Why Therapy Can’t Replace the Church

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0:00:00 – (Brad Edwards): Culturally speaking, our default is that we have exchanged power for trust as the currency for relationship. And when that is the case, unity becomes impossible. But when pastors make that same mistake, then conformity becomes a temptation.

0:00:26 – (Collin Hansen): You will find many books on the biblical and practical importance of the local church. I wrote one myself a few years ago with Jonathan Lehman called Rediscover Church why the Body of Christ is Essential. But few books can match the way Brad Edwards shows us the need for the church amid rampant anxiety, division and individualism. Not only our churches but our whole societies. I believe I said this in my commendation of the book would be transformed by implementing the wisdom found in this book called the Reason for Church.

0:01:02 – (Collin Hansen): Brad is the church planter of the Table Church in Lafayette, Colorado outside Boulder. His debut book has been justly acclaimed, strongly recommended. He won the 2025 Christianity Today book of the Year award and also finished first in the Church and Pastoral Leadership category. And he was the winner of the Gospel Coalitions Award for first time author that year as well, a category that I had overseen for many years.

0:01:26 – (Collin Hansen): I’m grateful that he joins me now to talk about everything from authority and institutions, two of our favorite topics, anxiety and whether unity should be the goal for a church. Brad, thanks for joining me on Gospel Bound.

0:01:40 – (Brad Edwards): Thanks so much for having me, Colin.

0:01:41 – (Collin Hansen): All right, so I ask you right off the bat, Brad, rank these three factors in the decline of trust in church authority. Number one, the overall decline of institutions. Number two, the behavior of church leaders. Number three, the nearly universal adoption of social media and smartphones. Again, ranking these factors and how they contribute to the decline of trust in the authority of church leaders. Again, overall decline of institutions behavior, church leaders, nearly universal adoption of social media and smartphones.

0:02:19 – (Collin Hansen): Go.

0:02:20 – (Brad Edwards): Can I filibuster and ask for your definition of decline,

0:02:25 – (Collin Hansen): a broader sense that I cannot look up to or trust or should even consider following the leaders of the church or even just my church.

0:02:38 – (Brad Edwards): Wow. I would say I would rank them in the order of decline of institutions. A very close second only because it’s more of an accelerant, which is social media. And then third, the failure of church leaders. Because I don’t think that the failure of church leaders is new. I just think that’s as old as sin and humanity itself. But I would argue that that is something that we have become so much more hyper aware of because of social media and the fact that it is delivering to us content that makes us more outraged and distrustful of institutions very intentionally, which is only accelerating that primary dynamic culturally. I mean we get by it honestly. We are a country founded in rebellion to a much tighter and more authoritarian institution, which is the monarchy of England.

0:03:32 – (Brad Edwards): And so I, I mean, this is in our DNA, individualism in general. And it’s. It was for many, many years, for two centuries, we had a. A pretty healthy tension between the value of institutions and the value of individual freedom. Are the kind of left and right pedals on a bike that makes a society healthy and move forward and also formative and healthy and virtuous ways. But we have become dramatically imbalanced, probably starting around sometime in the middle, mid late 20th, 20th century.

0:04:05 – (Collin Hansen): So the trade off here that you. I know you’ve heard this many times, I’ve heard it as well, is that if there’s nothing new about the bad behavior of church leaders, and those could be near or far, they could be domestic, they could be international, they could be anywhere. If there’s nothing new about that, then why isn’t it good news that those leaders are finally now being brought to account? They’re being exposed, they’re being deposed from their positions where they’ve been exploiting and manipulating and really getting away with all sorts of chicanery forever?

0:04:42 – (Brad Edwards): Well, that’s a good use of the word chicanery, first of all. But I would say that accountability is good. I’m Presbyterian. You don’t become Presbyterian by convenience, but by conviction and generally an awareness of how easy it is for individual leaders to go off the rails without accountability. And so I would say yes and amen to accountability. I would argue that social media hasn’t been a terribly. Just accountability because if you. I mean, there are so many stories of this. I cited a New York Times article in my book talking about the Facebook groups called Are We Dating the Same Guy?

0:05:21 – (Brad Edwards): And in one sense, it absolutely did make accountability for women going on, you know, bad dates and potentially like, genuinely risky, unsafe dates. It did help with that, but it also made it completely easy to trash the reputation and ruin the careers of, of men who were just maybe just awkward and, and just like rude and maybe not a good fit. And, and there’s no way to have accountability in both directions because social media just ends up displacing that injustice and that harm rather than resolving it or fixing it.

0:05:59 – (Brad Edwards): And so we, we just don’t have like, social media and just anything online. Just can’t. It’s. It’s not a full picture. It’s not a silver bullet that we think it is. But for those of us who are logging on online and seeing only the context that is happening online, which is a fraction of a fraction. It seems that way and it feels very satisfying, but it’s actually not helping any. It’s actually sowing more distrust than is warranted.

0:06:23 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, this is just something I go around in my head so many different times. And the reason I asked the question this way is because I think you ask most people, they would respond very simply, oh, it’s because church leaders are doing bad stuff. Their simple answer. And they may not be aware of the broader context where institutional distrust is endemic to our society. And it’s been collapsing, like you said, into the mid, especially the late 20th century.

0:06:58 – (Collin Hansen): That’s why in the year 2000, you have bowling Alone from Putnam. So there’s a move away from institutions already. But then as you point out in your second observation, your second ranking there, there’s this really significant accelerant that happens in the 2000 teens and really the late part of the first decade of the 21st century, and then that just goes wild. But given the fact that it’s nearly universal, that’s what suggests it can’t just be the behavior of the church leaders or the behavior of every leader.

