Show Notes
What does Christian public witness actually look like at work, beyond arguments and answers?
In this follow-up conversation, Josh Chatraw and Tanner move from diagnosing fear to exploring a more grounded vision of faith at work. Instead of focusing on winning arguments or having everything figured out, they reflect on how Christian witness is formed through character, humility, and presence in everyday professional life.
Through real-world case studies, including AI and technology ethics, nonprofit leadership, and workplace decision-making, they show how faith becomes visible not primarily through what we say, but through how we live and work alongside others.
Watch Part 1 of this interview here: https://youtu.be/RGnHJ7vKAGE
Episode Resources:
Apologetics at the Cross: An Introduction for Christian Witness: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310524687/
Telling a Better Story: How to Talk About God in a Skeptical Age: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0310108632/
Augustine of Hippo: The Doubter Who Became a Church Father: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0DF4GQY7Z/
Nuance is a podcast of The Collaborative where we wrestle together about living our Christian faith in the public square. Nuance invites Christians to pursue the cultural and economic renewal by living out faith through work every facet of public life, including work, political engagement, the arts, philanthropy, and more.
Each episode, Dr. Case Thorp hosts conversations with Christian thinkers and leaders at the forefront of some of today’s most pressing issues around living a public faith.
Our hope is that Nuance will equip our viewers with knowledge and wisdom to engage our co-workers, neighbors, and the public square in a way that reflects the beauty and grace of the Gospel.
Learn more about The Collaborative:
Website 👉 https://wecolabor.com
Get to know Case 👉 https://collaborativeorlando.com/team/
Episode Transcript
Tanner Fox
Well hi everyone and welcome back to Nuance, where we seek to be faithful in the public square. My name is Tanner Fox. I’m one of the pastors at First Pres Orlando and a colleague of Case’s and his guest host for today. And I am glad to welcome back our friend Josh Chatraw, who was with us last week. Josh works at Beeson Divinity School. He’s a professor there and leads all sorts of things in relation to public Christianity and apologetics, which is the topic for these two episodes. So Josh, thanks so much for being with us yet again and looking forward to our continued conversation today.
Well, last week we got to talk a lot about the landscape and, you know, what are you seeing in the world around you, Josh? What am I seeing as a pastor in terms of these opportunities for evangelism or conversations around apologetics, a little bit of the posture of the culture around us. You mentioned a lot about, you know, the ways that people are engaged in the world as like a lot of moral issues, right, in front of us kind of all the time and not always a charitable way to deal with those things when they’re having conversations with folks and that can change our perspective as Christians in terms of whether it sparks fear in us, maybe pushes us to kind of withdraw from the conversation entirely or maybe it, you know, gets our six shooters ready and we’re kind coming in guns blazing trying to shake things up a little bit and so what I really appreciate about Josh and his work, not only Apologetics at the Cross, which is probably the one I know best and my favorite, but all of the works that you’ve worked on, Josh, have a lot to do with kind of our posture and these sorts of things and the ways that we’re seeking to engage the world out of a place of love and humility. It’s hard to write a book about apologetics at the cross without having a posture of humility to say this is the recognizing our dependency on God and recognizing His work in us following that work in terms of death to self, crucifixion is the way forward.
I’ve so loved that about your work and today I would love to turn our conversation even more practical if we can. And so if we kind of talked about landscape and method in our last segment, I would love to, yeah, lean more into what it looks like for folks to kind of show up at work on a Monday morning and have some of these ideas bouncing around in their head. So maybe one buzzword would be apologetics, but another might just be public Christianity or public witness, in terms of how we’re engaging our world. So why don’t we start there? Why don’t we start with that larger idea of apologetics or public witness kind of moving into the workplace? Josh, what’s the first thing you think of when I say that phrase or those words? Like what pops into your brain?
Josh Chatraw
Public witness or apologetics?
