S1:E4 Finding Community in a Broken World

Marcus Goodyear: Thirty-percent of people in The United States go to worship services every week. The voice of our God speaks to us even when He is silent. That’s not a majority, and traditional church attendance has been dropping in recent years.

News Clip: It began tonight as US church membership has fallen below 50% for the very first time.

Marcus Goodyear: But many people are still active members of a faith community. And I’ve always wondered why people go. My son asked me this one time, “Why are we Christian?” And I told him, “Well, we’re Christian because we were born Christian.”

I was being cheeky, of course, though there is a lot of truth in that answer. I mean, really, I think my son just wanted to know why we go to church or why we keep going. What is this all about? Is it belief or belonging, peace or power, or just love? Different people have different answers to that question, obviously.

It’s an open secret that there is a lot more variety between churches and between Christians than most people think. And some of this is style, the style of music, organ or guitar, style of dress, robes or no robes, style of politics, sadly. Some of the variety though is also theological, sin and grace stuff, heaven and hell stuff, even different beliefs about who God is and how God calls us to live in the world. One thing Christians agree on though, this Bible thing. If you are a Christian, that’s your book.

However you choose to read it or interpret it, you might want it in the public schools. You might wanna keep it out of the public schools. It gets messy fast because so many of us find our identity in our faith communities. We are what we believe or put another way, maybe, I believe, therefore I am.

From the H.E.Butt Foundation, this is The Echoes Podcast.

On today’s episode, we welcome our guest, Corey Widmer. Corey is the lead pastor of Third Church serving Richmond, Virginia. He’s also on the theological advisory council for the H.E.Butt Foundation, and he wrote a theological piece in Echoes Magazine about the four part gospel.

I’m Marcus Goodyear here with my co host, Camille Hall-Ortega. Today, we are talking about the meaning of life with Corey Widmer and how our beliefs about the meaning of life affect what we do each day. Welcome to the podcast, Corey.

Corey Widmer: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here talking about this little topic of the meaning of life thing.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Yes.

Corey Widmer: Very very happy to be with you you both.

Camille Hall-Ortega: We’re glad to have you. We try to keep the the topics pretty narrow.

Marcus Goodyear: Yeah. Yeah. You know, just a small thing. Just a small thing.

Corey Widmer: Small thing. Yes.

Marcus Goodyear: So my son asked me once, “Why are we Christian?” He was in high school, and I said, “Well, ultimately, we’re Christian because we were born Christian.” And that’s probably not the answer you’re looking for. And I’m curious, Corey, you’re a pastor. What do you think of that response from a dad, and where should a conversation like that go next?

Corey Widmer: There’s a beautiful truth in that answer. And, of course, the way that you might dialogue with that answer depends on your theological tradition and the brand of Christian that you are. And so I actually think there’s something really beautiful about saying we were born Christian because in in my tradition, we have a really high view of the church, and we call the church the covenant family. We’re a spiritual family. And, of course, you’re born into a family.

And just like we’re born into a biological family, we’re born into a spiritual family. And for many, we baptize our babies, and we want our kids to hopefully never remember a time when they were not part of the church family, and they did not know never remember a time when they couldn’t remember that God loved them and claimed them. In fact, growing up, my pastor, Presbyterian pastor, whenever he would see me, if I was away at college, I’d come back. He’d say, “There you are, the child of the covenant.” And

Marcus Goodyear: That’s intense.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Awww.

Corey Widmer: He called me a child of the covenant. So I think there’s something beautiful about that, that your son is a Christian because he was born into a community that claimed him as God’s beloved. On the other hand, I might challenge that answer just a little bit. Because Jesus when Jesus walked around, He was very He was very loving, but He was very critical to one group of people, and that was the religious people. That was the people who just thought they were they were special because they were born that way.

