Ep. 149 David Fitch Returns - Reckoning with Power

point. And I think what the church always tries to do is use worldly power for God's purposes, and they limit what God would do because God's not a course of God, and He will not work according to worldly power.

a rating and review. It's easy, it only takes a second and it helps us find new listeners to the show. Just go to the Show page on the app that you're using right now and hit five stars. It really is that easy. Thank you so much. And find us on social media, Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, threads, YouTube anywhere. I post a lot of video clips and quotes. You could interact there, so find us at shifting culture podcast. Previous guests on the show have

included me J. Gupta. Jonathan Tremaine, Thomas and Lucy peviot. You could go back listen to those episodes and more. But today's guest is David Fitch. I'm so excited that he comes back on the podcast. David Fitch is a professor at Northern seminary and a pastor at Mission renew church in Westmont, Illinois. He is married to raeanne and they have one son named Max. He's coached hockey for the YMCA USA Hockey program

for seven years. David teaches speaks and writes within the fields of Neil Anabaptist theology missiology culture studies political theory and ethics. He writes from time to time on his own page at missio. Alliance on his own substack for Christianity Today, outreach magazine, Church leaders.com Ethics daily and multiple other sites, magazines and journals. He is CO hosts of the theology

of mission podcasts. And his latest book is reckoning with power from Brazos press, David Fitch and I reckon with power in this conversation, we talked about worldly power versus godly power. What's the difference? Why do we need a new relationship with power? We talk about mutual submission, engaging the table for reconciliation and justice, non coercive evangelism, we even engaged in a conversation around power dynamics in the Middle

East. It is a fantastic conversation that is much needed as we continue to encounter abuse of power in the church. So join us as we reckon with power and hand over the reins to God. This is my conversation with David Fitch of Feds Welcome to the podcasts. Thanks for joining me again, on shifting culture. I really appreciate it.

too. Make amends and and so figure it out. And you wrote this great book reckoning with power. And I really, really think that we need to take some of your advice here and use some godly power. So I'd love to get into some definitions, the beginning, what is power? And what are the types of power that are out there,

to do. And so power over like, you know, when the feudalist times in Europe, if you didn't pay your taxes, the SIR the knights would show up on behalf of the serf, and, and with a sword make you pay the day they force you to pay their axes. It's a little more complicated than that now, today. And so now we see and I cover in the first chapter, several different ways of understanding how power works, not through explicit coercion, or somebody putting a gun to your head or something.

But more subtly, in the discourses of our time, in the way, let's say male females interact together, what Laura molvi called the male gaze, or what Foucault talks about the technologies of power, whereby, you know, if you go to a doctor, and the and there's, there's a power relationship there, doctor, an expert, he's certified, supposedly, he's objective, it could be a her too, by the way, he or she is objective. And I'm the patient. And I chose to come here. And you know, therefore, I better

listen to the doctor. And no one's gonna say I was forced to do that. But there is a woven discourse of power in the medical world, and a lot of people are questioning it right? Or do those drug companies pay the doctors a lot of money to prescribe those drugs to me? What about all the other ways that I could be taking care of myself, health wise, instead of taking that drug to get my cholesterol down? Why about why not just go not go to McDonald's

so often? Okay, by the way, I admit, I am, I'm drinking McDonald's coffee, right now. So that was kind of a duplicitous statement on my part, but you know, what I'm saying, there's all these ways, powers woven into the discourses of our lives. And it's becoming more and more obvious, that we need to become aware of them. Now the Church will become becoming more I'm sorry, I'm going off on a riff here. But we're becoming more and more aware of how power

is going off the rails. And this is not the power of anybody, like when you go to church, no one's putting a gun to your head to go to church. When you go into that church. There are all sorts of inter woven power structures that you are assenting to, that you might even find yourself trusting. And yet, oops, there's there's something mischievious going on coercive going on, abusive going on. And, and so, Joshua, I think we're at a point where we've got

to do some reckoning. We are seeing power abuse everywhere, but most alarmingly in the church, and it's time to take a look at what's going on.

By the way with the way government was working at the time, everything. We're now coming out of that time when Christianity is anything but trusted in our culture. I think it's mistrusted. I think there's a resentment in the culture. And so now you have this shifting this massive shifting of cultures, where the pastor, hey, I assumed I got when I got this job, and somebody gave me the

title of Reverend. And I went through three years of seminary that I'd have a job, and then people would trust me, and they're not trusting me. And that's the big shift in power. Now, all the assumed, woven into the system powers are being questioned. So we have people that not too happy with it. And so this has kind of exposed all the ways power has been there, but we never knew it or recognized it. And furthermore, we're rejecting it. And now

abuse, violence, coercion. I mean, look at the way sexuality has changed in the last 50 years. Everything was assumed never questioned 50 years ago. Now. We're all freaking out. Oh, my goodness, it's all question and what's your first impulse is a parent of a teenager? Oh, yeah. I gotta do something. I gotta get defensive. I gotta pull that phone. I gotta quit paying for the phone. I got to order this kid around how many?