0:07:36 – (Collin Hansen): And then now you have a new problem. You have a new problem of the platforming and developing of both leaders who are themselves grandstanding and grandstanders whose grandstanding is to tear down other leaders. So a mix of a whole bunch of things, like you said, of positive accountability, but also really negative, non just accountability, then just more of the bad stuff, more of the performative outrage.

0:08:11 – (Collin Hansen): And now then you have this all mix up where you say, well, politicians are distrusted, and in many cases rightfully so, because so many of them are doing nothing but performative outrage. And now that feels like a doom loop.

0:08:25 – (Brad Edwards): Yeah, no, I mean, I know that Yuval Levin is kind of the free space in the bingo card for you, but I mean, his, his observation that the, the lens that leaders view their role in institutions shifted at some point, or at least past the tipping point. It’s not like it wasn’t, you know, but it just, it became primary and dominant, which is this idea that leaders started seeing the institutions as a platform for their performance rather than as an institution that they are responsible for and to.

0:08:56 – (Brad Edwards): And so the primary constituency became those outside the institution rather than inside. But even then, like when we’re talking about the church specifically, we didn’t help ourselves. This is a bit of a perfect storm reality that at the same time, social media kind of made that switch toward a performative lens. We were caught very flat footed. The American church didn’t have a good immune system for resisting that. And a good example of that is normally whenever someone says to me like, you know, the church that I go to or the church that I went to, I came from, you know, it’s just too institutional.

0:09:32 – (Brad Edwards): When I ask them like, okay, so when you say too institutional, I think I know what you mean, but can you explain what you mean? And normally they say things like, it just seems to be like all about growth for growth’s sake. It’s all about the numbers. You know, it’s just there’s so many programs I’m missing community. And I’m like, okay, that’s really good and helpful. But what you’re describing isn’t a church that’s too institutional, but a church that’s not institutional enough and is actually too corporate.

0:09:57 – (Brad Edwards): And I talk about that in the first chapter on spiritual pragmatism, how we started using marketplace logic rather than kingdom logic to view the church. And again, that was before social media. So I don’t want to blame social media as a monocausal explanation for all that ails us. Though maybe 98%

0:10:18 – (Collin Hansen): not monocausal. Nearly monocausal.

0:10:20 – (Brad Edwards): Yes, nearly monocausal. That’s exactly right, nmc. But we didn’t have a good immune system and we had kind of been resting on our laurels and hadn’t really had to pay any consequences for that departure from what is the historic norm for the church. And that doesn’t mean, again, it’s good intentions. Right. A lot of those decisions were made in the aim of trying to reach people who were not comfortable and did not feel terribly comfortable in an institution, a spiritual institution like the church. But again, that’s why I say in your ranking there that I think that the kind of abandoning and distrust of institutions as a cultural default for us is primarily responsible because that is the common denominator for all of these different catalysts.

0:11:08 – (Collin Hansen): You thought the rankings were over with the first question, Brad. Oh man, you were mistaken, my friend.

0:11:15 – (Brad Edwards): Excellent. It’s going to get even better. I know.

0:11:17 – (Collin Hansen): All right, continuing with question number two. When you meet someone who does not see a reason for church and they change their mind and they do see a reason for church, what is it that changes their mind? Number one, Bible verses. Number two, pastoral exhortation. Number three, experience with the body of Christ. Rank them by far.

0:11:44 – (Brad Edwards): Experience with the body of Christ. And if I could tweak your second one of pastoral exhortation, I would say it’s number two. In a close second is Christians who are able to articulate their experience in the body of Christ without number three. Because number three will come once you have an experience in the body of Christ. But by that point, you’re kind of already there. You’re at least open to that idea. But I don’t know that that’s necessarily a big factor coming in.

0:12:13 – (Brad Edwards): That said, I think, and maybe to combine the, you know, the biblical references and the experience, the Christian experience of church, like being able to talk about the church in a way that is explaining scripture’s understanding of the church in a way that’s intelligible to a very radically individualistic culture is so important. And like, if you had to, you know, if you had to summarize my book in, in a very pithy short statement, it says it’s a cultural apologetic for the institutional church.

0:12:49 – (Brad Edwards): And it is. I’m hoping that. I’m not just saying we need this language, but I’m hoping that I’m demonstrating how to use that language in the exhortation that I make in the book, which is primarily for Christians who are, you know, at least open to the idea of church. If not, probably those who are discouraged and sad that their friends who either are Christians, are deconstructing out of the church or their neighbors who they don’t know how to. How to. How to explain why their invitation isn’t into a cult or in something that is inherently harmful as an institution. Because that is the kind of. That’s the hurdle you have to get past.

0:13:27 – (Collin Hansen): I would assume that a lot of this is shaped by your experience in Colorado. I’ve long heard from Colorado. It’s the place that you go to escape your churches and families and other places, maybe especially Boulder. Is that true still?

0:13:42 – (Brad Edwards): Oh, yeah. I mean, it’s. Boulder is so in Lafayette. We’re, you know, 15 minutes dead east of Boulder. And a whole lot of our people at the table work in Boulder. And Boulder is typically known as a church planting graveyard. I’ve seen in the 14 plus years I’ve lived in Colorado and in the Boulder region, I’ve seen at least 50 or 60 church plants start and then close their doors before really getting any momentum or becoming sustainable.

