Speaker 1Hello and welcome. My name is Yinka Dawson and I'm the host of Practice in the Way with John Mark Homer, a podcast featuring teachings and conversations with John Mark and other voices to help us journey into a deeper life with God in the modern world. Today we're continuing our series Water from a Deep Well with John Mark and Dr. Gerald Sitzer, which explores the rich history of Christian spirituality and how we can learn from and practice the wisdom of early followers of Jesus in their unique eras. In this episode, John Mark and Dr. Sitzer uncover one quality that stands out in their journey through 2,000 years of Christian history, from the lives of saints and martyrs to missionaries and laity, the virtue of resilience. Here is John Mark.
Speaker 2Welcome back to the final episode of Water from a Deep Well. Dr. Sitzer, it has been a wild ride, not just through 2,000 years. We've covered a lot of ground and now to tie off our set of conversations, we want to find a bit of a through line that runs all the way from the New Testament up to the present day. In your closing chapter, you wrote a new chapter for the second edition of Water from a Deep Well. You write this, the martyrs call us to pray. proclaim Jesus as Lord, and the desert saints to fight against the world, the flesh, and the devil. The early church challenges us to create a community of belonging for broken, displaced, disconnected people. Medieval monks invite us to abide by healthy rhythms, mendicants to imitate the life of Christ, and mystics to seek union with God. The reformers urge us to study the word of God, evangelicals to surrender our lives to it, and missionaries to proclaim it to the world. The stories of these saints are at our disposal to enlarge, enrich, and warn us. There is more, they tell us, so much more. I love that. That's good writing. And as we've been tracing the spirituality of the church for 2,000 years, to end our journey, we want to focus a little bit less on a spirituality as much as on a virtue or like a moral muscle in the Christian kind of muscular armory, what you call resilience. Now tell us, of all, I was surprised actually, when you decided to add a new chapter to the second edition, I thought you'd write about Pentecostalism. I thought this is the last great kind of move of the spirit or spirituality of our day, but instead you chose to write about resilience. Why is that?
Speaker 3Because we need it. That's why. And we've always needed it. Yeah. Resilience is kind of a modern term that really goes back to the ancient virtue of fortitude. And fortitude includes kind of two different things. One is the courage to do something that's risky, dangerous, or threatening in some way. I am a Christian. Yeah. The other one is persistence, or what I like to call- Like a patience and endurance. Grit and guts. Grit and guts. It's making a decision to do something you don't really want to do, but you know is right, and then stay at it for the long haul.
Speaker 2Grit and guts.
Speaker 3That is what you
Speaker 2mean by resilience.
Speaker 3Fortitude. Or courage and endurance would be fancier terms to use. And we've always needed that particular quality. More recently, a lot of studies have shown that our modern world, especially in the West, is not developing that so well.
Speaker 2Yeah. It's decreasing, not increasing.
Speaker 3It's decreasing. Interesting.
Speaker 2It's tied to comfort, right? Safety, security. The more stable your life is, ironically, the less resilient of a person you become.
Speaker 3And scholars show that resilience starts small and when you're young. You're thrust into situations where there's relative safety for you, where you have to develop resilience in the face of difficulty or opposition. So let me give you an example. You've got a child in the third grade, and she's not getting along with her teacher, who's not very nice to her. For some reason, there's just a clash of personalities. Now, you as a parent have a couple of choices. You listen to your child. She complains. Teacher never does anything that's right, and so on and so forth. Maybe you even talk to the teacher. But then you have a choice. Are you going to help the child adjust to that teacher and learn some new things about how you get along with people you don't like? Or do you immediately ask her to be transferred to another class? You do the latter. Sometimes you have to, I admit. But if you do the latter too often, you are depriving that child of the opportunity of developing resilience. Here's another one. You have a boy who's playing basketball, AAU basketball. My two sons did. Competitive basketball. And they're not getting a lot of playing time. And in your mind, as the wise and critical father, who exercises impeccable judgment all the time. This is clearly a
Speaker 2hypothetical situation, not
Speaker 3an autobiographical story. In my case. And they're not getting playing time. And you're convinced that your son is much better than the starting guard in the team. And you just steam. You actually, you wish that starting guard would get injured. And you talk to the coach about it. And instead of thinking with your son, how can you develop new skills, work a little harder, or be a supportive bench player, you intervene on his behalf. No resilience. So resilience is formed incrementally, one step at a time, but, it has to be through some sort of difficulty.
Speaker 2It's resistance training.