No, that doesn't work. And so this is kind of where we're at now, in the church today is all the abuses of power, our reaction to the loss of power, and it's just reached its its ugliness. And we need to reckon with power.

It is always by his presence, by the power of the Holy Spirit, that he works among us, and convicts us and restores us and calls us to reconciliation and changes things. Notice I'm talking about social worlds, not just my inner soul, he certainly works. The power of God, by His presence works in my soul, but he also works in the world. This is something we've lost. And so I want to say there's two powers

at work, not one. In the book, I go into Genesis, you know, Genesis where God was present in the garden, with Adam and Eve. And when they usurped his power, by becoming by eating of the fruit of good and evil, and wanting to become God themselves. This was the great sin of the garden, trying to become God, you SERP power over God never does that were the ones who did it first. And then, and then they had to be escorted out of the garden because that was not the way of God. God is

by his presence. And then we know in Genesis six, violence broke out. And so ever since then, we've had two powers at work, God's power through Jesus Christ, at work in the world, and worldly power. And by the way, Jesus says, One more illustration, the disciple there already go to Jerusalem, Jesus is at the table. This is Luke 22, I believe. And the disciples are trying to figure out, you know, who gets the power? Who gets to tell the other persons

what to do? They think the kingdom is coming as they enter in Jerusalem, and it's going to be a kingdom, Allah, Roman Empire kingdom. And Jesus has to say, you know how the Gentiles roll it over you. Not so among you, not so among us. And he points to the table and a new way of being together, and a new way that the power of God through Jesus by presence shall be at work in the world. So we got two powers, not one in forever the church has been blurring the two always has to

go back and forth. Will we blur God's power with worldly power, or and then have to separate the two all over again after that blows up? And that's where we're at today, the blurring of God's power with worldly power. You know, I give several examples, examples of churches. You know, Mark Driscoll, James McDonald, how they just blurred the power. They, they started out as good people wanting to be the

minister of the presence. of God through Jesus, and things, kind of as they always do, people get saved, people get changed, things happen. And then they took the power on themselves and everything went wrong. They blurred the power, I

complicated. But the fact of the matter is, godly power only works when people are mutually submitted to God. And we are living in a world where not all of us are. And so there will be times when Christians entering of the world have to use worldly power. But it will only accomplish what Luther called preserve a Tory function. It will only preserve the world. It won't save the world. You get what I'm saying there, Joshua, I think is a huge and important

point. And I think what the church always tries to do is use worldly power for God's purposes, and they limit what God would do because God's not a corpse of God. And he will not work according to worldly power. Yeah.

they could evoke. And because there is this, this power, dynamic and imbalance, you know, there's, you know, Hamas came in and did horrific things, Israel, murdered women and children took hostages. And for a lot of people in the world now because there is an imbalance of power, they say, Whatever way necessary to get equity of power is going to be good. How do we utilize godly power? mutual submission in a place like that, where not many are following the way of

Jesus? Is it actually is it possible to enter into this to a place where people aren't following the way of Jesus and exerts godly power? So that we could see the results of godly power? Which would would be like Shalom and peace?

needs to be overcome. Versus so we have to use the lesser of the two evils etc, etc. I talk about worldly power, like, like, I give the example of a traffic light at a busy intersection. And that what the traffic light does is it kind of coercively orders traffic so we don't run into each other and kill each other at the intersection. You know. And by the way, if you don't obey the red light, you're probably going to get a ticket and if you get too many of those tickets, you're going to get

your license. If he if he had too many tickets, you might even go to jail coercive power over, but the intersection does keep people from running into each other and killing each other. But the the two cars that are in countering the intersection, let's say or or the person behind you the intersection that is honking at you because you didn't like step on the gas right when the green, it's not going to solve those problems.

If you're given the finger to the other person at the other intersection, it's not going to solve the conflictual anger and sin in the world. It's just going to hold it at bay, it's going to preserve it. And God's going to have to do that work. And that's going to be the work of the church. This is how I believe Anyways, now in Palestine, in Israel, one thing we learned about power over it can, it can only preserve it can't. It can't heal, it can't

reconcile. It can't. We've tried. And we know the I was listening to a study a couple of days ago, about the Iraq war. For every one civilian killed, you convert three into a terrorist, you are not solving the problem through violence. You're creating more violence, because that's the way violence works. It's the way of the world. It's not the way of Jesus who dies for somebody instead of inflicting violence back on them. It's the way of the world.

