[00:00:00] Speaker A: I love to surf, love music.
[00:00:07] Speaker B: Love Mexican food.
[00:00:08] Speaker A: I know, love Mexican food.
Yeah, that's a little background.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: That's great.
Hello, collective table. Hi, I'm Janelle Coker. Welcome back.
This is episode three of season 11, the case for Empathy.
We are making our way through six stories of people just like you who have something to say about their empathetic journey of faith.
This is David's story.
David was raised in the shadow of palm trees and tract homes.
Think back to Southern California suburbia in the 1960s.
His family was middle class, the kind of family you'd find in the pews every Sunday at First Baptist Church.
[00:01:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I grew up in a place called La Crescenta, which is a suburb of Los Angeles.
We were a middle class, classic Southern California middle class family.
Went to First Baptist Church all my life and we were actively involved in that church. I was raised from a very early age and it was a classic evangelical church, Bible believing.
Had a great youth group that I was involved with and I went to school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, got into mainly marine biology and with that I was able to join the Peace Corps and lived overseas for a couple years doing marine fisheries advisory work and came back, met my wife and we went back to the Cook Islands for a couple years and then came back and came to San Diego and been here since like 1990. Have two kids. They're growing up now.
[00:02:12] Speaker B: So I didn't know David as a teen, but I can imagine him, he is the quintessential coastal Californian, cool, a bit laid back and loves the outdoors.
David said he wasn't the rebellious type. He took faith seriously. Balancing his desire to live a set apart Christian life with the tug of wanting to be relevant to his peers.
It sounds like he was an all around good guy trying to live a good life.
[00:02:43] Speaker A: Growing up, you know, I would say I'm generally a compliant child or, and being taught at an early age and that was normal. And yeah, I pretty much accepted that. And growing up in like high school, trying to take it seriously, I guess you'd say, and wanting to be serious about my faith, trying to live a Christian life, setting, setting myself apart from what maybe other people were getting involved in and, but still trying to be, you know, relevant.
And I think, you know, it now characterizes kind of a focus on sin management.
[00:03:29] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:03:30] Speaker A: And you know, just kind of not smoking, drinking, partying, you know, even though I was tempted and I wasn't perfect in, in trying to stay away from those things. But that was definitely a big Part of my consciousness.
[00:03:45] Speaker B: Yet beneath just the rule, keeping something deeper resonated Jesus. Radical empathy, his boundary crossing love.
[00:03:56] Speaker A: When I look back, I was always, as I grew up and thought more about Jesus and what he did, I was always struck by, by, but just Jesus showing love to the people that aren't loved by normal society just stepping out and living a life of self sacrifice, teaching us to love our enemies and really cutting to the core of what it means to be a follower of his. And so that always kind of really resonated with me, I guess. So early on I had this kind of consciousness of trying to help, you know, underprivileged people. Like I'd bring, you know, people that I picked up hitchhiking to my dorm room in college to help them out, give them a meal or, you know, but I was also just very into like trying to be an apologist, you know, defending the faith.
So I had those kind of two things going on.
[00:05:00] Speaker B: Apologetics, that's the churchy word for defending your faith. With an argument and evidence in the right setting, it really can be helpful.
Sometimes it's about making sense of your own doubts.
Sometimes it's about having language when someone else asks a hard question.
But here's the catch.
Apologetics can also get in the way.
When you're more focused on having the right answers than actually listening, faith stops being about love and starts sounding a lot like a terrible argument around the Thanksgiving table.
And that tension, the pull between compassion and argument, was already baked into David's life of faith.
So picture this.
David is stepping onto the campus of Cal Poly, heading into biology lectures where Darwin and evolution are the air you breathe.
Meanwhile, back in the Baptist churches he grew up in, creationism was a non negotiable. In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth, almost a badge of true belief.
[00:06:27] Speaker A: The whole thing about creationism was raised as such a gauntlet, as a litmus test of whether you're really a true Christian or not.
[00:06:37] Speaker B: David didn't just stumble into that debate, he walked right into the middle of it. He had chosen biology as his field of study.
And that choice, every class, every textbook, I imagine late night conversations in the dorms would challenge the arguments he had been handed growing up.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Yeah, it was always being presented in the biology class, you know, the theory of evolution. And over time, you know, I would have first a reaction of no, God created everything in seven days kind of thing. But the more and more I learned about the theory, the more I understood it. There was really no threat to me. To believe in that.
[00:07:29] Speaker B: The study of science and David's love for biology was a place where he began to learn that his faith paradigm was maybe a bit too small for the world he was walking into.
It may have been the start of his deconstruction.
Still, the cultural pressures of the evangelical world was strong.