Speaker 3Excellent use of vocabulary. So if we want to see a great model of resilience, we can return to the early Christian period. Yeah. Oh, again, think about their circumstances. The disciples meet this unusual man. They can't make sense of him. They keep trying on these different terms, like rabbi or miracle worker, and then he's crucified. And he's none of those things. He's, he's an abysmal, failure. Another in a long line of Jewish failures. Three days later, he's raised from the dead. And it just sets in motion a transformative movement. They figure out the implications of them. And the more they figure out those implications, the more they realize they're belonging to a movement of the spirit that runs counter to everything Rome believes. And they start facing opposition. Now, all these converts to Christianity don't have any of those resources, John Mark. They don't know the story. They don't know the faith. They haven't been informed in character. They know nothing. And in order to form a people who can handle the opposition from Rome, they have to develop resilience. And they developed a formational process to do that slowly, patiently. Persistently, so they can have a company of people who are able to manage a crossing into a culture that is very different and hostile for the most part, as well as open to their own. That's our model of resistance. And I would suggest to you that in this modern period in which we live, that emphasis on resilience, formation of functional disciples, is very, very important. It's becoming more important by the day. So over the last few decades, I think resilience has become a more relevant virtue all the time. I mean, think about it this way. In 1978 was the peak period of the mainline Christian movement in America, like Presbyterian and Methodist and Lutheran and Episcopalian. 30% of adults in America, all adults, not just Christian adults, self-identified as evangelicals. And I think that's a very important thing. The evangelicalism sort of took its place and thrived and grew. It is now declining. The landscape is changing, and we don't know where it's going. Gen Zs sow some interest in religion, but it's an uncertain future. And with uncertainty and in transitions, when things feel less settled and less stable, resilience becomes all the more important.
Speaker 2And it's formed. When we think about church history, in what ways is it harder to stay faithful to Jesus when the dominant culture is Christian? I know in the West, the dominant culture is certainly not Christian. But if you're in a church, often that subculture you're in is Christian. But we see more and more churches drifting and Christian spirituality is drifting.
Speaker 3Well, I mean, you used the word nominal before, right? Sometimes we're in cultural situations where even the Christian landscape becomes highly complex. And we see compromise of one kind or another all over the place as they over-accommodate to culture, whether it's political culture or intellectual culture or some other expression of culture, where in order, in their minds, to maintain relevance and influence, they concede too much ground. And in America, this would happen on the left and on the right. On the right. Both sides. It is. I think we need to be careful. We don't cast dispersion, a term I've used before, only to one side or the other. There are many varieties of accommodation going on right now. And the reason why is because we have the memory of Christendom in our bones, and we want to hold on to it. Yeah. But the price to be paid to hold on to it is too high.
Speaker 2Yes. What can we learn in this kind of cultural moment from those first three centuries of the church? And how they built? How they built and developed and formed resilient disciples?
Speaker 3All right. Well, first, be radically committed to what makes Christianity itself. There's a kind of coherence to the Christian worldview. Yes. Creation, fall, redemption, the story of salvation, God's intervention, God's presence, God's discipline, the dominance and significance of God's steadfast love and faithfulness that finally culminates in the coming of Jesus. The formation of church, the giving of the Holy Spirit, and then cutting the movement loose to be able to reach the world with the good news that Jesus has come for us all. That's the coherence to the movement. That's what makes it itself. I mean, there's only one thing that makes a stool a stool, three legs. There's only one thing that makes Christianity Christian, the story that culminates in the coming of Jesus and the giving of the Holy Spirit. Let's start there. Be grounded and centered in that, and then form people in that so that they're functional disciples all the time. Now, that takes effort, especially in settings where there are lots of alternatives that are appealing and just not Christian. They reflect a different kind of worldview. So I would say intentionality and some kind of formational strategy that's inspired by the Holy Spirit and always grounded in grace. As I've said before, in the Christian faith, all Christian growth is becoming who you already are. You start from the finish line. You're beloved. You're known.
Speaker 2You're loved. Give us some examples of, you know, who you would consider to be a resilient disciple in the modern era.
Speaker 3Yeah, I want to. Paint a picture of the kind of person
Speaker 2that you have in your mind and imagination.
Speaker 3Yeah, and I'm going to give some unlikely heroes here that people maybe haven't heard from, especially this particular audience. One would be a Catholic, a Dorothy Day. I love this woman. She's very intriguing to me. She grew up in New York, kind of part of the bohemian educated elite. She's an atheist. She becomes a communist and a protester. She knows Eugene O'Neill, the famous playwright. I mean, she's well-connected. And she starts to protest, resist the government, advocate communism in a time when that was not very popular in American culture. Yeah, this is roughly when? In the 20s. Yeah. And she's jailed a couple of times. The second time she's jailed, she spends time in some solitary confinement, and she utterly collapses. It's a horrible experience. It's a horrible experience for her. And maybe for the first time in her life, she has to face herself. And she realizes, I don't have resources. Maybe my political views are right, but my internal self is fragmented and weak and rootless. So that's a setup for her. And then she begins to investigate Catholicism, becomes quite intrigued. She asks for a Bible or something. She asks for a Bible when she's in prison. In prison, right. And then she starts to read it. And then, of course, Catholicism is one of the great alternatives, and it's got rich practices in it. Yeah, and a social ethic. And a strong social ethic. So she begins to experiment with that a little bit while she continues to pursue this kind of communist agenda. And she falls in love, and she has a common-law husband named Forrester. And then she has a baby. And there's something about having a baby. There's something about having a baby that is utterly transformative. All of a sudden, this little helpless creature is before her, and she asks, what can I give this child? And she turns back toward religion again, toward Catholicism, and baptizes her baby. Forrester says, you baptized the baby, I'm gone. And he leaves. So she makes a big decision, and it's a sacrificial decision.