And so when we come to Hamas, the awful, awful evil, horrendous evil of Hamas, inflicted on Israel to go back and return that evil for evil doesn't solve the problem, I daresay doesn't preserve justice. And so this is the work of worldly power. How can we create a preserve a Tory approach that can keep people from killing each other, like that traffic light in Palestine in Israel, so that God can do

his work? The ultimate work needs to be done by my Christian brothers and sisters, in collaboration with Jewish brothers and sisters. I know many Palestinian Christians, we need to be the people of Jesus witnessing to another way. And that's the only way things will go. So there's two parts to the answer the question, yes, we must work for a preserver Tory solution there. But recognize that this this can't achieve

ultimate justice. Only Jesus can. And so the churches must rise up just like they did in the Jim Crow South in the 50s. And witness to another way.

happen. I've got examples in the book, I talk, I talk a lot about the Jim Crow South and John Lewis, who was a pastor who and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committees, basically out of prayer meeting started meeting in Woolworths. At the counter there, three is four at a time, started out with three little dinner fellowships turned into 52. And before you know it, the Jim Crow hegemony, the etiology of Jim Crow, racism

was disrupted. And people actually saw, Oh, we can meet, we can gather, we can eat together, we can love one another, and some some dynamic stuff started to happen. I just think that's the way true revolutions happen.

refugee homes. I mean, the homes were like old goat sheds or tents, or, you know, it was not the greatest policy, but we sat and we shared a meal. And after we shared a meal, they wanted to know us, we wanted to know them, we could actually go deep. And then there was a lot of encounter of Jesus because we were able to share a meal together. So how do we end enter

into the table? The table that will reconcile us and show that there is a, a new way away of Jesus away that we can exercise power, that God's power can be utilized. And we could love one another. How do we start to enter into table discussions?

Jesus at the Eucharist. And we then listen to one another, and we discerned together, Kingdom breaks out, I justice breaks out, personal animosities are healed. But But the story here, dude, is that for Americans who are used to traditional church ways, especially the modern church ways of the last 50 years, it is so damn difficult to get people to sit around a table for two and a half hours.

And do that regularly, I prefer once a week, and pray for our neighborhoods, and make space for God to work in our lives. I'm in a church right now. It's a fabulous church, I've been asked to be a pastor at this church and, and just getting people to think about being around a table is a challenge. It takes cultivation and vision.

Well, but this is, you know, read a finger wrote, read a Haldeman finger wrote a book, I can't now I can't remember, it's about the role of tables in X, and how the table disrupted Roman culture and brought healing and justice into the neighborhoods. Okay, so it might sound so so but we have to have leaders who have a vision for the table, and table fellowship. And you know, someone, someone asked me, What are you gonna do about the racism in town here? And I say, Well, can you give me

an example. And they go off on an example of, of a town ordinance committee, and we, I won't go into details on the show here. But one guy didn't want a restaurant because of this isn't a goal. What are we going to do about it? Well, our first impulse, and by the way, I do believe in embodied presence, through protest, I believe, I believe that's a form of presence. My first instinct, invite the guy to a table, have a brew, and have a black person from my neighborhood, a white

person, him or her. And let's sit around and talk about that restaurant, and why we would love that restaurant, and what that restaurant would do in our community, and how it would overcome some of the racial stereotypes and the racism that's endemic in our community. You know, a table let's start at the table. Let's

on the bus. And we're, I'm gonna, you know, run you over. So how do we, how do we lead a church? Can we lead a church? Or, like, what does it look like to mutually submit one to another as the body of Christ, which I believe we need to do, but also have a leadership team, you know, your pastor and, and your local church as part of a team that's helping Shepherd others? How do we do both?

we do anything? Well, this is just not the way the church is described in New Testament. autocracy is not the way democracy is not the way I would call it no Matok cracy. Okay. And so what we do is, and by the way, there's, there's this idea of the way the gifts work in mutuality together. And so, uh, but they're still first gifts, like in the end of First Corinthians 12. It's first, apostles, then prophets and

evangelists. And so, so the apostles go first, frankly, the ones who are leading into a place who have a vision, but that, but the Apostle Paul is Tim gambeson, his latest book shows from last year, Apostle Paul never exerted power over he was always viewing the people he worked with as CO laborers, he refused to exert power over, he said, I must be present among you. And so. So the first gifts don't exert power over like, like, I'm kind of like an apostle. I've been part of like

a church plants. I love church planting, I love going into a new turf, and say, What's going on here, Lord, and how can we gather your people to be a witness to your kingdom? But you know, I gotta go in and I got to paint a vision, I gotta call people into that. But then I gotta, I gotta go. Do you see what I'm saying? I propose this.

