Kevin Redford is a father and husband. An entrepreneur, small business consultant, and mentor, he enjoys creating art and making music. Kevin and Justin met randomly in lamaze class just before Kevin’s real life began when his first child was born. Kevin is the owner of Redford Photography and Redford DJ’s and he and his wife April and their children live outside of Pittsburgh.
Better Stories :: Erin Hudnall
Erin Hudnall is a Ph.D. candidate in sociology focused on rural community research. She received a BA in sociology and a BA in psychology from West Virginia Wesleyan College. Erin's interests include prosocial behavior, disaster volunteerism, community development, and the sociology of rural communities and organizations. She is an applied, community-engaged researcher with hopes to advance public sociology in West Virginia and within the discipline. Her current research focuses on the processes of community development and place-making in rural contexts. Erin also runs the Youth and Community Engagement Lab at the West Virginia Prevention Research Center, working full-time to support student and youth development.
In this episode we discuss Erin’s passion for trauma-informed safe spaces and her own story of religious trauma. We also discuss the connections of my book, Wonky: A Survival Guide for Following Jesus When You Hate the Church, to her own work. Erin’s article, Is West Virginia a Religious Void?, is a tremendous exploration of the religious context of West Virginia.
Better Stories :: Kevin Butcher & William Mack S03 Ep03
J. Kevin Butcher and William Mack are two of the pivotal team members of Rooted Ministries, an organization that exists to see pastors, Christian leaders, and churches rooted in the love of God and equipped through authentic mentoring and connection.
Kevin is the Founder of rooted as well as the author of “Choose and Choose Again: the Brave Act of Returning to God’s Love” and “Free: Rescued from Shame-Based Religion, Released into the Life-Giving Love of Jesus”. Serving as a lead pastor for 35 years, Kevin has lived the shepherding life – and connected intimately with countless pastors from every background, gender, ethnicity and denomination along the way. He and his best friend and wife Carla live in Colorado.
Mack is the Director of Pastoral Care for Rooted. With a background in creative arts, theology, and family/community development, he is a casually charismatic and disciplined communicator that combines a “real talk” sensibility with a shepherd’s firm, but gentle guidance to create safe spaces for those he coaches. Mack currently resides in Chicago with his wife Tori.
Rooted’s Abide Retreat, will take place on October 17-19, 2022, in Colorado Springs, CO. Scholarships are available.
Better Stories :: The Necessary Crumbling S03 Ep01
Welcome to a brand new season of Better Stories! We are a podcast sparking a revolution against boredom!
Today, our host, Dr. Justin Bowers, shares his own better, better story of the past two years. Justin is the author of Wonky: A Survival Guide for Following Jesus When You Hate the Church. He is also the founding pastor of New Community, a people finding and following Jesus in the North Central region of West Virginia. Currently, he serves as the Director of Career Services and Experiential Learning at West Virginia Wesleyan College and the founder of Appalachian Impact - an organization building hope for at-risk students in West Virginia.
It's Baaaaaaack!.... Season 3 is (FINALLY) Coming!
Wednesday, August 17!
As students all over the country head back to school we’re kicking off a brand new and long overdue season of Better Stories!
You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts here!
There’s so many good things to share! Don’t miss it!
Thinking About Hearing in the Middle of the Noise
“…it is mutual recognition— the ability to see yourself in another— that is constitutive of a democratic society and of the very sense of one’s own self. Put differently, mutual recognition presupposes humanity.”
- Karida L. Brown, Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia
I have a daughter in eighth grade right now who is the fullness of an eighth grade daughter. I love it. She is full of humor, sarcasm, wit, attitude, and sass. My wife would tell you she’s learned most of that from me. My wife is probably right. One of the other things my daughter has learned is the blunt force eye roll she gives when one of her parents isn’t really paying attention to what she’s saying. To be fair, she says a great deal over the course of a day. But she refuses to let us off the hook when we are enraptured with our social media scrolling. She deeply, deeply, cares about being heard. As we all do.