Even though he may have made room for an evolutionary theory, his understanding of hell and evangelism was still very heavy on his mind.
[00:08:04] Speaker A: I definitely felt the weight of responsibility to evangelize. That was something that was really emphasized that we need to be a witness and think of in those terms in any relationship. Is there a way to squeeze in, you know, some way to witness? So I did take that seriously. But I have to admit, I was never that good at it.
So I really took on lifestyle evangelism. That was something, you know, just trying to be a good person, you know, show people love, not necessarily trying to convince them to accept Jesus in their heart on the spot or something like that, because I was never really good at that.
[00:08:43] Speaker B: And with that tension of internal empathy and external pressure of purity, culture, and friendship, evangelism, David carried his faith into adulthood.
[00:09:10] Speaker C: Hey, everyone, it's cj. We hope you're enjoying the collective table and finding something meaningful here, something that connects with your heart and your journey. If you are, we'd love for you to help others find it too. The best way to do that is simple. Rate and follow the collective table wherever you listen to podcasts. When you follow, you'll never miss a new episode. And when you leave a rating or a short review, it helps more people discover this community of love, liberation, and faith in action.
And while you're at it, share an episode with a friend, someone you think might find encouragement, hope, or inspiration in these conversations.
It only takes a moment, but it makes a big difference. So go ahead, tap that follow button, leave us a quick review, and share the collective table with someone who could use it today.
Thanks for listening and for being a part of the collective table.
[00:10:13] Speaker B: To understand David's inner tension, we need to zoom out for a second picture. The mid to late 20th century America is changing.
Mainline churches are shrinking, and evangelicalism is gearing up for a growth spurt.
This was the age of the church growth movement, when Christianity in America started sounding less like a church service and more like a business seminar.
Donald McGaveran, widely considered the architect of this movement, basically told churches, hey, don't just preach market.
Don't just love your neighbors. Analyze them.
And churches jumped on board.
All of a sudden, your Neighborhood wasn't a community anymore. It was a mission field to be penetrated.
Translation. Put up billboards, get a cool logo, hire a worship band that sounds like the Eagles, and boom. Call it outreach.
Here's the bigger shift, though. For generations, churches poured resources into hospitals, schools, and social service agencies.
Think the Salvation Army. Think ymca. Boots on the ground, love in action. But around the 1970s, a lot of churches stopped asking, how do we serve our neighbors? And started asking, how do we get our neighbors inside our building?
Let me add a thought here.
Jason and I walk this line at the Oceanside Sanctuary. We have a great worship band, and we do want people in the pews.
I personally love our logo.
If people don't join in the effort, we can't be effective in our greater community.
Church growth isn't bad, and I don't think McGovern had bad intentions. But along the way, much of the evangelical church started to forget what the church was for.
And this is where the definition of the poor is hijacked.
Historically, the poor meant, well, people who couldn't afford to pay their rent or feed their kids.
But in this shiny new church growth era, poverty got spiritualized.
Hungry.
That doesn't mean you need bread.
It means you need Jesus in prison.
That's not about incarceration anymore.
It's about being chained to sin.
Needy.
Don't worry, that's just Christianese for doesn't have a personal relationship with Christ.
This neat little reframing let churches sidestep the the messy and expensive work of caring for the functionally poor, the folks who didn't have much to give back in tithes or time.
Instead, churches started chasing the spiritually poor, who were conveniently already middle class and ready to fill offering plates.
Poverty got rebranded as an internal defect rather than an economic injustice.
And of course, we didn't stop there.
We tossed in the oldies and the goodies of hell, shame and a good dose of fear. Unconverted men walk over the pit of.
[00:13:58] Speaker C: Hell on a rock.
[00:13:58] Speaker B: And covering faith became a personal salvation project.
And the church's success was measured not by whether the hungry were fed, but by how many people got saved and whether teenagers specifically checked all the boxes. No sex, no queerness, no questions about the Bible.
The whole thing created what I'd call a toxic stew.
Instead of the church existing for the world, the world now existed for the church.
Getting back to David's story, with the church growth movement sweeping the nation, David got swept right along with it.
He and his family went to a big church and tried to be good Christians. His wife worked in Sunday school and they moved through life.
But ideas of hell and good people being sent there by a loving God caused him to feel the dissonance.
[00:15:05] Speaker A: So I felt like this weird tension of how I would judge. Like I would feel like, oh, you may be doing that, but the verse our righteousness is as filthy rags. And that's what I would say in my mind, like, okay, you know, yeah, they're doing better than you, but their righteousness is a filthy rag. So they're still a sinner going to hell unless you convince them or they see the light or.
