority of a dad, but I knew he was speaking as somebody who understood also that I had grown up hearing the right answers, so to speak.
00:11:50
Speaker
This is why in the opening section, we talk about the notion of information saves. Notice, by the way, that all three of the misconceptions that we look at in the beginning of the book, fear protects, information saves, spiritual authority belongs to experts. All three of these revolve around control, the idea that you can control your kids. But of course, your child is a human being.
00:12:13
Speaker
and they have within their possession a heart. And the only one who has access to the human heart in all of its deep mysteries is our Lord and Savior. So in the deepest sense, there are no experts there. This is why in a recent book by Harold Senkpile, there's a beautiful name,
00:12:31
Speaker
called, I think, Shepherd of Souls. He's writing a book to pastors, but he talks about in the opening section, if there's anybody who styles themselves as a spiritual expert, you should probably run the other way. Because one of the reasons is, nobody has access to the heart, the inner motivations, the inner man, but God himself. And so that might sound challenging and daunting on the one hand, but it's also tremendously liberating.
00:12:59
Speaker
Because it means that if you are a parent, your child has been given to you and trusted into your hands by God, because after all, your child really truly belongs to God.
Community Support in Faith Upbringing
00:13:10
Speaker
But you also, you can leave the deep soul work
00:13:14
Speaker
to your Lord and Savior and you can be, you're then free to be a faithful witness and to ask the hard questions, the uncomfortable questions. But it's important that we cultivate an atmosphere in our homes where that is welcomed and where that is open and that we not run from those moments. I know there are many parents who feel that they are ill-equipped.
00:13:37
Speaker
and that they just don't have the resources. And part of what we want to say here is the secret is there is no secret here. Rely on Christ. Yes, seek resources and yes, read and yes, think, but you also need to be praying and you also need to be walking alongside the members of the church to reach your kids because they have been entrusted into your hands by God. And that was not by accident. So it's taking hold of that calling as a parent.
00:14:07
Speaker
That's so helpful to hear. And just picking up on what you just said about leaning upon other members of the church in raising children, for me as a single person, I've always wondered what does it look like to relate to the children in the wider church family, recognising that discipleship does happen in the home, but that there's a wider responsibility within the community of believers.
00:14:29
Speaker
Do you have any kind of wisdom on what that might look like for listeners who might not have children who are single and are wanting to kind of invest in children in the church family? Yes Kirsty, thanks for asking that. That was such a huge part. When I came as a single
00:14:48
Speaker
to operationalisation. There were many young families and of course part of my formation came with being invited regularly. Almost every night of the week I would go to one family and other and of course they had little boys and little girls who just especially the little boys I had them hanging off my head and you know rest for them.
00:15:07
Speaker
I love these little kids and of course I come out from a world where kids are interested but i watch the parents i watch the chaos of a home i watch the table i watched you know all of this and i was absorbing the love and i realize what an important part i was playing.
00:15:26
Speaker
in their lives and how as a single I could see how families operated and the parents loved for us you know often the little kids would want you to go and tell a story or come in the little boys would want to go and wrestle and fight or whatever it was so I think singles need to be invited into and included in parts of the family on both sides so it's a reciprocal giving and taking
00:15:50
Speaker
Yeah, and I think that's such an important question because what does it actually mean for your local church to be your church family if it doesn't mean that you are all brothers and sisters in Christ? So I was speaking with an elder in my church just a few weeks ago, and he put it like this, and I thought it was just so wise. He said, you know, I can't possibly, me and my wife can't possibly raise our children alone.
00:16:16
Speaker
We're all in this church, we as a community are all playing a part in raising our children. And that includes every member of the church. And so in a very important sense in those years when dad was single, he was doing his part to, he was playing actually an essential role in the formation.
00:16:39
Speaker
of those children. And growing up on the mission field and in our church community in Austria, there were many single people who watched my sister and I. And to this day, their spiritual imprint is with me. And they played a crucial role in raising my sister and I. And so it's cultivating a more expansive understanding, a kingdom of God understanding of what family means in the context of the church.
00:17:08
Speaker
That's really helpful stuff, folks.
Reflections on Spiritual Testimonies
00:17:12
Speaker
Do you know, another question I thought that occurred to me as I listened to you both right at the start of the show, give you a testimony, Stuart and Cameron. And obviously, Stuart, you've got in some ways more of the sort of more slightly more traditional, you know, quite dramatic. I was a Glasgow bouncer, you know, granny murdering kind of psychopath. I mean, not quite that extreme, but still.