This has been a tough week. Last Wednesday, January 6, 2021, we watched as a large group of protesters opposed to the results of our national presidential election became a smaller group of rioters who breached the walls of our nation’s capitol in an attempt to assert their own influence and authority. It was painful to try to explain to my kids what was taking place, how it could have happened, and what might happen next. There are few answers.
In the week since that awful scene, my mind hasn’t shut down. News outlets have labeled the events an attempted insurrection and the rioters a group of domestic terrorists. The country’s House of Representatives impeached President Trump for a second time. The National Guard has descended on Washington, DC in the days leading up to President-Elect Biden’s inauguration to offer security. More troops now reside in DC than in Iraq and Afghanistan combined.
And we continue to watch, in horror and confusion and anger and anxiety, while sitting at home in the midst of a global pandemic that doesn’t seem to be slowing down.
Back in January of 2002, just a few months after the tragic attacks of 9/11, then Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed a group of political and business leaders and told them that military attacks on terrorists should be followed by an aggressive war on poverty and hopelessness. He suggested that,
“As we fight terrorism using military means and legal means and law-enforcement and intelligence means ... we also have to put hope back in the hearts of people.”
- Colin Powell, 2002
Over the past week i’ve wrestled with many facets of the national trauma we’ve all experienced. I work in a middle school where we talk a lot about trauma. We talk about being trauma-informed, about caring for the whole child and understanding the core of their emotions rather than just the overflow of those emotions that comes through negative actions. In the wake of what happened on January 6, perhaps we need to revisit Mr. Powell’s words and consider - even among the scenes of those domestic terrorists attacking the capitol - what an aggressive war on poverty and hopelessness looks like in such a (divided) time as this.
I believe it starts with hearing.
In the chaos of the past week, I’ve thought a lot about my daughter’s efforts to make us hear her and what a theology of hearing might actually entail. After watching the ensuing social media feeds after the capitol riots and realizing, once again, that we humans, with all our political bravado and supposed cultural expertise, have gotten no better at actually hearing our brothers and sisters and the cries of their hearts. We need a primer on the value of hearing and hearing well. It may be possible, once again, that in the midst of a new wave of domestic terrorism, we need to do more than wage war on the acts (which of course should happen), but also wage war on the hopelessness that comes from not being heard. So, a few observations about hearing that I believe speak from the Scriptures to this present moment.
True hearing reveals our own brokenness. Early on in the Creation narratives of Genesis, we find Adam and Eve dealing with the weight of their own sin. We see them rejecting God’s promise and recognizing their own nudity (physical, yes, but also social, relational, and emotional). And we see them, in chapter 3 as they hear God looking for them, hiding.
Is it possible today that we are not hearing others because we are afraid of what it might cost us to truly listen? Is it possible that those who criticize the capitol rioters as dumb, ignorant radicals are missing the opportunity to truly listen to a population that is hurting, fearful, antagonized, and worn out from trying to defend world views that are cancelled more quickly than they are understood? Is it possible that those who attack Black Lives Matter as a Marxist movement intent on wreaking havoc on institutional structures are fearful of what it might cost them to truly understand racial injustice at a systemic level?
True hearing requires more from us. My daughter requires more than me being able to repeat her words. She requires that I look at her, put the distractions away, hear her words and hear what is behind her words. True hearing today is the same. It demands we do more than defend; it expects us to, even as we listen, go to the depths of our own brokenness and confront the same emotional and relational nakedness that has existed within us since the start of creation.
Hearing and seeing go hand in hand. When we hear someone, we see someone. When we see someone, we will listen to someone. The story of Abram, his wife Sarai, and his mistress Hagar proves this to us. In the wake of bad decisions, Hagar is cast out of the house of her owners Sarai and Abram and left without hope to fend for her own future. In her despair, she meets Yahweh in the wilderness where he provides for her and her illegitimate child. It is, in this meeting, that she identifies God as El Roi - the God who sees (Genesis 16). Five chapters later, Hagar has been cast away by Sarai yet again, and she finds herself again desperate in the wilderness. And she finds herself again at the mercy of Yahweh. The God who sees returns, and becomes the God who hears (Genesis 21:17).