[00:15:32] Speaker B: Let me add a little bit of context here and take you back in time.
The Rapture and the End Times were big topics of discussion and an entire generation of people grew up thinking that if they were not on the straight and narrow path, Jesus was going to come and take their entire family and they would be left behind.
Some of you may remember the fictional Christian books the Left behind series.
Anyone? Anyone?
The Left behind series is a faith based novel depicting the Christian Rapture where the true believers are taken to heaven, leaving behind a chaotic post apocalyptic world and its remaining inhabitants to face the Antichrist during the tribulation period.
Many who read this series struggled to distinguish it as a fictional book that lacked theological depth.
Sermons were preached, youth groups started book clubs and the authors pushed the narrative and that this was indeed a prophetic view into the near future.
As the years went on, mental health professionals started to document a new source of trauma often thought to be caused from this series called Rapture Anxiety.
A study by Yale University showed concerns of serious damage where individuals had deep fear of being left behind for not being a true enough Christian. This anxiety was especially prevalent in children and teens and manifested in four ways.
1.
Constant self doubt Many young Christians grew up believing that any sin or spiritual misstep would cause them to be passed over in the Rapture.
Number two widespread panic.
Some have reported waking up to a quiet house and instantly fearing their family had been raptured without them.
Number three guilt and self blame.
The books implied that even a moment of doubt could lead to eternal damnation.
And finally, number four, abandonment issues.
The core premise of the Rapture is a sudden mass disappearance, which for a child could manifest as a profound fear of abandonment by their parents or other loved ones.
I share this with you friends, not because David brought this up in his interview, but so you can better understand the waters David and his family were swimming in as American evangelicals or even to take a look down the road from the 90s to now and see how our political unrest, lack of theological integrity, and even all the grandmas out there clutching their pearls when their grandkids expressed natural doubt may all be from a fear of dispensational premillennialism.
All of this was based on a fringe non historical interpretation of the Book of Revelation.
And if all of that wasn't enough, then came the questions at home.
Honest, personal, impossible to ignore.
[00:19:31] Speaker A: Interacting with my daughter and her expressing concern about the Christian viewpoint of gay and lesbian people and her friends and that they can't be fully accepted in the church. And she had a real trouble with that.
And I used to try to explain away that and, you know, love the sinner, but hate the sin.
Seeing her work through her faith and questioning really helped me see that I needed to do that too.
[00:20:12] Speaker B: Travel cracked things open in a different way. David started to see the goodness in others even when they didn't have the same views that he did.
[00:20:22] Speaker A: The taxi driver was a Muslim man and I think it was Ramadan and he was just the kindest man and he ended up just talking to us and ended up inviting us over to his house for dinner and they were just breaking their fast.
And the love that I saw displayed by them accepting a stranger into their home, it was just pure kindness and love shown to stranger and that always just totally blew me away.
[00:20:59] Speaker B: Little by little, the scaffolding of fear and performance began to loosen.
David didn't throw his faith out. He reframed it around love, presence and dignity.
Foreign.
[00:21:27] Speaker C: Table listeners, It's CJ again. A lot of people out there might not realize that this podcast is part of a real life faith community. The Collective Table podcast is a production of the Oceanside Sanctuary, a progressive Christian community whose mission is to foster collective expressions of inclusive, inspiring and impactful Christian spirituality wherever it is needed. And as a 501c3 nonprofit organization, that mission is only possible because of the generosity of people just like you. So if you believe in what we are doing, if you benefit from this mission, please Visit
[email protected] Give to become a supporter today. Together we can keep building communities of love and liberation.
[00:22:22] Speaker B: On the far side of certainty. David didn't find emptiness, he found empathy.
What had always been there in him began to lead again.
[00:22:32] Speaker A: Now I kind of look at everyone as a child of God and to me that's the good news.
I don't believe I need to save anyone now. Whenever I meet someone, there's no preset agenda that I Have, other than I just want to get to know you. Tell me your story.
[00:22:52] Speaker B: That posture met real life in one of the hardest seasons a person can face.
David's son, Garrison, was diagnosed with cancer as a young adult.
And while his family faced treatments and uncertainty, David was also in the middle of deconstructing his faith.
[00:23:15] Speaker A: Going through that experience, I'm sure any parent will say with a child is.
I mean, I'm still probably processing trauma from that whole experience.
And yeah, being in the moment and going through deconstruction at the same time.
I didn't look at it as, I need to pray so that God will heal you. Understanding that it may not turn out well, hope that it turns out well, but it may not. And just, I guess, in a sense, being not comfortable, but understanding better and having less expectation that through prayers of myself and a lot of other people, that he's going to be healed or something.