Speaker 2She chooses her faith over marriage.
Speaker 3And became a Catholic herself, was baptized. And I mean a serious Catholic, deeply committed. It took all that
Speaker 2fiery energy and put it into devotion.
Speaker 3Catholic doctrine, Catholic practice. She believed in Jesus, the death and resurrection of Jesus. I mean, a deeply orthodox Christian. Yes. But maintained her radical perspective when it comes to the social order, especially the needs of the poor, the working class, and the alienated. Including alienated from the church. And now she had a Christian theology for it. Exactly. So she started the Catholic Worker Movement, and a Catholic worker newspaper that they distributed for a penny a day.
Speaker 2And this was, for those unfamiliar with it, this was like a really significant movement,
Speaker 3right? It was a very big and very influential movement. And then started these hospitality houses where the poor and volunteers would live together in community. When I lived in Iowa and was a college chaplain in my late 20s and early 30s, I got to know one of those Catholic worker leaders of a house in Des Moines, Iowa. I mean, he looked like a radical, but he was a delightful man. Loved Christ and loved the poor. Just like Dorothy Day, the founder of the movement. And they would all live together. And function like a monastery. I mean, they had the divine office. They served each other. They had their meals together. But they would welcome the least of these. Wow. And she always.
Speaker 2There's that monastic impulse, yeah, popping up again.
Speaker 3And her resilience came for those practices and her deep understanding of the significance of the incarnation. She said at one point in her famous autobiography, The Long Loneliness, interesting title, she meditated on what it was like to imagine that God, the God of the universe, was going to come to us. The Holy One, the Transcendent One, the Other, came to us, walked on our earth, and lived a lowly life. She said, I wish I could kiss the dust that he walked on. It was so beautiful to her. And she lived a long life, into her 80s, got arrested 11 more times, but was deeply, deeply Christian through that whole journey. And she found the resources she needed, the foundations. in a Christian worldview, in a relationship with God through Christ, and in the various practices she inherited, in this case, from her Catholic and monastic faith. It's a beautiful story. Now, there are stories that are beautiful but don't end quite so happily.
Speaker 2Yeah, because she's kind of like a bit of a rock star now. She is. And she's this intellectual, feminist, rad, devoted Jesus person. But not all stories end that way.
Speaker 3No, and this one I discovered back in the earlier part of the century when I'm reading. I was just reading. I was reading a collection of essays by American historians and came upon a name I had never heard of before. Nobody has heard of him. Jeremiah Evertz. And he's become one of my heroes. So this is an example of how resilience applies when you fail. And he failed. Martin Luther King Jr. didn't fail so much. He did. So he has an evangelical conversion, lives in the early part of the 19th century. He has an elite education, becomes a lawyer, and very involved in the evangelical movement at that early 19th century in New York, New England, that area. He's born in New England. And, oh, he's a chairman of missionary movements and committees. And so he's dabbling, kind of like a William Wilberforce, just involved in a lot of things that are basically at the heartbeat of the evangelical movement during that very entrepreneurial period. But he starts to take a deeper interest in the needs of the Cherokee nation. Cherokees at the time were living in Georgia and Florida. And they had, of course, been living there for many, many generations long before white people arrived. And there was a lot of agitation in those states to drive them out of there so that they could have their property. And Andrew Jackson eventually supported this himself as a president. Well, Jeremiah Evertz thought this was just wrong. I mean, it's their land. They've been here for generations and generations, and we're just going to kick them out because we want their property? And so he decides this is God's cause for him. To stop this injustice. So he starts a journal called The Panoplist. In the scholarly article I read, the man was saying, this is the best Christian political writing besides the Federalist Papers. It's brilliant. Other people write, but he does most of the writing. And he makes arguments from both a political and a Christian perspective why this is wrong. So he says, this is just not fair. This is not fitting of the American experiment and the American spirit. This is not who we are at our best. I mean, we came from somewhere else. We wouldn't want people to do this to us. Then why are we doing it to the people who have already been here? Besides, he says, a lot of Cherokees have become Christians. So we're actually doing it to our own brothers and sisters. So he mounts, he mentions the Old Testament, the way that we're supposed to treat sojourners and elders. He mentions the Old Testament, the way that we're supposed to treat I mean, he makes a number of very compelling arguments. He lobbies Congress. He speaks. He travels. This