You cannot hear someone if you don’t see them. We’ve learned this in the past year haven’t we? Our faces covered in masks have shown us how difficult is to truly understand the words someone speaks when we can’t see the mouth that speaks them. This is why arguments on social media are so easy, and I am so guilty. We can criticize much more rapidly, tear down much more aggressively, and deconstruct much more painfully when we don’t have to see the face of the person with whom we are sparring.
What Colin Powell was speaking to in 2002 was the reality that we could win a war against terrorists with military force and lose the war against terrorism to poverty and hopelessness. He saw and he heard. He understood. Karida L. Brown, in her brilliant work Gone Home: Race and Roots Through Appalachia, makes the same point. In a nation facing so much division and anger today, we will not recover democracy until we practice the work of seeing ourselves in another. This is hearing - and seeing - all wrapped up in the act of mutual recognition.
True hearing does not negate action. Notice that Colin Powell didn’t make an argument that terrorists should not be stopped and simply be listened to. What we witnessed at the capitol in the past week cannot be condoned - no matter the heart cries of those who used brute force to fight their way into the halls of power. It is perfectly feasible to call these rioters domestic terrorists in need of arrest, punishment, and consequence, and also say they are acting out of hopelessness in the same sentence. True hearing doesn’t alleviate the work of justice. It doesn’t put out of mind the need to fight for peace in the moments where it is needed. We must act. Our leaders must act. Our authorities must act. But we must do so while hearing the thing behind the thing. We must recapture the both/and rather than the either/or. Mr. Powell’s recognition of the hopelessness behind the terror was an exercise in discernment, a wisdom spoken with acceptable tension.
We need more of this today. While our debate and dialogue online has become the equivalent of second-grade four square games (“It was in!” “No it was out!” “Black Lives Matter protesters rioted too!” “But not as bad as the Trump supporters!”), we must find our way out of that spiral of argumentation and move toward just action and authentic hearing. Simply put, we must not compromise ethical right and wrong for the sake of our preferred perspective and we must keep hearing the perspectives outside our own.
True hearing shows us the heart of God. There is perhaps no more powerful story in the Old Testament than that of Hagar mentioned above. A slave who was handed over by her owner (Sarai) to sleep with Sarai’s husband Abram and give him a child that Sarai was unable to produce. A slave who was hated for her obedience. A slave who found herself with an unwanted pregnancy cast into the wilderness, homeless and hopeless. A slave who encountered the God of Creation, the God who comes to find those who are hopeless, the God who sees and hears in the most desolate places we wander. This is Hagar - a desperate woman who desperately needed to be heard.
I heard my eighth grader authentically last Wednesday. As we talked about the events at the capitol she asked the expected questions. Why? How? What does this mean? What could happen next? But I heard her beyond that. And I heard the questions behind the questions. The real questions many of our children are asking of all of us politically-opinionated, social-media savvy adults right now:
Will you do something about this?
Will you stop arguing with each other?
Will you find a way to unite again?
Will you learn to be kind to each other?
Will you stop yelling, convincing, debating, criticizing, refuting, attacking, and truly hear each other?
Will you wage a war on hopelessness?
Perhaps we all need a good eye roll to get us to start paying attention.
My Year of Books (2020)
I’m tracking right along with my goal to blog more often. Right now, I’m at about twice per year.
In 2019, I was able to bump up the volume of reading I did. So, at the end of that year I shared a list of all that I read, just for anyone who might be interested (and more for me to keep a record). I thought as 2020 wrapped up I would do the same this year. I appreciate these lists I find online for recommendations, so take it for what it’s worth. (Disclaimer: I have not authority as a book reviewer other than I’m a proud Enneagram 5 and a voracious consumer of words.)