Tanner Fox
Let’s do public witness. Yeah, sorry. Those are pretty different
Josh Chatraw
Okay. Yeah. No, I think, well, what I would say is that, the greatest apologetic, the greatest public witness is the lives of the people of God. And the worst public witness is the lives of the people of God. And so, it’s a life that keeps in step with the gospel, that is the best witness to the gospel. And when our lives are not in line with the gospel, it undermines the gospel that we proclaim. So I believe strongly that the kinds of people we are and the type of coworkers and workers we are and…are we people who slander and are we people who gossip? Are we people who work hard? Or do we live quiet lives as Paul describes? We seek the good of those around us and to love even people we strongly disagree with, people who are our enemies. I think all of these are ways we bear witness. And it’s also important to bear witness with words, suggesting anything like just, you know, living lives that are in line with the gospel. Yes, we should do more than that. But that’s where it starts. And the reason I start there is because we often think about kind of technique or rhetoric. And it’s a lot easier for us to kind of point our finger out there at the culture and say, that’s the problem. Where it seems like the Christian instinct going all the way back to Jesus, who, you know, says look at the plank in our own eyes before we pull the speck out of our brothers or before we denounce our enemies. It’s to say, okay, is my life living in line with the gospel? And so I think that’s where we start. And it doesn’t mean that there’s not a speck out there in our brother’s eyes. It definitely doesn’t mean that we don’t proclaim the goodness of God’s Word and the problems when we deny God’s Word and when we deny God in public as well. Yes, it’s not an either/or, but a both/and.
But I do think it changes the kind of posture and demeanor of how we do this when we start with our own lives. It’s kind of like the church, the kind of church, if you’ve grown up in a church, it’s like, the problem is the culture out there. And everyone after the sermon comes and pats the pastor on the shoulder because it’s like, man, you really got them. And it was like, yeah, but.
Tanner Fox
You got him. But you were talking to us. We’re in here.
Josh Chatraw
Yeah, those people maybe needed to hear that, but none of them were there, right? What do the people need to hear in front of you? Because what you’ve just told them is all our problems are out there. And that doesn’t seem like a biblical pattern, right? The prophets would, yes, they would critique culture out there, but their focus was the people of God.
And so we often want to be prophetic about those people, but not our own lives and not our own communities. And again, I think there’s a time to say, hey, there’s a fabric to the universe. And the reason you’re experiencing what you’re experiencing is because you’re against the grain, God’s grain of the universe. Absolutely. But again, it’s a matter of where we’re going to start. And then when we do that, again, as I said in the last episode, it’s not “you’re wrong.” And let me tell you how you’re wrong. It’s more of…in the posture of Lewis in that great line from The Great Divorce when he says, you know, that’s the joke, we’re all wrong. And once you can admit that, then you can begin living. And I don’t know, I wish we had a little bit. I wish we had it. It doesn’t play well, right? Because a lot of the political rhetoric now is don’t admit any weaknesses. There’s no weaknesses in Christ. I’m not worried about that, but I’ve got plenty of weaknesses. So I can own up to that and I don’t have to kind of live out of an inferiority complex. I’m like, yeah, I’m guilty as charged. But then once you’re able to say that, man, that’s so freeing. Yes, I don’t have all the answers. That’s not what public witness is about, having all the answers. You know, okay, but I can bear witness to what I do know because it’s been revealed to me by Christ.
Tanner Fox
I wonder if that sentiment in particular wouldn’t be really helpful to people. It’s just like, hey, what we’re talking about here is not having everything so buttoned up that there’s nothing that’s gonna kind of stump you or give you pause or tell you, like, hey, I get it. I would have to learn more about that before I could comment on it.
Josh Chatraw
Yeah, and I think that’s one of the things, I mean, on one hand, I want to say there is a kind of anti-intellectualism that has pervaded segments of the church, which just says, like, I shouldn’t have to think. Like, let’s put everything on the bottom level, and I just want it to feel good and don’t think about anything. And there’s a word, you know, we need to pull that plank out of our eye. That’s a problem, right? I’m not suggesting that. And I think, you know, some of the objections, some of the things that come up, they come up over and over again. Oftentimes it’s thinking about seven or eight kinds of different objections and then you’ve thought about 95% of the ones you’re going to hear. So some of this is we just, you know, it’s good to think, it’s good to read, right? Like, that’s good. Those are good things and we need to get back on that. But on the other hand, if our view of like, hey, I can’t be a public Christian until I have this all figured out, you will never be a public Christian.