0:14:11 – (Brad Edwards): And that’s. I’m being pretty conservative in the estimate. I know other pastors who’ve said as high as 75 or 100 over the same period. So it’s. It is, it is a bug zapper for church planting. And the reason why it is so difficult is even. And I’ve heard that explicitly from neighbors. Like, I literally came here to get away from evangelicalism. So please keep that to yourself. Right? It’s, it’s, it’s cordial, but it’s very clear.

0:14:38 – (Brad Edwards): Right, but even if that’s not the case, by definition, Colorado is a place where there are vanishingly few actual natives. I joke that I’m not a native, but we made two of them, two kids. But if you moved here from somewhere else, by definition, it means that there’s something about Colorado that you’re pursuing and you value more than the community and the place and the people that you came from. So even if that’s not an explicit thing, it is a functional value and a lesser value than the one that you are coming. Whatever is drawing you to Colorado, whether it’s the lifestyle, the recreation, the career advancement, because there’s a whole lot of major Silicon Valley companies and tech and engineering, that is all out here in the Boulder region especially.

0:15:24 – (Collin Hansen): I suppose that’s exacerbated by the fact that you would have some shifting within the state itself and with the historic prominence of Colorado Springs as the backdrop. Is that right?

0:15:34 – (Brad Edwards): Oh, no, it’s definitely. It’s. It’s really interesting. When we first moved here, Colorado was a very purple state. It was pretty evenly split, and it was basically kind of, you know, Boulder being very blue, Colorado Springs being very red, and then Denver being kind of a mix, but still leaning blue because it’s a major metropolitan area. But even in Colorado Springs, you have the headquarters of so many nationwide Christian and evangelical parachurch ministries.

0:16:03 – (Brad Edwards): And so which, you know, parachurch ministries are fine and good, but it’s also, in a lot of ways, many of them have started to function apart from the church or as a replacement for the church. And that just kind of continues to cultivate some of that anti institutionalism, even among the Christians in the state. I mean, this is the place of rugged individualism and cowboys in its DNA. So we get by it, honestly.

0:16:28 – (Collin Hansen): Not to mention, you also have the military in Colorado Springs, but on top of that, you have the newest. I mean, I guess you could add Space Force there, but the Air Force has been, I mean, kind of marches to the beat of its own drum as well as one of the newer branches. So interesting institutional connection there as well. All right, so no more rankings for now. Your book the Reason for Church has been widely acclaimed, but what has been the most common or even.

0:17:01 – (Collin Hansen): But let’s raise the stakes. What’s the most compelling objection to your book?

0:17:07 – (Brad Edwards): Compelling Objection to my book. I think in terms of where I. An objection that I’m very sympathetic to and honestly just didn’t know how to write only a chapter on it is probably the way that therapeutic culture is functioning. And, you know, I. I stayed in there that, like, good therapy is good. Like, this is, you know, church is not a replacement for therapy, but it’s a foundation that makes therapy a whole lot more effective, not just a peer or a compliment to it.

0:17:41 – (Brad Edwards): And I think one of the concerns is in talking about therapy culture, there is a. You can probably hear some things I’m not saying around the. Like, the reality that, like, sometimes a church can be unsafe and. And that. Well, how do you know that that is the case? And I just had to leave that for other books that the entirety of which are written around that. Like, you know, Michael Krueger’s Bully Pulpit, I think, is a pretty solid kind of primer on that kind of dynamic and how to understand that. And I just couldn’t write that.

0:18:16 – (Brad Edwards): There’s just no way to do that well in the book. So I kind of left it alone.

0:18:20 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, that is a difficult spot to be in. I can speak as somebody who’s benefited a lot from therapy and recommend that to other people. And yet also, I would be very much against a lot of what I see in therapy culture. There’s a new book by Frey India called Girls, and it is very much focused on especially online therapy culture and commodification and profit motives. Well, I would struggle to see why people would be in favor of any of that, given what she’s talking about there. And yet still, there is a sense where if you begin to critique that people hear not what you’re saying, but they hear a universal condemnation of therapy akin to what you have heard and do hear from some other Christians.

0:19:16 – (Collin Hansen): So that can be pretty confusing.

0:19:17 – (Brad Edwards): Oh, no, absolutely. And I think it’s also made more confusing by the reality that I think in the wake of. In the emptying of institutions and dechurching, I think you could make a pretty strong argument that the significant increase in people going to therapy, which, again, I think is generally a good thing, is also a way of trying to cope without an institutional involvement. There’s a therapist in my church. When I was writing that chapter, I was running a lot of things by her, and I was asking her, I’m like, hey, this feels a little bit crazy to ask, but, like, do you ever feel like your. Any of your clients treat you like a secular priest?

0:19:59 – (Brad Edwards): And she, like, I heard. I Thought the call dropped because she was dead silent on the other end. She said, that explains actually a whole lot, because there are clients who, like the clients that see the most growth, are not treating her that way. But those that are treating her that way really struggle, because what they’re expecting of a priest is to mediate truth, goodness, and beauty that is already inside them, rather than anything transcendent or external to them.

0:20:27 – (Brad Edwards): And when you go into therapy expecting and hoping for that, you’re treating a therapist like a priest. And it’s actually, it only kind of delivers you more deeply into whatever it is that you come from because you actually need outside help. And so that’s making some of this conversation a lot more difficult because it really does depend on the posture of the client in it, too. Not just the therapist or therapy itself or the mode of therapy or the approach.