Do you see this? Or, and then so and so says, Well, I'm a pastor, and that, that really ignores the spiritual needs of these people, or I'm an evangelist, and I don't think we're dealing with justice. And together, we submit one to another. But as I often in Pastor meetings, say,

make a proposal. I propose we need to do a, I submit to you and the other pastors in the group, because it's always polycentric always multiple teams, multiple guests, they will say, Yeah, I like a but gives you thought about what you're missing with a, so becomes a plus b. And by the time we're done in an hour and a half, two hours, we have a great proposal that we have said, I that the mind of Christ has been met here, let's go forward with it. And that's how I think

leadership happens. And at least, you know, Ephesians, four has the fivefold that, that then equip the rest of the church to do the same thing. First Corinthians 12, has these initial first gifts, that then equip the rest of the church to do the same thing. I think that's the way the best way. But in Christendom, you know, very, somewhat inefficient, let's put everything in the top down and, and get everything done according to a corporate model. And we kind of lost the Holy

Spirit along the way. But we got a lot done, or we thought we got a lot done, we actually preserved the church, we didn't grow the church. Now.

of what we're doing. I think some people in the in a congregation is going to say, and I know especially if we're we're looking at the church through the lens of worldly power, they would still say that there are our gifts and a leadership team that are mutually submitting one to another. And then they're saying, Hey, this is what we're doing as a church, but there wasn't much say from the rest of the congregation. And they go, it feels it still feels controlling, like we're in this

this moment. today. I think that sometimes, if you're viewing it through a worldly power, it will feel controlling. How do we reconcile that as the body moving forward?

Secondly, we're mad and angry and resentful that because a lot of us have come out of abusive uses of that, because frankly, when you put worldly power under God's name, all that goes off the rails, all the restrictions are taken off, and now the person can go abuse anybody they want, why? Because they're doing it for God. Okay, and so we're coming out of that. And so now anything that smacks of authority is viewed with some

suspicion. And so in my experience, I've, I've, we've got to train people out of autocracy, but we also got to train them out of democracy. Because a lot of people think, well, we're just gonna have a democracy. So one person gets to hold up the whole church, because he or she's got a bugaboo, something that is really bugging them. And that's not the church either. So we need to recognize gifts, the gifts of the Holy Spirit and learn how to discern and submit to the gifts of the Holy Spirit.

And, and when it's when it's worldly power, you can always tell worldly power, because it becomes abusive, you're not listened to, you're not heard, but together. So I give a few few practices in the last chapter of reckoning with power, and how to think about that even if a church is quite large. Like Like, frankly, I don't know if you can do this in a 10,000 member church. But 500 400 If there's an issue in the church, we are having a struggle to discern how to shape our church,

in relation to sexuality. Let's everyone who wants to talk about this, who, who will spend the next 10 weeks on a Friday night till midnight, discerning the spirit, hearing scripture, hearing the voices of the hurting and the broken, we're going to meet for the next 10 weeks, PRAY, LISTEN to the gifts and discern for our congregation, the steps we need to take to be a congregation that both in is inclusive, but also shaping of a sexuality that is faithful to Christ, and not

giving into the sexualization of our culture. You know, that that's what I call the egg Foose, meaning it seems good to the Holy Spirit and to us, how do we discern that together?

And then we hear from the teachers from Scripture, the ones that are already respected in our church for teaching. But we also hear from the pastor's the ones who are concerned for the, for the real needs, hurting needs of our carry, we hear from the evangelists in our midst, what does this mean for justice, and together, we discern, we hear from everybody, and a good leader will be able to craft a summation of what she or he is hearing. And then we take, or we don't take a vote, we take a

consensus. One to five, one of my favorite one to five meetings was when we spent six weeks on women in ministry, can women be ordained in our particular church for pastoral ministry, and 30 people showed up? And the two that were most adamant against it, you know, one to five, one, it's, it's evil. It's of Satan. The statement five, totally agree four. I don't totally agree. But I sense the Holy Spirit at work in this, and I can go along with it. Okay. And so those two were forests.