You will never be like, but some of this is our misunderstanding about what Christianity is. It’s like Christianity is kind of, or being an apologist or being a public Christian is me having all the answers. I’ve got this figured out. And it seems to me that yes, Christianity gives us a vision of the world, but part of that vision has always been kind of having mystery, has us not knowing many things and being okay with that and living with that and a way to live without a certainty on every issue. And so it actually, to me, the kind of Christian worldview can accept our contingency and the things that we don’t know and make sense of that. And that’s just fine.
Rather than kind of acting like, Christianity is about you being able to answer all these questions. And if you’re not, you’re not really a faithful public Christian. I just think we need to get that off the table. That’s not reality. And when somebody comes up, and I think part of what’s happened sometimes is we have this vision of the apologist who answers everything. But sometimes those apologists who are answering everything, once you look at some of their answers, they’re actually rather glib.
And people end up growing out of them, of those answers, right? Because they’ve tried to put everything in a little box and make it really easy. But then the young people, the real bright ones that I’ve taught, who’ve maybe grown up with a kind of thin glib apologetic, they end up growing out of that kind of stuff. And either they go deeper and reflect more, or they have some major kind of deconstruction issues.
Tanner Fox
I was going to say if it’s thin, it might shatter. And yeah, I’ve watched that happen before too, or just a life circumstance kind of contradicts the way that they maybe understood a caricature of the fabric of the world. And then all of sudden it’s like, wait, if that’s wrong, is everything wrong? And you kind of run down a road that’s like, whoa, that, you know, if you were willing to be patient and maybe approach apologetics, I even almost hear you saying like, if people approach apologetics as if they’re the teachers versus being the students. And it feels like that’s a lot of what your work talks about. It’s like you do need to know the culture you’re in. You do need to sit under it at least a little bit to say, truly understand what you’re saying about the world before I can engage it.
Josh Chatraw
Well, what in Christianity is kind of, I mean, what’s the heart of Christianity? It’s communing with the living God. It’s walking with him. And so it’s a way of life. I think when we kind of, I think sometimes just unintentionally, right? Because on one hand, we’ve got 2000 years of Christian reflection and it’s rich and it’s deep and we should be, you know, some of us are just going to just like eat that up, right? Give me more books and give me more, you know, and amen to that. When we sometimes, we can kind of, if you’re built that way, can get to become like Christianity is a math equation. You know, Christianity is a kind of data collection rather than theology is always meant to point us and the kind of thinking is pointing us to the kind of relationship with God, the communion with God, a way to walk in His presence so we can lose the communion part of Christianity, which is the heart, right? That we would know God and see Him. And so I think part of this is both living that out, but then also speaking about Christianity as more than just a clashing of worldviews, a clash of ideas, right? And I’ve got all the answers, and I’m going to smash you with those answers. Rather, it’s like, actually, I don’t always have all the answers. I think Christianity has great answers for things. Don’t get me wrong. It’s kind of what I do. But it’s actually much more than that, right? Theology is always pointing to a deeper reality.
And it’s deeper reality, and Lewis talked about this, that we have to fall into constantly, both as apologists, but also in our invitations. We’re inviting them into a reality to live forgiven and in the presence of the living God. That is the invitation, not, hey, come follow me because I’ve got all the answers, because you’ll run out of answers. OK? And if you think you have all the answers, you just haven’t been around long enough and you need to…
Tanner Fox
I was gonna say you haven’t bumped into the wrong question yet.
Josh Chatraw
Yeah, you need to read more books. You need to learn something so you learn how much you don’t know. I think that, I mean, it just shows a kind of level of naivety if you go in and say, hey, I’ve two plus two my way to God. Now, why don’t you follow my math and come along with me? That’s just not how this works.