Just a quick rundown of the awards I would give out for 2020:
Best Book: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Best Novel: Gilead, Marilynne Robinson
Best Theology/Inspirational: The Slavery of Death, Richard Beck
Best Guilty Pleasure: The Institute, Stephen King
Here’s the list, in order of when I read them:
Call of the Wild, Jack London
Midnight in Chernobyl, Adam Higginbotham
Every Parent’s Guide to Navigating our Digital World, Kara Powell
Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey
Jesus’ Plan for a New World, Richard Rohr
Digital Minimalism, Cal Newport
The Final Solution, Michael Chabon
Talking to Strangers, Malcolm Gladwell
The Front-Line Leader, Chris Van Gorder
The Boys in the Boat, Daniel James Brown
The Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead
How to Be Anti-Racist, Ibrem X Kendi
Gold-Dust Woman, Stephen Davis
The Slavery of Death, Richard Beck
The Boy Crisis, Warren Farrell and John Gray
Fathered By God, John Eldredge
Above the Clouds, Kilian Jornet
The Tattoist of Auschwitz, Heather Morris
The Madness of Crowds, Douglas Murray
After Whiteness, Willie Jennings
Telegraph Avenue, Michael Chabon
For My Pastor Friends - Jerry Garcia was (Mostly) Right
I remember during my senior year of high school one of the themes chosen for one of the major events - prom, graduation, etc. - was the lyric from the old Grateful Dead song “Truckin’”: “What a long strange trip it’s been…”
The lyric was fitting for our graduating class. We were leaving several years of familiarity and over the course of our last year in high school we were now saying goodbye to our teachers, each other, and the system we knew. We had even seen the roof of our building be replaced, literally walking down hallways on school days with open sky exposed because of so much damage from long-standing leaks. This project even came with controversy over asbestos in the repairs. Truly, what a long strange trip it had been.
Nearly 15 weeks ago, the majority of us across the United States found ourselves walking through a moment where life as we knew it was getting shut down. The spread of Covid-19 took over the collective attention and consumed the collective anxiety of our culture. Schools shut down. Entertainment and shopping centers shut down. And yes, for us who carry the vocation of pastor, church as we knew it shut down.
Then, on May 25, officers in Minneapolis arrested George Floyd. While in their custody, he was restrained with a knee on his neck for 8 minutes and 46 seconds, until he died. The social corridor narrowed again. Demonstrations, protests, riots, and looting all ensued.
And so I’m writing this today for my pastor friends. Because in many ways it feels like we’re walking a social hallway, seeing holes in our ministry ceilings, and perhaps thinking the same theme has consumed our lives. Truly, what a long, strange trip these past 15 weeks have been.
Eight years ago my wife and I moved home to our small town in North Central West Virginia and planted a church from the ground up. We began with about 25 friends on our back porch. Over the course of eight years we’ve watched our church grow - with all the stretching and tumbling and joy and pain that encompasses any growth. Two years ago on Easter we saw 356 people attend our Easter worship services. Last Sunday, three weeks into trying to regather since social distancing in our area had been relaxed, we saw 14 people attend our service. What a long, strange trip it’s been.
I think maybe though, Jerry could have added another adjective to this lyric. What a long, strange, hard trip it’s been.
I know that so much of our social fabric has changed over these past four months. Every sector of our society has felt this. Education, politics, entertainment, civil service, and the list goes on and on. But today, maybe for myself and maybe for someone else, I want to write to my pastor friends. Because Jerry forgot to put the word hard in his lyrics.
Just before the pandemic hit, I remember several news articles covering the deaths of large church pastors who had struggled with depression and succumbed to suicide. It seems like in recent years there have been too many to count. Even during the pandemic, another pastor, Darrin Patrick lost his life in a self-inflicted gunshot wound. To say this as bluntly as possible, I’m tired of seeing those called to ministry taken out by demons of depression.
Which has me thinking… How are we doing in the midst of this long, strange, really hard trip?
Let me speak only for myself.
I spent the first few weeks of Coronavirus shutdown trying desperately to figure out how to “gather” a church that couldn’t gather. I learned more about video editing than I ever wanted to know. I tried live streaming. I tried to understand Google Analytics. I talked about online giving. I talked about fear and anxiety and preached my guts out with no one in the room. A few weeks in I even started enjoying the recording process. I found a new way to do my vocation and then found some joy in it, even though someone telling me church was awesome because we got, “64 likes!'“ made my skin crawl. But then our conversations shifted to how we would reopen. So we spent hours and hours talking about guidelines, CDC research, the potential for spread, masks or no masks, hand sanitizer availability, how to clean properly, and on and on. We made communication efforts about reopening. We tried to be excited but not too excited so those who weren’t comfortable coming back to worship in a building wouldn’t feel guilty. We kept recording videos. We tried to setup live streaming. We talked (more) about online giving.