They were born into this tribe and this religion, and Jesus challenged them deeply to say participation in a religion is never enough to push them towards spiritual transformation. I think we can never fully settle with just mere participation because Jesus always pushes us to spiritual transformation. So that’s why I might I might haggle with your answer just a little bit.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Yeah. I’m so glad that you talked about it in that way because I think it is a beautiful sentiment, this idea that we’re born and God loves us. He loved us already. He loved us in the womb. Right?

He loved us before we were known. He knew us before anyone else did. And so that’s that sort of beauty in that answer. But, yes, it’s good to sort of__ I can imagine me as an inquisitive kid going, can we unpack that a little bit? Right?

Corey Widmer: Yeah.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Can we unpack a little because, of course, you know, as you mentioned, different traditions have some of these details. We look at them a little bit differently. And so for me, I come from a Baptist background and now, nondenominational. And so, yeah, we would say there’s a choice that has to be made. Right?

Corey Widmer: Yeah.

Camille Hall-Ortega: There’s a choice that has to be made. And so my parents’ answer might look a little bit different, but I think knowing that it’s rooted in love and the love of God is really beautiful.

Corey Widmer: Yeah. Even though I grew up in a Presbyterian church, I very much was also immersed in the world of kind of nondenominational, baptistic evangelicalism. And there was a strong sense in that community that it is your choice. And I remember people saying things like, just because you’re born in a garage doesn’t make you a car. Right.

Just because you’re born in a barn doesn’t make you a sheep. You know, just because you’re born in a church family doesn’t make you a Christian. And there’s some truth to that. And yet I want to say drawing from both traditions, both the more, I would say, liturgical reform traditions and the nondenominational traditions, we can say that both things are true, that we’re born we should be born knowing that we’re claimed by God, and we don’t have to do anything to earn that. And yet we also know that we need to be a part of partnering with God in our spiritual transformation, and that means surrendering to Him and inviting the Holy Spirit into our lives and expecting a spiritual change that produces fruit.

So, yeah. Yeah. I think this is why important we need all the traditions, not just stuck in one.

Camille Hall-Ortega: That’s right.

Marcus Goodyear: True. True.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Right.

Marcus Goodyear: Yeah. To be fair to my son, I’m using him he’s gonna be so mortified that I did this. But I’m using him as a foil because I think what he was he was really asking two things in my mind. One of them was why do we have to go to church?

Corey Widmer: Mhmm. Of course. I mean I asked that when I was his age too.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Right. Right.

Marcus Goodyear: Yeah. I mean, I’ll be honest. I still ask that question.

I just I do, you know? The other question though, the deeper question I think he was really asking was why are we committed to this form of spiritual formation? Why are we continuing to choose Christianity?

And that is obviously a much deeper conversation that he and I are continuing to have. We’ve talked a lot about church more than we have on many other episodes we’ve recorded so far, which is super fun and I think in line with who we are as a foundation. I read that the church is in decline in America and we’re talking about these communities that have been so important to us and why we choose them. What do you think it means for these communities to be in decline? And do you even agree with that?

Corey Widmer: I think I do agree with that. I mean, I think there’s a couple of different ways to unpack decline. What does decline mean? I mean, on the one hand, we do know that literally the statisticians show us that the church is in decline. I mean, twenty years ago, 45% of people regularly attend the church.

Ten years ago, 38%. Now 30%. So, I mean, that’s that’s a significant decline over twenty years, and we have every reason to expect that decline will continue. So, yeah, quantitatively, there has been decline. But I also think you could argue that qualitatively there has been a decline. I think that when I see the American church, I often see a church that, is declining in its spiritual fervor and declining in its integrity. I see the captivity to political idolatry. I see shallow forms of discipleship. I see reductionist gospels.

I mean, I mean, there’s there’s a lot of ways that like, when I go to travel around the world and I go to places that have traditionally been seen as, like, the third world, I see, like, a vibrant deep Christianity. Whereas what often I see in America is a more shallow form of it. And I think we’ll look back and see the way that in the twentieth and twenty-first century, the center of Christianity really shifted away from the traditional Christian west and more into places of Africa and Asia where traditionally we’re seen as missionary, places for missionaries to go. So I do think there’s a decline in America, both in the quantity and quality of Christians.