00:17:32
Speaker
Yeah, Cameron is a more sort of down to earth one. And I suppose maybe a question for you, Cameron, to have a reflection on first, but Stuart, I'd love to get your take on this too. You know, Cameron, my testimony is more like yours. And I remember as a young Christian, almost feeling quite inadequate because, you know, I had friends who had dramatic testimonies and that's very powerful evangelistically. Look what the Lord saved me from. And if your testimony is simply, I grew up in a Christian home, I wrestled through some questions and now I'm following Christ. You know, sometimes you can feel almost like a second-class citizen.
00:18:02
Speaker
How have you kind of processed that? And what advice would you have to people who are going, gosh, I wish I had this really dramatic testimony like Stuart, mine's more like Cameron's. So it's funny because that when I first set out to work on that chapter, I had that was a big challenge for me because I thought, all right, so that here's dad, his rap sheet is so darn interesting. And I'm looking at my life here. And I've just the way I put it in the book, I've always lived blandly ever after.
00:18:32
Speaker
So there were certain elements I tried to play up at first. I thought, all right, I'll tailor this up. Not exactly embellished, but just try to sort of raise the dramatic stakes while I was born into black metal and I was really into dark stuff. But then the essential goofiness of it hit me and I thought, don't run from that. So that chapter by, you know, for the people who read it early on, it's probably one of, it's a funny chapter because what I was trying to do, my little identity crisis was actually
00:19:01
Speaker
pretty funny. Now it had some sad elements and I mistreated some people in the process, but the fact that I thought people who dressed up in bad kiss makeup and screamed about being Vikings and oppressed by Christianity in Norway of all places, which is largely specular, struck me as ironic and kind of funny. But then it also helped to highlight some of the, I'll speak gently here, but some of the inadequacies of what I'll call the testimony circuit.
00:19:28
Speaker
Because it's obvious we're gonna prize exotic testimonies for the same reason that we like interesting stories. We always find stories interesting the darker they are. But it hit me that anybody who is rescued by our Lord and Savior, that is always amazing and dramatic. And it doesn't matter if you were a former bouncer, if you were somebody who was into the occult, or if you were a mild-mannered accountant who just simply thought that you were in charge of your own life.
00:19:59
Speaker
In some cases, the more mild, the more dangerous because the more harmless it looks. But if you're living apart from Christ, you're living in total despair. So it was so it simultaneously helped me to see.
00:20:12
Speaker
Look, I don't need that big dramatic story, but also in a sense, I do have that big dramatic story. It's just not conforming to the conventions of earthly standards. But when we think about it in apocalyptic terms, that is peering behind the veil to the spiritual realities, it's every bit as dramatic. So I say that as a word of encouragement to those who have maybe grown up in the church and who do feel that kind of sense of guilt when somebody gives their testimony and it sounds really dramatic and also
00:20:41
Speaker
take hold of the wonder and the beauty and the grace of being born in a Christian home. I mean, my dad would have been spared so much pain and suffering and turmoil had that been his story. By God's grace, it was my story. So I've learned to thank the Lord for that rather than say, oh, why did you cheat me out of a great testimony?
00:21:01
Speaker
Quickly, to end them there Andy, I would just say that growing up with what Cameron just said there, you know, there are memories and there's things I did that I have to live with and I know I'm forgiven and I know I'm redeemed and I'm grateful for that but I'm glad that my kids didn't have to see some of the things or do some of the things I did and still have that as part of your memory baggage to live life. I mean the grace of God covers it
00:21:24
Speaker
but there's something beautiful about the goodness of a home in Christ and living a good life as primary and following God without the unnecessary scars all the way in those things. I think that was a great place to end on.
Conclusion and Guest Book Mention
00:21:42
Speaker
We've covered an awful lot in a short amount of time. Thank you so much for taking the time to be with us this afternoon. It's been really great talking to you both and so we're really grateful for that.
00:21:53
Speaker
And for listeners at home, you can get Cameron and Stuart's book, Faith at Last. It's coming out with IVP and it's launching in January. Should be available in all good bookshops and we really encourage you to check it out. And also all the great material that they put out with us at AM. You can find both Stuart and Cameron all over the web if you go looking them up. And we'll put some links to some of the material in the show notes. So thanks for joining us. Christie, great to have you with us from London as ever.
00:22:20
Speaker
And to all of you listening at home, wherever you are, do CAPTCHAs again in two weeks' time for the next episode of PEPTALK. Thanks for listening.