Tanner Fox
Yeah, it’s a little different. So I kind of hear you saying as we as we turn to maybe a couple case study kind of ideas, I hear you saying paying attention to our own character and moving ourselves, paying good attention to the way that we’re engaging the world with humility and with kindness, seeing that the story of God kind of as it infiltrates ours and grace pours in as just as important probably as the ways in which we are gathering arguments or thinking through the rational ways that we would defend. There’s an apologetic of life that is deeply important. And even, I mean, there’s, I’m sure as folks are listening to this, there’s probably some conviction around like, are you a gossip? Are you lazy? Are you any of those things? Because those would in some ways portray the opposite of an apologetic of the Christian life as God has a fabric that says, here’s how I want you to live and move and be in the world.
And at the very base level, you’re not doing that. That’s troubling. But also something you said in the first episode was like being a great listener and kind of making enough space in our busy, efficient lives to to be curious and to double listen, I think is the way you talked about it from John Stott as we’re listening to the world and listening to what God’s doing. So is that a fair, relatively fair summation?
Josh Chatraw
Yeah. And I would just say one more quick thing is to say, I think part of the pressure that we feel is that we’ve, and this has come at us through a lot of different things, but we feel like apologetics or evangelism or public Christianity is about control. In other words, I’m going to be in a conversation. I need to control this conversation.
Tanner Fox
You mentioned the Enlightenment being a part of why we think that way.
Josh Chatraw
Yeah. I mentioned in last episode, but that’s kind of spilled over into kind of how we view relationships and how we view evangelism and apologetics. So I don’t want to go this way. But there’s a lot of kind of, I don’t want to go too deep here, but there’s a lot of kind of ways that speak about this as like staying in control, staying in control of the conversation. Here’s the technique. We will give you the technique and you can kind of manage this. And I’m wanting to say, well, actually this is about being attentive.
It’s about being attentive and that you’re a good reader and listener. So I think reading good books helps us become a, you know, special novels and stories help us be good listeners to the world, be listeners to people, but being also a good listener to the Spirit, being attentive to what the Spirit’s doing and not being in control. Actually, I don’t want to come in here and feel like I need to manipulate this conversation.
It doesn’t mean that I’m not kind of thinking about and understanding, trying to understand the cultural context. And I will say some things to challenge people. Absolutely. But I don’t want to mechanize this. Right? And I think when you start doing that, people start feeling that way. This is part of the scariness of it’s like, okay, I’m going to try to control you. And that’s what this is about. And so what sometimes happens is we see apologists on the debate stage and then people who are budding apologists want to take that into conversations. But that kind of genre of the debate stage, right, is not like…it’s like if you just got married and you’re just like, I’ve learned how to talk to people by looking at debates and that’s how you’re going to talk to your wife. You’re in trouble.
Tanner Fox
You might think you won a lot, you probably didn’t. Everyone lost.
Josh Chatraw
It’s that line from that old movie, White Man Can’t Jump, you know, and I just like quoting that on podcasts. It’s like, you know, when you think you win, you’ve really lost, right? And I think what happens is we go into these, you know, this one genre of kind of conversation. We think that’s what being an apologist is. And then you either run from that because we don’t want anything to do with that or we try that. And then we wonder, like, why is this not going so well in everyday conversation?
Well, because that’s a particular genre of debate, which often, not always, but can turn into just a spectacle and versus the kind of conversations that 99% of us are going to be in and the kind of engagements that 99% of us are going to be at aren’t that way. Unless our primary way of engaging is online, which is going nowhere fast. If you’re trying to deal with this in the kind of comments of social media, right? It’s going nowhere fast as far as actually persuading someone. So I think part of it is just giving up control, but I think that’s actually good news. Like, it’s not up to you. That’s actually really freeing, right? I’m free to be attentive to the spirit. I’m free to, and I know we need to get to some specific issues in this episode, so I’ll be quiet, but I would want to set that as the context. Hey, be free to just attend to this person, attend to the Spirit, and have a conversation with them. I think that takes a load of the pressure off. You’re not the Messiah, you don’t do the saving, but you can attend to this person, you can ask good questions, and you can attend to what the Spirit is doing, and be bold, absolutely be bold, be courageous, speak gospel truth, but I do think that takes the pressure off.