Camille Hall-Ortega: And I imagine are you thinking, of course, that those are related, that

Corey Widmer: I think so.

Camille Hall-Ortega: folks don’t want to come to church if they think it is causing dissension, or that people aren’t practicing what they preach or that they can find the sort of support they’re looking for somewhere else? Or what what do you think about that?

Corey Widmer: Certainly, Camille. I mean, we know that millennials and Gen Z are are the most inclined to leave traditional institutional forms of church. And it isn’t necessarily because they don’t love they don’t have respect for Jesus or they don’t believe in Jesus or they don’t respect spirituality. It’s because many of them are just disillusioned with the institution of the American church and what it is certainly, some of it is the way that it’s been portrayed in the media, but a lot of that is very true. It’s true to to to form and what the church has been and how we’ve capitulated to a lot of compromises.

Marcus Goodyear: So if someone has lost faith in the church like we’re talking about, maybe they still self-identify as a Christian, maybe not. What would you say to them? Why should they go? Why should they be part of a church again? And also, what should that look like? Or maybe what does it look like?

Corey Widmer: Well, you know, despite everything, despite what the church has been, can be, despite its flaws, despite its foibles, I would still encourage a person to become a part of a church. I think that Christianity is a communal collective faith. It is not meant to be practiced alone. The pages of the New Testament and the whole Bible are just stirring with images and metaphors of our collective identity, you know, whether it’s the body of Christ or, or that we’re part of a a whole collective community that God redeems. And I would even go so far as to say we need one another. We need a community not just to know God, but to know ourselves.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Mhmm.

Corey Widmer: And we can’t fully know God. We can’t fully know even ourselves unless we’re deeply embedded within a community of faith that is seeking to know and love God together. So I would encourage anyone who is seeking, as hard as it might be at times, to get get involved in the church.

Now you asked what that should look like. I mean, I would I would say to find a church, in which you can be not just a consumer watching a really cool show up at front, not just be an observer, but to be a contributor. Andy Crouch has this great phrase where he says, “We move from being consumers to contributors, from consumers to creators.” And this is what part of what it means to be made in God’s image is to be not just a a person who passively sees, but who actively contributes. And so a church that where community is central, where we’re not just passively standing by, we’re participating in the life of the community together, where we have a sense of belonging, a sense of shared purpose. And that often will mean that there are very annoying and difficult people, but that’s part of what it means to be in the body of Christ. So, you know, what do you guys think?

Camille Hall-Ortega: No. I think I think that’s really good. I think hearing the statistics, it feels like it those statistics beg sort of two questions, which is, is church worth it? Right? Is it a problem that that decline exists?

And I think for us as Christ follow followers and speaking to your answer, the the answer is yes. That we, you know, we know the importance of corporate worship. We know that the how the body of Christ is meant to work. And so, yes, there’s value in being a part of a church. And And so then the next question I would ask, well, what what do you do about that decline?

What does it look like to make meaningful strides to improve that decline? To turn it around? And I think exactly what you were speaking to is has been my experience that when you find a community that can be really fruitful and intentional, it’s important not just to say, what what can this place do for me? But to say, what does it look like for me to serve in this place?

And I have found time and again that when you begin to serve in your church community is when you have the most meaningful community yourself.

Marcus Goodyear: Yeah. Especially when you serve in your church community beyond your church community.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Sure. Together serving serving the outside community together.

Marcus Goodyear: Yeah. So when I when I think of church as a way to gather- I’m an old English major nerd, so I love gathering around the Bible and just reading scripture because I love gathering around any book, especially a book that is good enough to continue to be read two thousand years later. So I like Bible study just because I’m a nerd, but I also really like the pop up food markets that we do, the feed the homeless that we do.

Corey Widmer: 100% agree with you, Marcus. And I and I think so much of this relate we talked about the meaning of life before. That’s how you open this. Like we’re supposed to be talking about the meaning of life. Right? And so a lot of this comes down to what you understand the church to be.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Right.