0:20:51 – (Brad Edwards): It has to do with our posture when we approach it.

0:20:54 – (Collin Hansen): Well, try publishing an article that suggests that a lot of the reasons people seek therapy are because they don’t have friends and they don’t look for older women to be able to help them to navigate some of these dynamics. So you publish that, which I don’t think is even really disputable, and yet what people hear is, oh, that’s the church trying to control women by telling them not to seek any therapists. And after all, no one in a church is remotely qualified to be able to handle the things that are to be handled by therapists.

0:21:29 – (Collin Hansen): Well, that’s exactly the conflict. That’s exactly the problem that we’re facing here. Again, I don’t think it’s in dispute that a lot of the things that people would have gotten help with in the past are through their church, with their friends across generations. But you don’t have those things anymore. You still need help. You have to pay for it.

0:21:51 – (Brad Edwards): Yeah, it’s a really hard thing to talk about because there are absolutely ways where maybe more fundamentalist churches would make that argument. And when that’s your experience and. Or you have social media delivering those arguments for your consumption to become outraged, then, yeah, how do you speak through and break through that white noise is really tough.

0:22:19 – (Collin Hansen): I can’t think, Brad, of many causes that are less obviously attractive today than institution building.

0:22:27 – (Brad Edwards): Yes.

0:22:29 – (Collin Hansen): So hooray for us. Let’s talk a little bit. Tim Keller Center Church Movement, institution dynamics. You know, the first major works that I published were on the movement of the young, restless, reformed. By the time I took this job at the Gospel Coalition, having studied revivals in the past, I saw My role as a way of institutionalizing that movement, especially through resourcing and connecting local churches, that would be able to sustain whatever movement would or whatever gains have been accrued by the movement. Recognizing that, by definition, movements don’t last.

0:23:10 – (Collin Hansen): By definition, revivals don’t last. If they did, we wouldn’t need a term for revival because it would just be normal state of life there. So. So movements, I think, especially to young people, maybe especially to young men, are a lot more exciting. The Internet favors individuals. How exactly do we continue to go about promoting something that seems, I mean, just really unattractive? And again, I mentioned the dynamic with Keller. He talks about the relationship between institutions and movements, both necessary. Both have their strengths and weaknesses.

0:23:52 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. How exactly do we go about doing this when we are people who are representing institutions as leaders, man.

0:24:00 – (Brad Edwards): I mean, first of all, just to validate just how unpopular that idea is. I mean, that is why at every stage of this entire process, I was shocked continually when the doors kept opening. And when I got the email from Christianity Today that it was being named book of the Year, I literally checked to see if this was. Came from a Nigerian prince. Right.

0:24:23 – (Collin Hansen): Or a cruel friend.

0:24:25 – (Brad Edwards): Yeah, yeah. Or like, you know, I’m like, I don’t. You know, it’s a weird scam to try and, you know, get money out of a pastor and an author. I’m not sure, like, what the cost benefit is for you on that, but sure. So, yeah, no, I was. I wrote the book that I. Like, I need to process the struggles that I’ve been encountering and the challenges I’ve been encountering and planting a church in Boulder County.

0:24:49 – (Brad Edwards): And I’ve been thrilled that it’s actually resonated with people. And I think the reason why it’s resonating is I think we’re exhausted. And. And. And to your point about revival chasing, I’ve been using the language lately of, like, our. Our call right now is not to chase revival. It’s to build a remnant. Because I don’t think that we have hit rock bottom in terms of, like, the levels of exhaustion in society and frustration and disenchantment. But I can’t see the trajectory we’re on, like, pulling out without getting to a point where, like, we actually get desperate enough to maybe be open to church again.

0:25:28 – (Brad Edwards): And so I think, to answer your question, like, how do we do this? I think it’s especially having a long view and building a spiritual greenhouse in an environment that’s not hospitable to human growth. And what it means to be human in ways that once that hostile environment is finally recognized as like, being incompatible with our flourishing, we might actually start looking for greenhouses again and be open to it. And I think we’re seeing a little bit of that with Gen Z.

0:26:02 – (Brad Edwards): They’re the first generation to have no memory of, or experience of growing up in an institution as a norm. And so they don’t have the same baggage that millennials and especially Gen X. I’m a Zennial, so I’m kind of including myself in that criticism. I don’t think they have the same baggage. And so I think there’s a real opportunity there, but I think it means especially just having a long multi generational view and goal for this.

0:26:30 – (Collin Hansen): You mean to tell me, Brad, that AI will not be the means of us being able to, now that all the work’s being done by computers, to rel, to kick back, to enjoy each other’s company, to pursue leisure, we can all move to Boulder so we could just enjoy the great outdoors. You mean to tell me that it’s actually going to result in a much more frenetic pace for everybody and people will be working harder to try to meet ever increasing productivity goals? Is that what you’re telling me?

0:26:59 – (Brad Edwards): I mean, I know it’s crazy because every other technological innovation has delivered on that promise. You know, between the printing press and the, you know, Al Gore’s Internet, I’m. Yeah. Our biggest challenge at the table to spiritual formation is schedules. The additional convenience and the efficiency that it promises does not result with that. It means that we are, we think that we can operate as more than human, but it reduces our humanity.

0:27:40 – (Brad Edwards): And the goal is actually being fully human, not subhuman, not superhuman. We’ve got to be fully human. And we actually have to have like, recover an anthropology for that. And technology is actively misaligned for that.