[00:24:09] Speaker B: The old impulse toward control lost its grip.
I asked David if he missed the certainty.
[00:24:17] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, that has a certain appeal, if it really worked, like, you know, so, yeah, in a sense, I do miss it, but at the same time, I don't. What I see, what I observed in myself is this whole thing where it's all up to you and your faith. Be confident that God's going to heal you. And even to the point of maybe saying, oh, I don't need to go see a doctor anymore because I know I'm going to get healed. And that's like, whoa, on one hand, oh, what strong faith you have.
And that being kind of the gold standard.
[00:24:58] Speaker B: And on the other hand, it seems like incredible foolishness, right? Yeah. Yeah.
This lack of control in the midst of his son's illness drew David back to the point of faith. Living in peace even when things are uncertain, seeing his own place in the world of faith through love, kindness, and Jesus.
[00:25:21] Speaker A: Just like I was saying, just drawing back to Jesus is the example of what empathy is. And basically helping those less fortunate than you and being conscious of that, even to the point where it may upset your own power and privilege.
But we're being presented in our country right now this choice that you can either follow the true path of Jesus or protect your power and privilege in the name of God. It's all wrapped up in superficial religiosity. The Christian nationalism versus doing what I think Jesus really wanted us to do.
[00:26:11] Speaker B: So did you hear him, dear listener? Did you hear David?
A white educated, professional man says this way of seeing Christ upset his own privilege and power.
This willingness to Interrogate. His place in the world is powerful and commendable.
He proves a point that. That Valerie Carr made in a past episode.
Let's listen to a few of her words now.
[00:26:41] Speaker D: I'm just rereading Isabel Wilkerson's book Cast and her gorgeous, gorgeous metaphor of, like, walking into the darkened theater and being shown your seat. This is the role because of your race, because of your position, because of your color, because of your status. Like, this is the role you're playing. And if we're just unthinkingly taking our seats in the hierarchy, unthinkingly taking our roles in the institutions that we've inherited, then nothing will ever change. I mean, that's exactly how it's been perpetrated, perpetrated generation after generation after generation. And so to wake up to that requires an internal transformation. And it's uncomfortable because it's threatening, you know, especially if you're someone who's. Who's gained benefits or privileges from your particular seat in the theater.
You know, to be able to be.
[00:27:27] Speaker B: Able to wake up.
[00:27:27] Speaker D: Up to how much of that was unearned, or to be able to wake up to how much you've been complicit. Even though you're a good person. You are. We're all good people, and yet we've been thrown into this society where we're all given these social locations that either uplift or demean other people.
So the waking is the reckoning with white privilege, the waking with all. You know, the waking is the. Is also waking up to the fact that it ought not be this way and that to undo it actually requires a lot of disruption. And there is some cost. There is some risk that you will lose your reputation or popularity or some segment of your resources. You will lose the narratives, the stories that you told yourself about who you are and what this country is. That's the grieving I'm talking about. It's like the waking comes with grieving, with these things that we've just relied on. But the promise is that on the other side is like more beautiful solidarities that you could not have imagined before.
[00:28:30] Speaker B: This hasn't all been easy.
David's path of deconstruction and finding faith rooted in love has cost him.
[00:28:39] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, definitely lost relationships and there's strain. So, no, it's not all been easy by any means, but overall, I'm very thankful to be on this journey. And I wouldn't, you know, would not go back.
It's tricky and it's difficult and not easy. Yeah. It would be so much simpler to not have deconstructed, but I'm very thankful.
[00:29:08] Speaker B: And yet the everyday posture is clear now.
[00:29:13] Speaker A: It's just so refreshing to just meet people of all walks and like.
If we want to talk about God and faith, that's great. If not, I'm just more interested in what you do as a person. And I think if there is a God, if there's a Divine, I think that's what they would expect too. The divine wants us to just love and be accepting.
[00:29:41] Speaker B: David didn't have to question his seat in the theater.
He could have stayed comfortable, kept his privilege and held on to the power handed to him.
But instead he chose the way of Jesus.
Well, thanks for your bravery and your willingness to do it. And we appreciate you. Thanks for being here.
[00:30:13] Speaker A: Well, thank you.
[00:30:15] Speaker B: That's a wrap. Nico, thank you for joining us for the Collective Table podcast, a ministry of the Oceanside Sanctuary.
We hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, if you did, we'd love your help in sharing the Collective Table.
Follow us. Leave us a 5 star rating post about the podcast on social media or share it directly with someone you think would enjoy it too.
The Collective Table is created by Jason and Janelle Coker and directed and edited by Nico Butler.
May the peace of God be with you and may you have a wonderful week ahead.