becomes his passion. But what's interesting is to read quotes from his journal. He receives a lot of fierce and unkind opposition. And he always says, my job is to reflect the spirit of Christ even when I respond to enemies. I will never speak ill of them. I will never do name calling. I will never caricature them. I want to reflect the character of Christ no matter where I am and what I'm doing. I mean, it's very moving. And he prays for his enemies. So it kind of comes, finally comes to a head. There's a vote in Congress. It loses, I think, by one vote. So he's so close. And then Andrew Jackson says, you know, it really doesn't matter what Congress decides or even what the Supreme Court decides. I've got the guns. They're going to go. And of course, they have to leave. It's called the Trail of Tears. And a quarter of Cherokees die. One of the great tragedies. On the way. He is so exhausted through this all. He dies a year later in 1831. But I'll tell you, even at the end in his writing, he is so sweet and so charitable and says, I failed, but I belong to God. Now, there's a resilience that stands the test, even in the face of failure. Yeah. So we have Dorothy Day and Jeremiah Evertz, very different backgrounds, one male, one female, one Roman Catholic, one evangelical Protestant, who take a stand and, with Christian character and resilience, serve the kingdom in two very different and beautiful ways. Play their part well. Now, what's great is that we're looking at two individuals or many individuals. But it's not just the individuals. It's the church. And when the church is at its best, many parts, one body, and we all have little things to do. We all have a part to play. Dorothy Day was a writer and a bohemian and a protester who was kind of outside the mainstream. Here's Jeremiah Evertz, who's a lawyer and was part of the elite America. For old money, yeah. Yeah. Old money, that kind of figure. And you know what? Both of them belonged to the same body, as did William Carey and Mary Schleser.
Speaker 2It was a tinkerer and a working class.
Speaker 3Yeah. And Ignatius and Calvin and Luther and Julian of Norwich and Susanna Wesley. And Abba Moses, who was a criminal hiding out from the law. They're not individuals. They're our brothers and sisters in Christ, and we all belong to the same body. We all find our way to where we belong, but we're part of a bigger team. And that's what gives me the most hope, John Mark. I mean, I know we've got a lot of bad churches and maybe a lot of failing, stumbling Christians. Yeah. But we still have the body of Christ, and there's health there. Often health that we don't even see because we hear only about the scandals and about the failures, about the church collapses. And they're hard on our heart. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They are very hard.
Speaker 2We grieve, and rightfully so. Because we're tied to it, it's hard on our identity. It's hard on our sense of self and belonging. Do I really want to identify with that or belong to that?
Speaker 3But I know a lot of pastors in Spokane, and there are some goofy churches in Spokane. But there are a lot of good ones, too. Yeah. Now, they don't do everything, but they're all doing something. Yeah. And put all that together, many somethings mean. A lot bigger something. And it can do good kingdom work.
Speaker 2Yeah. The New Testament has this phrase, the cloud of witnesses. Yeah. Would you explain that for anybody not familiar with it?
Speaker 3It just means the people who have gone before us, who in their own way have been faithful to God. Some of them were heroic and did well and accomplished great things. And then he continues the list and just names a bunch of failures. People who died, who were martyred, who suffered. And they're all part of the family. And they're all our cloud of witnesses. And they're all speaking to us. John, Mark, Jerry, there's more. Stay at it. You belong to this community. It's worth it. The kingdom is coming.
Speaker 2Dr. Sitzer, thank you so much for having these conversations, for passing on the treasure of Christian spirituality down through two years. Two thousand years of church history to today. I just, my soul just feels enlarged every time I'm exposed to the wider tradition, the great tradition, the way of Jesus down through church history. And every time I'm around you, I'm inspired just to stay faithful, to play my small part. For all of us listening, may we stay faithful. May we grow into resiliency. May we play our small or large or who cares part in the unfolding of the kingdom of God.
Speaker 1Thanks for listening. This podcast is from Practice in the Way. We develop resources to help churches and small groups apprentice in the way of Jesus. We're a crowdfunded nonprofit, so everything we make is completely free because it's already been paid for by The Circle, our community of monthly givers. Special thanks today goes to Neil from Lake in the Hills. Cheryl from Pensacola, Florida, Amy from Mount Carmel, Tennessee, Luke from Winscombe, Avon, and Jacob from Olathe, Kansas. Thank you all very much. To join this Friends in the Circle or learn more about our resources, visit practiceintheway.org. Until next time, may the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all. Thank you.
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