0:27:54 – (Collin Hansen): It’s almost like if AI did deliver all sorts of new time, all sorts of new opportunities, that other businesses would know this and they would start to market us with all the other things that we are needing to do to be able to fill that time. And it also strikes me that in the great technological leap forward for, say, domestic work after the Second World War, it led to a certain rise of another wave of feminism as a response to the perceived and real malaise.

0:28:28 – (Collin Hansen): So regardless of how you see it, technological change coming, rarely does it result, whether it’s in increased productivity, expectations or increased leisure. And then endless marketing, or then endless marketing of therapeutic means of dealing or coping with that it’s almost like it leads to certain disruptions that increase the anxieties that when you do not have an institution or a history and ultimately a God who is grounding you through that with a remnant, it’s impossible, hard if not impossible, to be able to manage.

0:29:09 – (Collin Hansen): Let’s talk about individualism. What kind of individualism is good and what kind is bad?

0:29:16 – (Brad Edwards): Yeah. So I make the distinction between individualism and individuality. Right. Because I argue, and I think Tom Holland’s book, book Dominion is just a gold mine for. I mean, that’s basically what the entire book is about in a lot of ways, is the way that the Western value of the individual is inherently rooted in the Christian understanding of the imago DEI and having a personal and individual relationship with God in and through the church.

0:29:44 – (Brad Edwards): And that is a really good thing. Right. It gave us the civil rights era. It gave us all kinds of good things in this country. And it was. It’s. It’s. We all. We can trace back our genealogy back to that. What individualism is is the way that individuality has become unmoored from institutions and the roots cut from that vertical anchor in. In Christ that you were just describing. So maybe it’s a good way of thinking about it is a kind of a Christian individuality that’s. That’s metastasized or become a malignant kind of cellular reproduction.

0:30:19 – (Brad Edwards): And it brings with it some moral claims about, like, what is a person and how does one find or have or experience significance, meaning and purpose in life? And individuality doesn’t really answer that question. It just says that the individual is good and it should have the opportunity to pursue those things. But individualism says that those must be individually achieved rather than receive from anything outside of you. And that’s straight out of Robert Bella’s Habits of the Heart, which, not coincidentally, was.

0:30:55 – (Brad Edwards): I first heard about that book when it was recommended by Tim Keller when I was doing the Redeemer City to city, church, planter intensive. And I’m so glad he did, because that fundamental shift is upstream of so much of what ails us and helps

0:31:13 – (Collin Hansen): to explain not only the rise of things like social media, but also that social media did not create all of these challenges out of nowhere. It’s why, again, that’s in the 1980s. So there’s something. And of course, every layer you peel back, you can go back to, oh, that’s a very American concept that goes back to the 19th century or 18th century. And then you can keep going back to, in a lot of ways, Though Christianity did create a space for individualism in a way that is wonderful and necessary and shaped the very sense of self that we have.

0:31:50 – (Collin Hansen): So. Yeah. To be able to differentiate between good and bad is necessary. Go ahead.

0:31:53 – (Brad Edwards): Oh, no. I was gonna say, like. I mean, the conversation we’re having right now is the same tension that sparks the Reformation in the first place. Is it the unhealthy institutions and the abuse of priests that is the cause for the Reformation? Or was it Martin Luther bringing about the importance of not binding consciences beyond the word of God? Yes. Is the answer. Right. This is not. You know, there’s nothing new under the sun, and history may not repeat, but it does rhyme.

0:32:26 – (Brad Edwards): And there is a consistent through line here.

0:32:28 – (Collin Hansen): I love that point. I don’t know why I didn’t even think about that. Yeah. Whenever you see. I mean, Michael Horton does a great job of this. When people argue against Protestantism and say. And blame it for everything that ails modern life, and especially individualism, because I understand where Catholics are coming from on that. The response is always, yeah, because the Council of Constance was just such an awesome thing when they had to bring every prostitute from across Europe to be able to be there for the priests and the bishops, that clearly we had something really good going on back then.

0:33:02 – (Brad Edwards): I mean, you could make the argument it was the medieval super bowl, but.

0:33:06 – (Collin Hansen): It was the medieval Super Bowl. But. But you have a. It’s a real tension of individualism. It brings many good things, it brings many bad things. It’s like any number of different technological developments. The Reformation did unleash all sorts of radical things. It also did bring about true and genuine reform and also alterations from the Catholic Church. Also criticizing the Church was something that was necessary to hold Church leaders accountable.

0:33:38 – (Collin Hansen): Also, it became the basis for. If we’re going to argue against the priests, why not the whole thing? Let’s argue against Christianity altogether. So it also gives rise to what we see with the Enlightenment and broader skepticism. So I just think these dynamics are a lot more interesting when you handle them with the appropriate tensions within the gray, as opposed to treating all of them as black and white. And that’s why when you see something like individualism, you have to say, are we talking about the good kind? Are we talking about the bad kind? Because they’re both there. You wouldn’t want to go back to a world with no individualism.

0:34:11 – (Brad Edwards): Yeah. I mean, like, it goes back even further than the Reformation. Right. It goes back to the fall, when Adam and Eve said, we’re going to function as our own authority. And then we see that played out in the Tower of Babel when the motive isn’t just like we want to reach a tower that reaches the heavens. The motive that’s given in Genesis 11 is so that we can make a name for ourselves, so we can achieve our own identity and significance and meaning, purpose and not need God.

0:34:35 – (Brad Edwards): So we’re always going to struggle with this tension.