Then, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and George Floyd.
And while all these things in the paragraph above were taking place I also started to try to figure out how to preach and teach about racial righteousness and reconciliation in this cultural moment. I targeted my 95% Caucasian town with the truth of God’s desire for justice and equality and leaned into conversations many wouldn’t think were prophetic enough and many others would say were too over the top. Too conservative. Too liberal. Too soft. Too hard. Too much information. Why can’t we just focus on Jesus? All these were things I heard. And felt.
What a long, strange, really really hard trip it’s been.
If I’m completely candid, I feel like my most frequently used phrase right now is, “I don’t know.” Two weeks ago I preached a message called “Brave Enough Not to Know”. Maybe it was because I needed therapy for myself to actually believe that all my uncertainty right now is okay.
I don’t know.
I don’t know what church is going to look like a month from now or a year from now.
I don’t know how to sustain the giving we’ve lost.
I don’t know how to lean into the necessary leaning toward racial reconciliation that we’ve failed at as the Church for too long.
I don’t know how to separate my sense of identity from my work of ministry.
I don’t know how to love my family well and also shepherd a church that is afraid to gather.
I don’t know how to get people to wear masks.
I don’t know a lot of things.
And for those of you who are pastors in this moment struggling with the exhaustion, the depression, the anxiety, the fear, the hopelessness, the grief, the confusion, the uncertainty, and the not knowing, I don’t know how to help.
But I’d like to.
I’d like to say I really do think it’s okay for us in this moment not to know. I think it’s okay to name the strangeness (and the hardness) of this moment. And I think it’s okay to say you need someone to talk to, pray with, and stand beside. We’ve never been here before. So let’s not go it alone.
Maybe on the other side of this we can add one more lyric… What a long, strange, really really hard, and beautiful trip it’s been.
I’m staying hopeful friends. Reach out if you need an ear. Our stories are better together.
Better Stories :: Kris Camealy S02 Ep03
Enjoy our interview with the incredible Kris Camealy! You can find out tons more about Kris here.
Kin in the Kingdom // How our Theology Should Affect our Sociology
I’ve grown up in an Appalachian culture. I spent nearly 10 years outside that context after my college graduation, but then moved home to North Central West Virginia to plant a church nearly 8 years ago. This culture has been portrayed in a multitude of ways - most of them negative and most of them shallow. Rednecks, hillbillies, mountain people, poverty, white trash, the list could go on and on.
This is also the land where kin matters. You know, the extended family. The people who live in your homes but also their people. The people who come to Thanksgiving, show up for Christmas, and celebrate birthdays. The people who, in the middle of need, will have your back, share your load, and in true Hatfield & McCoy culture, will go after anyone who poses a threat to the kinfolk around you.
We get this right? Even outside of Appalachia, we get tastes of the power of kin. We know the people we would call if life fell apart. Whether it’s family or friend, we all have a sense of kin.
The interesting piece of this, to me, is that growing up in this culture it was sort of unspoken. I knew who my people were, and I knew who my people were not. I knew where theorists call the in-group/out-group boundaries existed. My family had a sense of Appalachian loyalty and connection that was impenetrable. Even now at forty years of age, and with our kin more spread out than ever before, we still have that.
—
There’s this thing about the Biblical narrative in the New Testament. It is seen first in the acts and words of Jesus, and later in the theology of Paul. For the Jewish people, kin was perhaps best understood in the Greek word “oikos,” or household. It implied not only your immediate family but those who shared life with you - your people but also your slaves and neighbors, the entire community of those who shared your sphere. And for Jesus, he begins to reconstitute the meaning of family and the understanding of oikos around himself. At one point after being told his mother and brothers are trying to gain access to him he bluntly asks, “Who are my mother and brothers?… whoever does the will of my Father in heaven…” (Matthew 12:46-50). At another point Jesus directly says if one doesn’t “hate father or mother he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14:26). For Jesus, it seems, family no longer carries the boundary of blood or proximity; it is rather formed around the connection to Christ himself and the blood shed for those who seek to do his will.