Tanner Fox
Yeah, just briefly, before we get into a little case study, I had a family coming in who was moving from a different faith tradition into our, hopefully into our church. And they decided they wanted to read the Westminster to figure out what we believe. And I got a phone call that said, we need to have a meeting. I have some questions. I was in my like, let’s argue this out mode, which is like, I’m a pastor. I should, I don’t know why I ever enter that mode. I shouldn’t, I just take care of people. But we get in there and they’re asking good questions and it ended up the real question they wanted to ask was around assurance of salvation. And we were talking it through rationally, logically, you know, all this sort of stuff. And then from some other training I’ve had in some therapeutic spaces, it was just like, leave it up. If there’s empty space, just leave it, see what comes of it. And so we’re sitting there and I feel like I’ve said what I’ve said and they’ve said what they’ve said and it’s just quiet. And then finally, I kind of noticed that the wife is, there’s tears running down her face and it broke the conversation into the space that it should have been in the whole time, which had everything to do with a child of theirs who was in the faith as a child and then had gone wandering for a long time. And it was just a mother who was deeply fearful for her son. And this was not a question of, do we believe alongside you guys? And can we be covenant partners in your church? These were like experiential questions and aches and longings from this woman that were such a gift for us to then be able to talk about. And it did end up in a space that had a lot to do with like, I wish I had better answers for you, but I also want you to know that I will join you in prayer for the son of yours as long as it takes. And it became a humanized, we’re not measuring notes here. We’re talking about the aches and longings of the heart. And it was just a great, it was a humiliation for me in a little bit because I had gone in with such a different spirit. Jesus was kind enough to offer me the space to get to be with them in a way that felt a good bit different and yeah, and really good and beautiful in a lot of ways.
So anyways, let’s move from there to let me give you a little scenario. So let’s just say you’re a software engineer and your team is discussing a project that is all technology, everything about it’s technology, but in the midst of the conversation, you have some moral concerns as to whether or not we’re utilizing that technology to help people or kind of exploit, you know, yeah, it’s not so far on the moral side of anything like completely grave, but just enough. It’s a gray area where you think, hey, the secular world is totally cool with this, but as a Christian, I don’t know about that. So how would you kind of bring this public faith into a conversation like that in a secular space?
Josh Chatraw
Yeah, that’s good and tricky. I didn’t get this. I didn’t get this question beforehand. Yeah. But it’s also general enough to, you know, there’s some vagueness there. And that’s OK. And how you asked it. But I think I mean, one thing is just to say some honesty, I think that’s my initial reaction. You’re welcome to chime in and save me here, Tanner. But, I think my initial reaction is just some honesty of like, I’m working through this. I’m working through this given, and some of this, just to be honest, might be my kind of own personal way I see the world, but I’m very concerned that in developing this technology, we would not be exploiting anyone in any way. And so that, I know this might be profitable for the company. This might be profitable for us, but at the end of the day, for me, if I know this is going to be exploiting people in a certain way that I would want to back out of this project or have more conversations about should the company do this or at the very least is there another way that I can be perhaps even be assigned to another project. But I’m still working through that. I’m assuming that some companies might, and some coworkers might engage you in that and some might just look at you like you have, you know, three eyes or something. But I think, I would at least want to speak to that, right? And say, this is where I’m at. Or at least this is what I’m working through. I know that again, that’s my initial reaction. I know that there might be some companies that you don’t have that freedom to kind of say that, or you don’t feel that freedom to say that.
And I think that can be said with a kind of humility, which isn’t like, all of these scoundrels don’t care about this, but I do. I think there’s a way to kind of get at that where you’re saying, I’m working through this one. And what you described, it’s a gray area. You know, you’re just like, hey, I’m working through this. You know, there’s still a kind of…the theologian Oliver Donovan talks about, he talks about the crater marks of the gospel and how the gospel in the Western society has kind of left these craters. Well, people who aren’t religious still or who aren’t Christians still feel certain Christian values. Things like, well, we shouldn’t exploit people or, you know, there should be consent, right? That there should be consent in relationships and other values that Christianity brought to the world. And I think that sometimes these things can be shared when you express those people and you’re willing to express those people will say, yeah, you know, that’s a good point. I haven’t thought about that. Sometimes you can have…even co-belligerence is, you know, the language sometimes used with people who don’t, who don’t agree with your beliefs in God and beliefs in Christ, but they have these ethical values that they actually share with you. And then all of sudden you have something in common, which, could over beers or coffee later, you know, I’m Baptist so it would probably be coffee, these things can be talked about, right? And you can pick up on that. Now you have something in common. And when they see the kind of courage that you’re willing to, in a humble way, just kind of say, hang on, what are we doing here, guys? What do you think, Tanner?