0:34:39 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. All right, still have some more questions here with Brad Edwards talking about the Reason for Church, published by Zondervan Reflective, wonderful publisher. All right, so should unity, Brad, be the goal of a church? I think when we talk as institutional leaders and especially as pastors and elders, our answer is clearly yes. However, how many good and necessary causes have been thwarted by church leaders, or church members for that matter, who say, no, no, no, that would cause disunity in the church.

0:35:16 – (Collin Hansen): So should unity be the goal of a church?

0:35:20 – (Brad Edwards): Certainly not the goal. It should be a fruit of the church. It should be the fruit of faithfulness and a church living out the greatest commandment to love the Lord your God with all your heart, mind, soul, and strength. And the other side of that coin being the loving of neighbor, of yourself. And I think that if a church is about that, then, yeah, unity is going to be downstream of that. But yeah, when you make unity, the point, conformity becomes a temptation.

0:35:50 – (Brad Edwards): And it’s just so good that social media has just freed us of that, because we don’t really enforce conformity on social media at all. And I think that’s part of the problem here is that we have these blind spots. We’re like, oh, no, it’s okay in this area, but no, not in the church, because I don’t have the same power that I have in a church that I do on social media. And so there’s a whole lot going on there.

0:36:16 – (Brad Edwards): But yeah, I mean, unity is a fruit. It’s not even a means to an end. And I don’t think it’s the end either. I think it’s secondary and it’s important to pay attention to. It’s important to it to be a goal in the sense that pastors should be working to bring people along, and people who are in their congregation should be not just swallowing whatever questions or doubts or concerns they have, but there should be trust there. Like, part of the reason I think that the unity conversation is so fraught is because we’re trying to talk about it without talking about the importance of trust and the way that culturally speaking, our default is that we have exchanged Power for trust as the currency for relationship.

0:37:06 – (Brad Edwards): And when that is the case, unity becomes impossible. But when pastors make that same mistake, then conformity becomes a temptation.

0:37:14 – (Collin Hansen): To paraphrase from a wise man, you aim for happiness and you will not get it. You aim for Christ and you might just get happiness thrown in. Aim for unity and you will not get it. Aim for the gospel and you just might get unity thrown in.

0:37:29 – (Brad Edwards): I mean, if you read Paul, to be in Christ is to be spiritually unified as the starting point. And so even then the conversation’s gotta be like, okay, how do we, what is the unity that we have already and not make it something that we act like we don’t have and the responsibilities on our shoulders because God is sovereign and he’s involved in this and he’s promised that in the Great Commission.

0:37:49 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, good point. Brad, what has surprised you the most since you became a pastor?

0:37:57 – (Brad Edwards): Wow, there are so many answers to choose from. I mean, I, I think the part of what sparked writing this book in the first place was the shock and surprise that I spent my whole time in seminary. The book, the Reason for Church, the title is an intentional homage to Tim Keller’s the Reason for God. And I very much expected that, like me coming to Faith toward the end of college and having no experience in church, my objection was to God more than the church.

0:38:35 – (Brad Edwards): And so I kind of had similar expectations that that would be the biggest objection to the Christian faith. But planting in Colorado, I realized and was pleasantly surprised that many of my neighbors are actually really open to talking about God and even to the idea that like, okay, yeah, I might need a loving God’s grace and some kind of a relationship with him. Right. But I was not prepared for, nor did I even have an answer to the objection that, yeah, but I don’t need the church. And that’s a completely irrelevant, if not harmful reality. And so I think the premise for the book is probably the most surprising thing over the especially the last 10 years of planting.

0:39:21 – (Collin Hansen): Well, another question. You’re on the ground. We’ve already established this in a state that’s changed a lot in 20 years. So what’s next?

0:39:33 – (Brad Edwards): What’s coming down the pike kind of, so to speak? Yeah, man, I gosh, you’re gonna open up a whole can of worms to my galaxy brain. I, like many people, am pretty consumed with the trade offs and the technological catalyst that is AI already. I wrote in the article that was, was paired with the, the announcement in the latest issue that in our table students, our youth ministry There was somebody who in our church works for Google and you know, in a way that was not actually going to like, the conversation was not supposed to be about AI. He just asked very simply, like, when you have a question that you don’t think that your parents or even your pastor know the answer to, where do you go?

0:40:23 – (Brad Edwards): And a, a, a not insignificant number of them said, oh, chat GPT. And we’re talking about like ranging, you know, middle school, like sixth grade, all the way up through 12th grade, but most of them in middle school also. And I think just whether that is actually true, like that’s what they actually do, or that’s just what all their peers are saying, that communicates to me a value and an eagerness for this to continue to develop and become more ubiquitous in ways that I’m just not sure that we’re prepared for yet.

0:40:57 – (Brad Edwards): Because let me put it this way, and I haven’t written about this anywhere yet, so this is a bit of a hot take, but Tristan Harris says that there’s a. Every time we see the invention of a new novel technology, what that does is it surfaces a resource that we didn’t know was a resource before and then commodifies it. Right? So the clock, you know, the resource was time. You know, when you scheduled meetings, you weren’t, you didn’t have a specific time. It was like midday. And you’d have to wait around for that person to show up maybe as long as an hour or two. Right.