Paul continues this understanding, fleshing it out for the life of the Church. He calls the people brothers and sisters. He references Yahweh as Father. He spells out over forty ways the people of the body of Christ can care for and love “one another”. He identifies Jesus as our brother. He reorients the identity of Jesus followers as being a part of the household of God (1 Timothy 3:15). For Paul, like Jesus, the kinfolk - the brothers and sisters of Jesus - are any and all who find themselves entering the waters of baptism and centered around the table of communion.
—
So what’s the point?
Over the past week we have seen a growing movement of protests and reactions to systemic racism and oppression throughout our country. We have seen the Black Lives Matter conversations brought once again to the forefront of our news cycles. We have seen pain and fear, anger and violence, action and demand.
And we have seen counter-thinking. We have seen those who love to spout off immediately when they hear the chants of “Black Lives Matter!” that instead, “All Lives Matter!”
So the point is this. Our theology must affect our sociology.
Or put more simply, what we believe about God must affect how we love people.
The response that all lives matter seems to be a rallying cry for tempering too much attention on black lives. It seems to be that my white brothers and sisters who want this to be the way protests should happen are crying out for the black voices and those who support the black voices to calm down, realize they’re just a little extreme in their thinking, and not lose sight of the fact that God loves everyone equally.
The problem is this thinking seems to move us away from the kinship of God’s Kingdom.
Let me speak from an Appalachian context. If my cousin’s daughter is hurting - if she is wounded or sick, perhaps hospitalized with some unknown condition - her kin will be there. We will reorient our lives. We will change our schedules, shift our priorities, and be there in proximity with them for as long as it takes. And all along that journey, we will not once say, “Well cousin, we’re here for you, but just remember all of us get sick at times. So make sure as you care for your wounded daughter that you temper that with concern for the rest of us.”
This is ridiculous, isn’t it?
And yet, in the midst of our cultural moment where the Black Lives Matter movement has risen to prominence, this seems to be the common response. I expect this response from conservative pundits. I reject this response from brothers and sisters who follow Christ.
In fact, Jesus seems to carry this theology into the very practice of prayer he teaches his disciples. In Luke, immediately after he demonstrates the Lord’s prayer for them, he says this:
5 Then Jesus said to them, “Suppose you have a friend, and you go to him at midnight and say, ‘Friend, lend me three loaves of bread; 6 a friend of mine on a journey has come to me, and I have no food to offer him.’ 7 And suppose the one inside answers, ‘Don’t bother me. The door is already locked, and my children and I are in bed. I can’t get up and give you anything.’ 8 I tell you, even though he will not get up and give you the bread because of friendship, yet because of your shameless audacity he will surely get up and give you as much as you need.
9 “So I say to you: Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you. 10 For everyone who asks receives; the one who seeks finds; and to the one who knocks, the door will be opened.
Luke 11:5-10
Even a friend who wants to ignore the needs of kin cannot because of “shameless audacity”. How much more, Jesus seems to ask, will our Father in heaven invite us to bring our needs to him? And how much more should we, as the kin in the kingdom of God, care for those around us who are wounded?
In passage after passage, Jesus places the idea before us that the singular individual in front of us - the bleeding, wretched, poor, pitiful, weak, wounded, hurting, oppressed - each of them in our direct proximity is our neighbor and is the one we should offer compassion to. And never, not once, does Jesus seem to state that we are called to analyze the needs and conditions of the bleeding, wretched, poor, pitiful, weak, wounded, hurting, oppressed. No, he simply calls us to loving solidarity.
So yes, black lives matter (as if I should even state that). And for those of us - my brothers and sisters who follow Jesus - we are the kin of the kingdom called to stand and embrace the wounded around us. Our theology is meaningless if it doesn’t affect our sociology.