Corey Widmer: What you understand yourself to be. And if your primary goal is to be happy and your primary goal is to, you know, live a life of personal fulfillment, then church is gonna be there to help me with my personal happiness and personal fulfillment. And so I go there to get a product in the same way that I would go to a spa or go to a club or something. And then when I am not satisfied with it anymore, you know, I move on to find a different church or not at all. But if the meaning of life is to participate with God in his redemptive mission of all things, to redeem all things, and if he has created this church to join him in that redemptive mission, then, gosh, to be a part of a church means that I get to be a part of a people who are on mission with God for the redemption of all things.

And that just, like, blows the doors open. It means that I can’t not be human without this without this community. Right? I need to serve. I need to to be on mission. I need to be get involved in the problems of the world, because it’s part of what it means to be human.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Even though it can get really messy.

Corey Widmer: Oh, so messy.

Camille Hall-Ortega: It can get really messy because because we are human. Right? That so many times I hear stories of people being disillusioned with the church, and really they’re disillusioned with people in a church. Right? And so they go, “This thing happened.”

And it’s really important. Right? These aren’t things that we can set aside and just say, like, la c’est la vie, you know, that kind of thing. No. These these are really important and sometimes traumatic things for folks. But it’s because we are flawed. We are fallen. We are not Jesus. We just want to be as much like Him as we can. Right?

And so we see that happening. And I know that for us, we say hurt people hurt people. Right? That that many of us know that the church can look like a hospital, and you’re gonna find people who are hurting. And you’re one of those folks.

And a lot of times, hurt people hurt people, and so it can get really messy. But it’s, it’s so important to note that it’s worth it, that the messiness is worth it.

Corey Widmer: It is worth it.

Marcus Goodyear: Yeah. Defining how it’s worth it, I do find continually to be a challenge, especially for people outside the system. For me, when somebody rejects the church because of broken people, what I understand them to be saying is that this is a closed system that’s defending itself. And they want it to be something bigger.

It promises to be something bigger. And so when it becomes insular, when it becomes about tithes in order to keep the building, in order to keep the keep itself running, self-perpetuation is not inspiring. And so there’s the they experience this difference between what the church says it is and what they believe they want it to be, which is, in my mind the body of Christ that living all of us together living out the teachings of Jesus in the world today, which is a great thing.

Corey Widmer: Yeah.

Marcus Goodyear: I don’t know anybody of any faith who thinks the teachings of Jesus are bad. That’s a bit of an overstatement, but not much. Not much. You hear a lot of people talking about He’s a good teacher and all this. And so people generally agree, that he’s good.

And yet, what we believe and what we do can feel so far apart. And I’m not talking about just, like, the superficial way of thinking about hypocrisy. I mean, the system itself seems to not be behaving as the body of Christ in the world in ways that are just disillusioning. So it’s more than just I can’t get along with the person in the pew two pews ahead of me. What do we do with with a closed system church?

Corey Widmer: Yeah.

Marcus Goodyear: What does it look like for the church to open up?

Corey Widmer: Well, in this I think what you’re saying is really important, Marcus, because you’re saying there’s a difference between saying, I have challenges in church because so and so person there is annoying, and I have a hard time with them and saying that there’s something, like, systemically broken or toxic or in turned in upon itself about the system. And I do think that that is some that is a challenge for the leaders of the churches, for people like me, for pastors to really look at ourselves in the mirror, to understand, you know, how what are ways that we have really, lost sight of the New Testament vision of what the church is called to be and really do, like, some hard work of of correction and, renewal for this new age that we’re in. So I really take what you’re saying seriously, and we’re trying to do that in different ways in my own community. And I think there’s many churches around the country that are seeking to do similar things.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Will you tell us what some of those things are? I’m so curious about what it looks like to do work that makes the church look and be less divisive to folks who are on the outside looking in.