0:41:31 – (Brad Edwards): We just didn’t have efficiency. But when we were able to measure time, that created the value of efficiency. Social media, right. We have attention. Attention, exactly. That wasn’t even really in our vocabulary. And now it is the basis of profit for the vast majority of our gdp. That’s wild, right? AI I think the resource that it’s going to commodify is agency. And I think that agency is going to be the thing that we are, is both marketed to us like, this is the promise that it’s going to give you, but it’s also going to rob us of something of that because there’s something about the, you know, I know as an author you understand this. Like the thing that terrifies me about using ChatGPT is, is, is how easy it is to, to go to that rather than face the tyranny of the blank page.

0:42:29 – (Brad Edwards): Right? That part of the creative process of like, I don’t even know what I’m gonna say. I don’t even know where to start. Like, if ChatGPT does that for us, I think that there’s a muscle somewhere inside us that is going to atrophy. And if that is the case for just writing or content, take that same principle and apply it to all these other areas of life that it’s promising to give you greater superhuman agency for.

0:42:54 – (Brad Edwards): And what are the trade offs that might make you subhuman in that rather than fully human? I think that’s the big, the unexplored landscape that we’re looking at.

0:43:07 – (Collin Hansen): Let me give you another reason for church. A reason for church is that you might just show up to a Sunday school class and have a discussion about Hartmut Rosa’s the Uncontrollability of the World in the context of digital technology, with a sense for how AI as it commodifies. Agency will be something that exacerbates that existing sense that we must dominate everything in our sphere by expanding what we control, as opposed to living a world of resonance with the things around us, the natural world, other human beings receiving the world as something from God, as opposed to the world as something that we have a compulsion to dominate.

0:44:07 – (Collin Hansen): So that was our Sunday school class.

0:44:09 – (Brad Edwards): Oh my gosh, did you record that? Can I have it?

0:44:14 – (Collin Hansen): I mean, I’d not thought about that before. AI is agency. But immediately I went back to a quote that I had again from him that I use in my cultural apologetics class about the especially American impulse that we have to conquer everything, we must control everything. I was applying it to gambling. So the reason it came up is because we were having a discussion. These are mostly young people, mostly Gen Z in this group.

0:44:42 – (Collin Hansen): A lot of Gen Z in my church, probably the biggest age cohort of them are millennials. And one of the guys next to me, younger guy, was talking about gambling. And I had been mentioning Ross’s discussion of sports as a really good example of resonance, a positive thing where you cannot control. Uses soccer, obviously he’s German, so uses soccer as an example. He said if you could control that, all the interest would go away, I realized. But we do try to control it through gambling.

0:45:10 – (Collin Hansen): That’s how we control it. That’s how we get rid of the resonance and we control it. And then I made the broader point about how the, the categorical imperative of modern life in the modern west is you must dominate everything. Well, if AI is agency, as you’re arguing, then that will only serve to advance the categorical imperative of modernity.

0:45:34 – (Brad Edwards): Well, and I mean, I mean, another word for agency is power too. Like, I mean, I mean, it’s interesting, you know, when you when you started that with talking about Sunday school, my first, like, where my head went immediately was, oh, yeah, children’s Sunday school. Like, if I have to, if I’m showing up, I’m like. Like, I became a Christian as an adult. So, like, I am. I am very much learning at the expense of my kids. Like, what it means to disciple young people. Right.

0:46:02 – (Brad Edwards): And so I never was on the receiving end of that. I don’t have those resources to draw on and, like, things to riff off of. But going into a children’s ministry, you know, a children’s Sunday school, and, you know, if you feel like, unconfident, like, I would anxious, I’m like, God, I want to do right by this. I want to, you know, I want to help these kids. If I’m using AI in some way to either replace me or to supplement or like, leaning on AI more than I’m leaning on God in prayer, who gets the credit when it goes well.

0:46:30 – (Brad Edwards): And I’m robbing myself of an experience of God showing up in the midst of that and not just, like, giving me the right words to say, but actually affecting the change in children’s hearts when I don’t have the right words. That could very easily be a trade off in a very. Just a very practical, concrete way. Never mind the economic disruption that it’s likely to cause.

0:46:55 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah. Had a conversation just this morning, talked to somebody who teaches video game design. And I was asking about AI And AI has been going for a long time in video game design. And he said that students object to him when he marks them off, saying, it wasn’t me who did this, it was AI. So you can’t mark me down for this. That’s a whole new. That’s a whole new AI does the work. I have no problem with AI doing the work, but you can’t mark me off for anything because AI did it.

0:47:40 – (Collin Hansen): It was the computer.

0:47:42 – (Brad Edwards): I mean, credit and blame are two different ways of saying the same thing. So, yeah, like, who gets the credit and the blame? Oh, man. Yeah. With agency goes responsibility. Yeah.

0:47:53 – (Collin Hansen): But the whole point of whose work is this? Another professor tells me that he confronted a student and said, I can’t award you points for this paper. It’s clearly written by AI. And the student says, what’s the problem with that? I wrote the prompts. If I wrote the prompts, that means I wrote the essay. Said, no, that’s not how it works. And the student was incomprehending. It made no sense at all.

0:48:25 – (Collin Hansen): How could this be so I think you just really hit the nail on the head. We’re in for a lot of confusion about agency. And then I take a step back to a remnant mentality because what is the resonance response to this sense that we have to exercise our agency to achieve power and control everything? Well, the response is as a remnant, you are constrained to pursue the things that are under your proximate control, to serve your family, to serve your church, to serve your community.

