The popularity of short term missions continues to increase year after year, and for many it has become a regular part of our Christian practice. And yet, there are so many ways in which our efforts can cause harm, not only to those with whom we visit, but even to the team that is making the effort. In this episode we focus on the reasons why short term mission trips can be harmful and question whether the practice should continue. We discuss examples of the ways this harm comes about and the American values and attitudes we inadvertently bring into short term missions. We end the episode with helpful tips for those who wish to continue to engage with short term missions, referencing the book When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert, whose work we suggest should be a prerequisite for any short term team traveling domestically or internationally.

In this episode, we answer a viewer’s question about what the work of Bible translation involves, and whether God would allow the scriptures to be inaccurately translated. Our conversation begins with an acknowledgement that even the most conservative views on the inerrancy and infallibility of scripture affirm that these views only apply to the original manuscripts, and not to translations, and those original manuscripts are no longer available to us. For that reason, even before we consider translation, we need to be familiar with the scholarship involved in the transmission of the text, the field of study that seeks to recover the text of the original manuscripts by studying the thousands of copies that we do have. Contrary to the common notion that the books of the Bible have been changed so many times that we cannot be sure of its original text, we reference those scholars who do not subscribe to the Christian faith but who nonetheless attest to the remarkable care in which the Bible was transmitted. We then consider the challenge of translating from the foreign languages in which the scripture was written by the biblical authors, and acknowledge the interpretive decisions that need to be made anytime we translate any writing into a different language. Those decisions and the implicit theological positions of the translators can result in slightly different translations of certain words, some better than others. Finally, we conclude with a genuine note of thankfulness to God for the fact that we have so many translations available to us, even while acknowledging that some people groups still have none in their language.

As followers of Jesus, we are to steward every gift that God has given us for the sake of Jesus as citizens of His kingdom. Jesus and the apostles did not have the right to vote, but we live in a country where we do have that right. How are we to steward the privilege of voting for the sake of Jesus and His kingdom? In this episode we explore the difference between voting and rooting, and how we can know which one we are doing. We also talk about the impact of voting on local issues and local candidates, rather than obsessing about national politics, and how much more of an impact our vote makes in the local context. Stewarding our vote also requires that we become educated about the candidates and the issues, putting in the work to be well informed long before we are asked to cast our vote. We also explore how we can love our neighbors – and even our enemies – in the ways that we vote, and how the way we vote has become one of the most visible aspects of the public witness of Christians to the broader society. Finally, we ask if there are times that we shouldn’t vote, and whether there is any truth to the idea that voting (or not voting) for certain candidates is a sin.

Many of us are aware from our own experience that young people who grew up in the faith appear to be leaving the church in greater numbers. In this episode, we look at some of the top reasons cited by researchers who survey young adults about why they are leaving the church, and sometimes also leaving the faith. We talk about the impact that parents have on the faith of their young adult children, how the church’s elevation of political ideologies is increasingly cited as a reason young people are leaving a church, and how moving to a new town can often make it hard to re-engage with a new church. We also share some of our own observations from our years of experience working in young adult ministry, including how churches often want to have young adults attend their churches, but are often unwilling to make any of the changes that would truly engage young adults or make room for them at the table in a meaningful way. We end the episode with a description of the model of dialogical engagement that we have used for close to two decades in young adult ministry and ask why churches have an aversion to a method that has been statistically shown to have a significant impact on propelling young adults towards a resilient faith.

Christians are not known for stewarding the earth. Instead, the majority of Christians appear to care very little about the planet and are often more concerned about discrediting any view that human activity is a factor in the changing climate. What is behind the refusal of so many Christians to work toward the scriptural mandate to care for the earth? Do political views end up having more of an influence on our action or inaction than our God-given vocation to steward the planet? In this episode, we meet Dr. Steven Fitch, who has led several Christian organizations that have planted more than a billion trees in an effort to reforest impoverished countries through employment resulting in poverty relief and sustainable economic development. Through his example and the observations made on this episode, our goal is to show how Christians should be leading the way in tackling these issues as those God has entrusted to manage His creation.

We may not even be aware how our attitudes about the flag and its display in houses of worship conflates our faith with our positive feelings about the country. One of the ways we can assess our own hearts on this issue comes when we consider what happens when we relocate the flag or remove it altogether. In this episode, we examine how the flag becomes commingled with our Christian faith, often representing a belief that God has blessed the United States in a way that He has not blessed other countries. Even a majority of pastors believe that patriotic elements should be incorporated into the worship services on certain holiday weekends, while those same pastors report that their congregations sometimes love the country more than they love God. We ask whether American Christians have a unique fondness of flags and pledges, creating new ways to praise Christians flags and the Bible, and how these well-intentioned but misplaced allegiances can take us from the person of Jesus.

We respond to a listener’s question and wrestle with the fact that the Old Testament did not abolish slavery, but actually endorsed the slavery of foreigners. While most of the slavery described in the Old Testament was debt-servanthood, and the Old Testament law provided protections and limitations around the practice that included the forgiveness of all debts and the six-year redemption of those in bond servanthood, the Old Testament also endorsed the chattel slavery of neighboring countries and foreigners living temporarily in the land of Israel. We discuss how the serious scholarship on this subject dispenses with many of the arguments advanced by Christian apologists, while discussing our honest confusion over the fact that the Bible does not contain an outright abolition of slavery. At the same time, we point out that it was the very teachings of Jesus and the New Testament writers, built on the legacy of the Old Testament law, that laid the foundation for our modern views related to human rights, anti-discrimination, equality, and dignity of all persons, and that ultimately to the abolition of slavery. Our goal in this episode is to demonstrate our willingness to study deeply, wrestle with troubling issues honestly, and still faithfully follow Jesus by trusting that – while our knowledge of God will always be incomplete – we are ultimately putting our trust in the person of Jesus, and not in having certainty about the answer to every question we may ever pose about the Bible.

Americans are known for their rugged individualism. But our value of individualism and wanting to be at the center of every narrative can derail our efforts to follow Jesus. In this episode, we examine the ways that our culture – and even our churches – have reinforced the idea that we are the main character in our worship and in our reading of the biblical narrative. We discuss how this focus on ourselves shows up in subtle and not so subtle ways, and our discussions seeks to show how inserting ourselves at the center robs us of the richness found in being an integral part of the united people of God. Our affirmation is that Jesus is the main character of the scriptures and of all of cosmic history, and that finding our true place as part of His body is an important part of following Jesus as our Lord.