Corey Widmer: So one thing we’ve done- we’re a large church. We’re, you know, over a thousand people. And so how do you help a church like that become a church in which people feel like they belong and that they have a shared purpose? And so about five or six years ago, we sort of came up with a new way to organize the church. So we created 12 geographic parishes around our city based on where people live, and we tried to make a bigger church much smaller.

And so in each parish, there’s a couple hundred people, and we reconfigured the way our leadership works. So now leaders are over each of these areas, and we our our small groups are organized geographically. We’re trying to grow smaller. So we might be growing as a church, but we wanna grow smaller. We wanna get more in touch with each other, more in touch with our local communities.

Mission is abstract unless you’re talking about your own particular neighbors. And so we want people together to love their neighbors, care about their neighborhoods, care about the schools and the institutions in their neighborhoods. So we’re trying to make community and mission smaller and more local, and that has given people a sense of belonging and a sense of shared purpose, that you can’t get just like coming sitting in a service and consuming a good, sermon or something.

Camille Hall-Ortega: I love that. It sounds like you are improving intentionality and intimacy. And I know when we’ve talked about, I the phrase has been used, I don’t know if it’s an overstatement, but that we have an epidemic of loneliness. And so when people are seeking meaningful relationships that are not surface level, that go deep, where you really feel known and you’re able to know others, I’m sure plenty of folks are looking for that in their church community. And it sounds like your efforts would help lead to that, would help lead away from loneliness and and more toward intention and intimacy.

Marcus Goodyear: Camille, that makes me wanna go to the David Brooks clip that we’ve prepared. Last month, David Brooks was out at Laity Lodge, the adult retreat center that the H.E.Butt Foundation runs, and David Brooks is a New York Time columnist. I guess, probably he often appears on radio and TV shows as the the thoughtful conservative or used to be anyway. And so he was he was not at Laity Lodge with a political agenda, but it did come up just because that’s his work.

And so, I’d like to play this little clip that we’ve pulled from a talk he gave at the lodge and just get your feedback on it, Corey.

David Brooks: And so you see these skyrocketing rates of of mental health problems which are attached to politics, and that gives people a sense of powerlessness. And so in my view, what people are doing is they feel a pain, they feel lonely, they feel hopeless, they feel mean, and they want to find a social therapy that will ease their inner ache. And they should be coming to faith, but they’re not by and large. They’re going to politics. And politics is an attractive form of social therapy because it gives you the illusion that you have a sense of belonging.

I’m on team red or team blue. But you’re not really in community with people. You’re just hating the same people together. That’s not community. Politics gives the the illusion of a moral landscape.

I can understand the morality of the world because there’s good over here on my side and there’s evil over there on that side. But as Solzhenitsyn said, “That’s not a real moral landscape. The line between good and evil runs down every human heart,” Solzhenitsyn said. It gives you the illusion of moral action. I’m doing something for the world.

But you’re not sitting with a widow or helping the poor. You’re just being indignant in front of the TV screen. And so it gives you all these illusions that it’ll help you solve you think you’re gonna solve your problem. And it should be said that people who are lonely, according to a researcher named Ryan Streeter, people who are lonely are seven times more likely to be active in politics than people who aren’t lonely. And so that says a lot about where our politics is.

Corey Widmer: So good.

Marcus Goodyear: He hit on belonging. He hit on loneliness. He hit on community. I mean, so many things that we were talking about.

Corey Widmer: Yeah. I just love that. And what makes me wanna listen to his whole talk- you know what it reminds me of is that humans desperately need to feel belonging. They need to feel heroic.

They need to feel a a sense of grand meaning to their lives. But when you lose God, when a society no longer has God within its imminent frame, what do you turn to? People really a lot turn to sex and turn to love. And one of the reasons why, like, romantic love has become such an idol in our society is because of the loss of God. But I think that I think what Brooks is saying is that the same thing has happened with politics, is that as not only as our society has lost any sense of the transcendence, but also as the church has dramatically declined and no longer provides that sense of shared belonging and shared common purpose, politics has been a very, very terrible stand in.