Tanner Fox
Yeah, I love that. I think it answers kind of both sides of that question because I think, you know, if you’re thinking about public Witness then it has something to do with having convictions around the things that you do or don’t do in the workplace and so to draw the conversation back to a values conversation, are we first and foremost for our client and do we do we want what’s best for them? You know, if we’re doing something that might lead them down, let’s say with the technology like a more addictive way of using our technology, is that really for the good of our client? Clearly it’s good for the bottom line, but is it good for the way that we view humanity and the part we want to play in people’s lives? And maybe you do get overridden, right? Maybe you’re the lowest on the totem pole on that, but I can imagine a world where that opens a conversation with other coworkers over a coffee or something that gives you the space to say, we actually do have some strong convictions about how people are made and what they were made for and.
Or even, I’d just love to hear what y’all think people are made for. And I love the way that that could become a conversation long term as you get to kind of bear witness to your beliefs and convictions, but also to, yeah, maybe push against, or who knows? I mean, as you said, the fabric of the world is built by the Lord. And so I think the more we lean into it, whether it’s professionally, institutionally, or individually and organically, is going to be better for us in the long term. And I think you even see that across some spheres right now in terms of the ways that some tech companies are kind of being looked at as like, wow, you guys are, you know, what we thought was just a really great way to connect is actually a way to make people, you know, deeply addicted and more lonely. Like, is that so good that you did that the way that you did that and built algorithms to keep people locked into your stuff for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours? Like, are you contributing to the problem or the solution as a social, you know, connecting networking space?
I think that’s really helpful. Why don’t we do one more and then we’ll call it a day. So let’s say you are in some form of leadership in a local nonprofit and part of the work is to connect with other nonprofits in the city and you end up with a group of folks that have very varying beliefs and worldviews but potentially or possibly maybe deeply progressive and you guys just see the world very differently.
How would you engage that space, or maybe even what kind of counsel would you give someone who is walking into those spaces where collaboration is necessary for the good of the city, but there are just competing ways of seeing the world?
Josh Chatraw
I think a couple of things. One, I would say transparency is really important to be able to say, hey, look, let’s not be under any false pretense here. You know, just like we want to work with you guys because we think we agree on this. Like, you know, I don’t know what it is, and we actually want to care for the poor in our community. It seems like you guys want to do that too. And we want to do that.
So we think there’s an opportunity that we might be able to help each other with this task, right? But at the same time, we don’t want to be under any false pretense in you guys imagining that somehow we embrace all of what you embrace. And I think it’s important for our people to know that too, right? And so if you’re in an organization that’s, don’t, if I’m understanding the question correctly, a church or a Christian organization, to be able to say, hey, we’re partnering with this group, we’ve been very clear to them kind of what our views are. And we also want to be very clear with you where we disagree with them at. And yet there’s an opportunity for us because we do overlap in this particular aim. And it’s also an opportunity for us to rub shoulders with people who don’t agree with us, who don’t see the world like us. It seems like, you know, Jesus did that kind of thing.
And so I think it’s really, really important on the front end, if you’re on a Christian organization, to be really clear about what you’re doing because of our world now where just everybody’s kind of always looking and is really like, hey, what’s going on? How could we be engaging, you know, even in non-official ways with this other group where everyone has to pick a side?
It seems like when you do that, you end up with these pockets, right? And we never speak to each other and we dehumanize each other. But part of the issue is because we’re part of this polarization in the church, a lot of people will misunderstand what you’re doing and you’re not doing. So it seems to me that you would need to do some teaching on the front end and also just be really deliberate about having these conversations with all parties.