And I must say, they were fours. They didn't totally agree with where we came up. But they said, I trust what I've seen, what I've heard. And we can go forward of this because I trust this community now. And I think that's the kind of thing we need in our churches, on some of these key issues we're facing as we discern the future of a church and mission in the United States, Canada.

resonated with it. So this is right at the very end of your book, it says, We must train ourselves to do something so foreign to our age into the evangelism strategies of times past, the present in the hurting places where we live, sit at tables with people, listen, be regular, allow space for the spirit to work, know how to ask questions, speak truth, sincerely, offer reconciliation.

invite people into the kingdom, invite them to accept Jesus as Lord over our lives, our towns, allowing him to use his wonderworking power in their lives. This kind of evangelism is the mark of a church on the right side of power. How is that different than the evangelism that we have typically engaged in?

That was probably mainstream culture, maybe 5060 years ago, wasn't unheard of, even for people that didn't go to church to know what some of those words meant. And so when you, you know, when you ask somebody and challenged somebody with that, kind of, yeah, it's coercion, but it's assuming, by the way that everyone's got this problem before he even talked to him. It's all sorts of problems with that. But when you got to hegemony, this culture, you can get away with it. We don't

anymore. And so that's, that's ideally not the way what would that did was that took passive Christians and made them active Christians and invited them into a personal relationship, it comes out of all the revivalist movements of the of the previous period in the United States. So when you do that today, darn it, it's so coarse. When you, you're a sinner, I'm going to prove it to you. Really, you know, this is the biggest turnoff, ever.

And so no wonder most Christians don't want to do evangelism if they learned it that way. But man, salvage evangelism is the good news of what God has done in Christ, to restore and heal the world, and restore and heal you as part of healing the world. And it's so good, but you don't have to say a thing, frankly, you just have to go sit there long enough, and allow the Spirit to work. And then you go, Hey, I think I saw Jesus at work in your life, do you? Do you see what I'm saying? Let the Holy

Spirit do the work. And it's a totally non coercive way that God works to bring people to Himself, it is so illustrated, is so well, in Luke 10, when Jesus says, go there, sit at tables, don't bring a purse, go vulnerable, as sheep among wolves. Sit and remain there, eat what set before you. In other words, be a guest. You have no power. And then when somebody exposes that they are sick, pray for and then when they're healed, go, oh, that's

the kingdom. I proclaim. Jesus is Lord and he's working in your life. Do you see it too? That's the model. I think of evangelism always. Until culture became hegemony this in terms of its Christianity, and Bill Bright published 4 billion, did you hear that billion copies of the four spiritualist, he's got the one way to talk about the gospel. That's good for everybody. I got news for you. The Gospel meets you where you're at, in whatever struggles you're at. And it's different for everybody.

So I'm going to, I'm going to exert power over to be able to preserve Christianity within our culture. How do we engage the culture without a power over stance and exerting worldly power?

And we all know what Christian nationalism does, it turns we got people turned off the church now faster and more furious than we've ever had, over this Christian nationalism thing. You know, in, in Quebec, Canada, they had the quietest revolution, the Roman Catholic Church tried to take over Quebec

in the 30s 40s and 50s. And the whole culture went away from Christianity, one away from Catholicism, they actually use Catholic words, as swear words, now in Quebec, this is an illustration of what happens when you use worldly power to accomplish God's purposes. And so, again, we must I plea, that for all the Christian nationalists, there's still some left that go, you know, the saint work and we can still have a conversation with him. Do you understand the way God wants to

work? And can we understand his power? And can we now go be present to his work in the neighborhoods, and so we will engage culture, but it will almost always be in the way God came to engage culture, by becoming present in flesh and blood, in a manger in Bethlehem, in a particular time and a particular place, and manifest who he was to real people in real relationships, and it's spread from there. That's God's strategy. That's the way he works. That's what he wants the

church to be now. incarnational presence of Jesus, his body, in the neighborhoods of all the hurting, and we start with the hurting. Why? Because, as James Cohn as, as numerous other liberation theologians have reminded us, there's a privilege, there's an epistemological openness there, to God, that is not present amongst the affluent, and the people who don't think they need

it. And so and can we engage culture, the way Jesus the way God engaged culture, in the person and work of Jesus, as opposed to our own designs of getting things done? And it never works?

high. But but but this is what I think we need to do if we want to see a renewal of the church and a healing of the church and a healing of our culture in this time. Those are my hopes, but I have no, this is Jesus is Lord. I have I just put it out there and see what he's going to do with it.

we're gonna miss it. But we did catch Patrick Kane's famous goal when they and we were out in a cabinet somewhere, but it was a rip roaring celebration all by ourselves in a cabin, the first Stanley Cup since the early early 60s. So the one the first one I'm really conscious of for the Chicago Blackhawks, and I've been a Blackhawks fan all my life. Even when I grew up in Canada. My mom was from Chicago. We love the Blackhawks.

in Canada. We just pray for a new outbreak of the Holy Spirit through these conversations. Amen.