It has given people you know, when they can’t find transcendence, they can’t find meaning, they can’t find a sense of shared purpose. Well, here’s here’s an option. But as David Brooks said, it actually sort of undermines everything that we’re looking for in so many ways. It’s a really beautiful meditation that he gives there.

Camille Hall-Ortega: I love what you’re saying because at the root of a lot of our searching and striving is this need and desire for belonging. And it’s important that we know what it looks like to try to fulfill that in the church through God, through community. Are we attempting to fill that need with something that’s healthy? If it’s a shared hate that’s not gonna do it. That’s not gonna do it. Right? That’s just what we heard at false community.

Corey Widmer: And Christians have been really, like, diluted and and I think led astray, in this regard too, especially as it comes to politics. I think that while politics is certainly one way that Christians could be involved in helping to influence society, I would say it’s not at all the best way and and maybe not a favored way at all. And when we rest our hopes for what we want our country to be or the world to be, on it, like, political power and we, like, put our hopes in that, it becomes no wonder, like, you hear people using, like, highly almost eschatological language. Like, our life will be destroyed if this candidate wins or America hangs on this election. I mean, that’s just that’s just foolishness.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Well, it’s it’s not biblical.

Corey Widmer: Right? That’s not all.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Our hope is built on Jesus.

Corey Widmer: Yeah, and yet when we throw our hopes within the political sphere because we think it’ll somehow, like, help us get this meaning and purpose that we’re longing for, that’s what happens. We become idolaters.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Mhmm.

Marcus Goodyear: Politics is a way of thinking about power and negotiating power.

Corey Widmer: Yeah.

Marcus Goodyear: And what I love about Christian faith is that it flips that, you know, Jesus is the servant. He gives up himself. He empties himself for the world around us and His, when He rides into Jerusalem to just follow the story out, He knows that He’s going into his death. And it’s only through sacrifice, it’s only through death, it’s only through giving ourselves up that we find the thing that is truly life.

Corey Widmer: Mhmm.

Marcus Goodyear: And I when I was talking to my son about Jesus.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Preach it today.

Corey Widmer: That’s the upside down down kingdom. That’s the upside down kingdom.

Marcus Goodyear: Yeah. Christ is teaching us to give ourselves up, to give up our identities. I mean, that is powerful. It is it is irresistible and scary in a way that I want to be part of it. And so for me, the the challenge is that I have this belief that I want to be true.

And I don’t even think mostly beyond the implications of just emptying myself and helping the those around me empty themselves, for for our community locally. But I want to be part of this and I want the church to promote that. You know? I want to see that in the church, and so often we fall short of our own beliefs.

We fall short of of what we say we want to do, and our systems fall short of it too.

Camille Hall-Ortega: And maybe that’s related to how folks interpret things. I know, Corey, you just wrote a great piece in Echoes about the four part gospel. Will you talk a little bit about that and how that might affect perspective?

Corey Widmer: Yes. The Bible tells a big story with four chapters, creation, fall, redemption, consummation. But often we reduce the story, reduce the gospel to just the middle two, the fall and redemption. And when we do that, I really do think it changes everything and I including how we think about politics and these things that we’ve been talking about. I mean, one way to look at it is that if you have a two chapter gospel, if all your gospel is just fallen redemption, I’m a sinner and I need Jesus to save me, then your posture towards the world is essentially inherently negative, reactive.

You know, denouncing, critiquing what’s bad. The world is inherently bad and wicked. We’re moving away from the world. We resist, react, reject, renounce. So it’s an inherently reactive posture.

I think if you have a four chapter gospel, then I think you have a more redemptive posture where you’re the world is a good world that is broken, yes, but that Jesus Christ has redeemed through his death and resurrection, and he is coming to consummate his the fruit of his work. And therefore, we move towards the world. We affirm and cultivate what’s good. We instead of resisting, reacting, renouncing, we’re renewing, restoring, redeeming, resurrecting, regenerating. I mean, these are a lot r words. Right?