So that’s some of my initial thoughts. Am I getting at the question or you want to add to this, Tanner?
Tanner Fox
Yeah, I think so, because I think as Christians we can sometimes have the challenge of thinking…We have a hard time figuring out where to draw the line in terms of partnership and not partnership if worldviews aren’t aligning, you know? And so I think that’s a challenging thing. I was the Pastor of Mission here before I took over discipleship and we did a lot of stuff for the homeless community and so those partnerships were varied, you know, in a lot of different ways, trying to figure out, can we partner with the city? They’re asking us to do certain things. Local government’s asking us to not do certain things in order for us to be considered a partner. At what point does faithful witness go to the wayside and how do we understand where that line is? Or if I’m thinking about friends who are on local businesses and they want to be a part of smaller groups of small businesses that want to serve the community but also stick up for one another, but maybe there’s strongly varying understanding of worldviews in those spaces and just, how do they engage those things. So yeah, I think it’s kind of about common grace for the common good. How do we be here? And what would be, at what point are we giving away too much, maybe is another way to ask it as Christians.
Josh Chatraw
Yeah, those are often wisdom, right? And I think those are wisdom things rather than it’s always just so black and white clear. I think there’s a…and hey, look, I mean, as I mentioned before, Jesus wasn’t overly concerned about, didn’t seem overly concerned about what those religious elite were going to think about him because he was hanging out with the tax collectors and prostitutes. But, you know, I mean, let’s just face it. I mean, we’re in a cancel culture. We’re in a culture where there’s a lot of guilt by association. And so the ability, if we’re paralyzed by that, the ability to actually go and engage the local city government or engage this group and actually maybe work together while at the same time bearing witness to them as you’re doing becomes hampered because your biggest fear is being called a name by, you know, the Christians on the other side of town or somebody on social media. And I think we have to be aware of that. We have to be aware of the confusion that once you get called that name is going to ensue within your organization or within your church. And so if you haven’t preemptively kind of done the work of like, are we doing? Why are we doing? Let’s work this out as a group of leaders. Let’s communicate it. Let’s dialogue as a community. And then you run into it. It’s going to be like chaos on the back end, right? But if you say, hey, here’s our priorities. Here’s some lines that we’ve drawn. Let’s all think about this together. And then when it pops up, because somebody is not going to love the fact that we’re working with a city government because, you know, for whatever reason, then we’ve actually had this conversation on the front end. And so, but it also all that takes courage too, right? I mean, I think it takes courage. It’s a lot easier just to stay in our silos. It’s a lot easier just to say, you know, we’re only going to work with, we’re only going to really engage and we’re only going to kind of cooperate with people who believe exactly the same things as us on every single thing. But then you actually, people are left to just their own imaginations or what they see on social media to kind of, you know, about Christians. So I do think we need some front porch spaces. We need some places in our community where we can gather and we can cooperate and we can engage. And all of that, we need to humanize one another.
That’s so important, that kind of work of just, we, and I think some of it can be official and sometimes it’s just wiser that it’s more organic. And I get that. so, okay, well, maybe we don’t wanna, because this gets really complicated, maybe we don’t wanna go into any kind of official mode, but how can we organically be there? How can we be there when, and help serve just as a group from our church who shows up to help on cleanup day, knowing that there’s other groups in charge of it and we don’t want to know, rile things up, but can we show up as a group and engage in as individuals, but there as a kind of community unofficially there to serve the poor in our community in that example. So I think there’s ways we can be creative on this and not everything has to be officially, you know, done.