0:49:09 – (Collin Hansen): And you are not anxious with this ever present sense that you must be dominating, you must be productivity maxing or body maxing or whatever else that is out there. We often think of younger people as slackers. I sense that that’s the opposite going to be the case, are going to be AI maxers and then using what other time to body max or whatever else we want to look at there. So it’s likely you’re not going to be looking at younger generations thinking, boy, why won’t they just get off their bottoms and do something? But more like, oh wow, they’re setting expectations here of accelerating just achievement that exacerbated by AI the rest of us can hardly even comprehend.

0:50:03 – (Brad Edwards): I mean, look at, we see the same polarization around attention as a result of social media, right? You, the attention becomes a pursuit as a good of its own. It’s not a means to an end, it becomes the end itself. Right? And there is this amazing article, I’m just totally spacing on the title or the author, but it was in Harper’s Magazine recently where the writer went to Silicon Valley and interviewed some of these especially really young founders of AI companies.

0:50:35 – (Brad Edwards): And one of the observations he had was that these, these, you know, early 20 somethings who skipped college and went straight into, you know, starting a tech company, when they asked them a question about like, so what comes after this? What is the meaning and the purpose that you are like, what, what is. What will starting this company enable you to do? How is this company a means to an end? And the answers he got were shockingly, either I don’t understand the question or like I don’t know, but I know I can make $3 million a year, so it doesn’t matter.

0:51:11 – (Brad Edwards): And that was like one of the lines there, one of the responses, which is, which is really sad because it makes agency a pursuit on its own. And they even use that language. And so these are the people who are designing the AI and that worldview shapes the digital liturgy that we all use. So I, you’re connecting a whole lot of dots for me on this I mean Alan Noble’s, you know, in the podcast that I co host with John Homus post everything we interviewed Alan Noble and he was talking about how this, this is really going to reshape the entire educational system.

0:51:47 – (Brad Edwards): But I think that there’s something, there can be a good winnowing if educational institutions actually recover the formative purpose and not just divulging of information and helping you get a good paying job after college, but like forming better humans and more virtuous people.

0:52:05 – (Collin Hansen): Yeah, not just output or achievement focused, but formation and full character approaches. I knew we’d have a sprawling conversation, but like I said in the introduction here, what we’re talking about is not just a book, good as it is, that’s able to say, hey, church is really important. This is what the Bible says about this. This is the theological reflection from the church. But being able to bring that conversation into the context of kind of the current, the modern situation, that’s something that, like you said, a cultural apologetic for the institution of the church. And that’s a recognition that the church has not always gotten things right yet the church by God’s grace persists and the church is a remnant and a refuge in an ever changing world that in some ways by not going with all of the other cultural changes precisely is able to continue to maintain its witness with integrity in keeping with the church’s biblical mandate there.

0:53:19 – (Collin Hansen): So let’s close this out. Brad. Again we’ve been talking with Brad Edwards about the reason for church from Zonervan, Reflective, again widely claimed, wonderful book. Let’s just end on this. What would pastors want their congregations to know most about church or about their church?

0:53:40 – (Brad Edwards): I would say two things. I think, I think I can speak for pastors when I say that we carry into the pulpit a high awareness that in many ways we are heard when we are exhorting people to obligate themselves to the church, that there is a perception that that is a self serving thing for a pastor to say and I think I would want everybody to hear is that that might be the case sometimes, but we can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater and that actually obligating yourself to the body of Christ is the only way that we can fully experience the blessings of Christ and where we get the means of grace. That’s the only place we find the word and sacrament and prayer in the ways that scripture is setting forth as like we need this.

0:54:38 – (Brad Edwards): And so try to hear your pastor with some charitable assumptions, I guess. But also I would want to say that if that is true and if God and if Jesus in the Great Commission says that like, you know, all authority in heaven and earth has been given to me and I am with you to the end of the age, that this is the book ended, this is the bookends of the Great Commission, that that means that God is going to be working in you when you are in your church, even if you are not aware of it, you don’t experience it. Or maybe you experience it, but it kind of sucks sometimes.

0:55:13 – (Brad Edwards): Like it’s just not as satisfying as you thought it would be and it didn’t match your expectations. And that’s. I just want you to, I want people to hear. That’s okay. Because there are things going on that there’s a spiritual reality that we don’t see, but we get a taste, a little bit of it in the thin place that is the corporate worship of the people of God and that is a gift. And it doesn’t require your pastor to be just incredible or amazing or whatever.

0:55:40 – (Brad Edwards): It’s going to happen because God is his body and his bride and he loves it too much not to be faithful to his promises. And that includes the local institutional church. And yeah, it’s God’s broken but beloved people both.

0:55:55 – (Collin Hansen): Amen. I love that. That’s great. Even when you don’t subjectively feel as though something good is happening, objectively, we’re normed, we’re told, we’re reminded that God is doing a mighty work. And that’s one of the most important things about institutions in general is the faithful consistent showing up that changes people showing up and serving is how people change those habits. Get my guest in Gospel Bound this week, Brad Edwards. The reason for Church is the book.

0:56:28 – (Collin Hansen): Simon Reflective is the publisher. Brad, thanks for joining me. Thanks for writing this book.

0:56:32 – (Brad Edwards): Thanks so much. This is a blast. Thank you.

0:56:41 – (Collin Hansen): Thanks for listening to this episode of Gospel Bound. For more interviews and to sign up for my newsletter, head over to tgc.org gospelbound Rate and review Gospel Bound on your favorite podcast platform so others can join the conversation. Until next time. Time. Remember, when we’re bound to the gospel, we abound in hope.