Camille Hall-Ortega: Right.

Corey Widmer: And that just gives us a different posture in the way that we handle everything from politics to the work of human labor to race relations to everything. It just changes the bigger story.

Marcus Goodyear: In the in the article, you talk about wholeness and shalom and that’s the direction of scripture. Shalom is a Hebrew word.

Corey Widmer: I mean, I think a great definition is flourishing. I know that’s become sort of a catchphrase these days, but I really think it’s a beautiful word because it means to be a person who is flourishing in every way you could flourish. Your life with God, your life with other humans, your life in this beautiful creation, everything is is whole. You’re flourishing as a person.

Marcus Goodyear: So we’ve been talking about the church giving itself away. What does it look like for us to approach the church as a tool for helping others flourish? Not just ourselves, but others. And how much responsibility do we have to support our neighbor’s capacity to flourish?

Corey Widmer: Well, I think we have- maybe the this is the call. This is the beautiful call that God has given us. I mean, Jeremiah 29, 7-11 is a section of scripture that I love where, the people of God had been taken into exile in a foreign land, and they didn’t really wanna be involved in their community because they’re a bunch of, you know, people that they hated. And God through the prophet Jeremiah comes to them and says, actually, I want you to seek the shalom, the flourishing of your neighbor because in their flourishing is your flourishing, which is kinda crazy. Right?

He says if you wanna flourish, you’ve you’ve gotta be involved in your neighbor’s flourishing. And Jesus says some very similar things, in the Sermon on the Mount when he calls his people to be salt and light, to be leavening, to be fruitful. He calls people to be peacemakers. He calls them to be those who hunger and thirst for justice, for social righteousness in their communities.

He’s almost saying you’ve gotta be as just as hungry for your neighbor’s flourishing as you are for food and drink. I mean, it’s just beautiful. And so I think what that means is that the church, we need to figure out ways to support people in doing that work of of flourishing in their communities, whether it means empowering people to come alongside the most vulnerable in their neighborhoods and their cities, or whether it means helping to heal, historic places of injustice and oppression in America. You know, that would be, for example, in this long history of racial oppression in our society and the ongoing effects of that oppression. It could mean getting involved in supporting people in their everyday labor and the work of their hands, whether they’re teachers, educators, doctors, lawyers, tradespeople.

It could mean equipping people to be really good neighbors and to pay attention to the needs of their neighbors. It could mean getting people involved in creation care and helping holistically care for the Earth. It could mean equipping people to share the good news of Jesus and how to articulate the true good news that Jesus is offering people, not just to go to heaven when they die, but to be restored in their full humanity, to be connected to God, to be connected to others, connected to the earth. So I just that’s what the church is called to do. We’re on this beautiful mission of shalom, mission of flourishing, empowering people to extend that flourishing to our neighbors.

Camille Hall-Ortega: I was just thinking all of those things, we know that they are good. And yet, most of them are pretty hard for us because it’s not our nature to do what God has called us to do, which is to esteem others higher than ourselves. To think of your neighbor’s needs as more important than your own does not feel natural. Right? That’s not something that comes easily.

But there’s a sort a sort of beauty in this incentive that God is telling us. I’m telling you how it’s supposed to be because that’s how it’s best. And so, esteeming your neighbor, thinking of your neighbor and his or her needs above your own will cause your life to be more full, cause you to thrive, lead to you flourishing. What a good God we serve.

Corey Widmer: I know. Isn’t that beautiful?

Camille Hall-Ortega: Yeah.

Corey Widmer: And it’s to become like Jesus. Because Jesus is was the ultimate lover of neighbor. I mean, look what He gave. He gave everything. He gave his life. He gave everything. And like Marcus was saying earlier, the church will be the church when we’re a crucified church, a cross shaped church, a church that looks like Jesus, a church that is taking all that we have, all of our resources and our power, and is giving them away for our neighbor. And I think what often people are seeing, especially in politics, is a taking church, a church that wants to take things for themselves, power and resources for themselves. And that is a church that is obscuring Jesus, because Jesus is one who gave himself away.