Tanner Fox
Yeah, it was in our little example, we ended up really just bumping into our own limits. Like we don’t know what we don’t know about how to do this. And so it was actually more out of our need to partner than theirs, which put us in this position of humility. Honestly, that was just like, if y’all don’t help us out, we’re going to, we’re going to keep spending the same amount of money with a lot less effectiveness. But if we can partner with you, like this will, this will be a real gift to us. And, and I really think for our folks, it was more just engaging the conversation and for them to know it was well thought through. That it wasn’t just something flippant like, we just jumped into an idea. But instead it was like, we really think like for the common good of this city, this would be a really, you know, wise move. I think you mentioned that as like the way, yeah, I think the principle there that helped me is the idea that, you know, in terms of our continued walk with the Lord, it will be one where we’re constantly looking up saying like, is this right Lord? Is this where you want me to go? Is this a partnership I should engage or not? And sometimes it’ll feel black and white and a lot of times it maybe won’t. And you’ll just be, you know, leaning into the faith side of what that looks like in terms of faithfulness. So that’s awesome. Well, how about this? The very end here, what might be one thing a business leader or lay person in our church or that’s listening to this podcast could do in this next week or so to start to engage the world of sharing their faith?
Josh Chatraw
Yeah, I would say invite somebody out for coffee or into your home for a cup of coffee that you haven’t attended to. And without any kind of pressure that says, OK, I’ve got to give a full gospel conversation, but just go into that. Asking questions, asking, having thought through, there’s a great little book by David Brooks on, I think it’s like how to know a person. And it’s a wonderful, I mean, it’s got different elements that are helpful, but I think some of the best parts are just the practical parts of learning to listen and learning how to really know a person. And so if you did that over the next two weeks, if you just said, there’s somebody who started at work or somebody I don’t really know that well. I’m just going to invite them for a couple of calls. I’m going to take the initiative and I’m going to, you know, nothing that maybe will make me feel super weird or awkward. Maybe a neutral space rather than your own home. But, I think that can, and not putting too much pressure on yourself to say, I’ve got to, I got to argue, I got to argue them into, but it, but also being open to doing that as well. That you could bear witness, being attentive to the Spirit and being open to being bold, but at least beginning with a kind of holy curiosity and maybe I’ll just add to that look for somebody who look for somebody who’s maybe quiet or is lonely or is it’s not is actually…kind of have your antenna up for people who aren’t…maybe just that person you’re dying to spend time with, but somebody who needs some kind of care and attention. Have those people on your radar screen. Often what I find on this is that in our kind of world of optimization and efficiency, it’s really striking when someone takes the time to try to know somebody, to ask them their story. Even if you don’t in that conversation get to the gospel, I think there’s a kind of way you’re bearing witness in that you care for that person and you’re humanizing them and you’re telling them in so many words, I see you, and establishing that kind of communion with another human, I think it becomes a lot easier to point them to their need for communion with God.
Tanner Fox
Yeah, it would be very hard to cure a soul apart from knowing it and what its maladies are. So that’s wonderful. Josh, thank you so much for your time, both in our first episode and in the second. Just as a reminder, folks, Josh has a lot of great books out there. The Augustine Way, Apologetics at the Cross, and it will have a bit of a facelift coming sometime next year. So that’s exciting, Telling a Better Story again is one my favorites and then again our current, this is the one I’ve read the most from you right now. I’d love to go back to the other ones but even the children’s book is such a joy around our house. So make sure you pick some of those resources up. I know Josh said that the first thing to do is invite people to coffee but I will say quite honestly, Apologetics at the Cross has been an unbelievably accessible resource when it comes to thinking through a reasonable way to engage people’s stories and then draw them near to the foot of the cross and the crucified Christ and the risen Christ. And so I cannot recommend that enough. And I didn’t say this earlier, but it also has such a great history of apologetics as well. So it gives you not only the landscape, but also how to move forward, which I think is so good. So great.
Friends, thanks so much for being with us here at Nuance. We are wanting to continue this conversation that folks can be formed for faithfulness, that people can engage the public square in ways that feel like they are walking in step with the Spirit and living lives that are beautiful in the likeness of Jesus and all the places where they live, work, play. So thank you for joining. Make sure you like and subscribe and share around as you can. We’d love more folks in these conversations as we try to, as I said, just live faithfully.
So glad to have you with us, Josh, again. Thanks so much and praying blessings over you as you continue this work of sabbatical and writing and all that fun stuff. And let me close with a short benediction and we’ll be done.
May the Lord bless you and keep you, may He make His face to shine upon you, may He be gracious to you in every way and give you peace. In name of the Father, the Son Jesus, and the Holy Spirit.