Marcus Goodyear: Yeah. And yet we’re reading the same Bible. Right? So how does it happen? How does it happen that we have this book that teaches a better way of living, like demonstrably better, such that people who don’t believe in it can recognize the wisdom in the book and it’s like we don’t know how to read. Maybe we’re just not reading. I don’t know.

Camille Hall-Ortega: That brings up a possibility.

Corey Widmer: That brings up some complicated questions of biblical interpretation. How two people can read the same thing and come up with very different answers. And this is where I think we need the help of the great teachers of the church and the way that the church has interpreted the scriptures wisely throughout the ages and, and being very aware of our own cultural captivity that leads us to, I think, blindness and not seeing what the truth of the scripture is really saying. And we need each other for that. We need our traditions for that. We need the Holy Spirit for that.

Camille Hall-Ortega: And so maybe but we’re talking about the meaning of life. Right? I think we’ve touched on all aspects of that question for sure. Right? But truly that we’re talking about loving God and loving our neighbor, and that’s it.

Marcus Goodyear: That’s right.

Camille Hall-Ortega: That’s what that’s the picture God painted for us of what it looks like to live life more abundantly.

Corey Widmer: You know, I just love that, Camille. And it reminds me just to maybe end with a little story. I visited a little old lady, who was a hundred and one. She was the oldest person in our church, and she was in a tiny little room in a home. And she was very ill, and, she could barely move.

And I sat with her, before a couple of days before she died there in that room. And every nurse that came in, she smiled and greeted them by name, every nursing assistant. When I left and walked outside, all the nurses were like, we’re just so sad that she’s dying, because she’s just been such a joy. She asks us all how we’re doing. She knows our names of our family members.

She brings joy into this unit. And it just was so powerful for me because, you know, we hear debates even about euthanasia and about people losing their agency and their sense of purpose, and they can no longer meaningfully contribute to society because they’re too old. What’s the purpose of them even using up resources anymore? But here’s this little old lady with a frail body barely able to move, and she is fulfilling the meaning of life in that little room more than most any other person that I knew. She is loving God, and she is loving her neighbor, and she’s doing it in a highly limited way, but she’s doing it in a powerful, beautiful way.

She’s so, I mean, what that means is we can we can fulfill the meaning of life. Whatever our limitations, whatever our restrictions. If the meaning of life is to love God and love neighbor, and we do that through the the the the sacrifice of Jesus for us and his life in us, then we can do that whenever, wherever, however. That’s our calling.

Camille Hall-Ortega: So good.

Marcus Goodyear: Yeah. Powerful story. And in as much as we’re looking toward the end of things, I think what a beautiful end to look toward to to be able to to be like the woman who you were with.

Corey Widmer: Mhmm. I wanna be like her.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Yes. Thank you for that story.

Marcus Goodyear: Right. Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you so much for joining us today. We really, really appreciate everything you do for the foundation and for the representative you are.

Corey Widmer: Thanks, guys. It’s a joy to be with you. Thank you for your work.

Camille Hall-Ortega: Thanks. Same to you. Bye bye.

Marcus Goodyear: Thank you for listening to The Echoes Podcast. We will include links to David Brooks’ audio from Laity Lodge and Corey Widmer’s article in Echoes magazine. And while you’re reading his article on Echoes, be sure to subscribe to our print magazine. It’s free and it’s beautiful, and it comes once a quarter. So it doesn’t even clutter up your mailbox.

The Echoes Podcast is written and produced by Camille Hall-Ortega, Rob Stennett, and me, Marcus Goodyear. It’s edited by Rob Stennett and Kim Stone. Our executive producers are Patton Dodd and David Rogers. Special thanks to our guest today, Corey Widmer. The Echoes Podcast is a production brought to you by the H.E.Butt Foundation.

You can learn more about our mission and vision at hebfdn.org

Season 1: Episode 4

Finding Community in a Broken World

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