Theology in the Raw - 631: Bruxy Cavey - Church Membership, Nonviolence and Hell

Episode Date: January 23, 2018

Today on the podcast Preston is talking with Bruxy Cavey. Bruxy and Preston are talking about church membership, nonviolence and views of hell. Do we need to have church membership? Who can be a "member" of the church? Should a Christian hold to nonviolence? Should a Christian serve in the military? What does Bruxy think about the Eternal Conscious Torment view of hell? Is Bruxy one of the Annihilationist too?  Bruxy Cavey is the senior pastor at The Meeting House. The Meeting House is a multisite Anabaptist congregation in Ontario, Canada where thousands of people connect to God and each other through Sunday services, online interaction, and a widespread house church network. Bruxy is also author of the bestselling book, The End of Religion and his new book, (re)union, is an overview of “The Good News of Jesus for Seekers, Saints, and Sinners. You can learn more about Bruxy at bruxy.com. You can also learn about The Meeting House at themeetinghouse.com. The song at the end is from the Gladiator soundtrack called "Now We Are Free". Support Preston Support Preston by going to patreon.com Connect with Preston Follow him on Twitter @PrestonSprinkle Check out his website prestonsprinkle.com If you enjoy the podcast, be sure to leave a review.

Plus, he kind of looked like a terrorist. I mean, if you guys listening haven't Googled Bruxy yet, Google Bruxy KV images, and you're not going to— It's not a mistake. He really is a pastor. He's a terrorist or a hippie drug dealer, I think. I haven't stopped more times than I care to mention. Hey friends, welcome back to another episode of Theology in the Raw. I am here with my, in some ways, he's been a friend for a while, but as it goes in this day and age, we've never actually met in person nor talked in person. But I feel like my guest has been a friend and a mentor from afar and

really from a different country. I'm so grateful to have Bruxy Cavey on the podcast today. Bruxy, thanks so much for being on the show. Preston, this is a real privilege. And likewise, it's a fascinating thing to be a fan of someone through media or on-screen presence. And we're still on screen, but to talk personally is fantastic. I love it. This must be what online dating feels like. You read your profile, listen to some audio clips, and then you finally meet and see if you hit it. Online bromance, man. So I, I'm going to give you a running start, but I want you to talk about who you are, your kind of background, where you've been in ministry and life. But just for the audience, Bruxy, he's been a pastor at a church in Toronto, right, Bruxy?

Yeah, Toronto, the surrounding area, yeah. It's called The Meeting House. It's a multi-site Anabaptist congregation. And I was just telling Bruxy earlier, I just, I've so appreciated his heart for the church. He's absolutely a pastor at heart, but not just for the church, but for the de-church, the unchurch, the unchurchy church type church people that don't like to go to church. And Bruxy has a massive heart for those people, as I do. of heart for those people as I do, but also your ability to blend incredible intellect and thoughtfulness and scholarship to the pulpit in a way that's just really down to earth. I just absolutely love. And you've written a couple of books. One, The End of Religion. The second one came out last year called Reunion. And the subtitle, I believe, is Good News of Jesus for

Seekers, Saints, and Sinners. Is that right? Yeah, that's it. Yes. My hope is just to say, you know, the gospel's for all of us. For the longtime Christian, the new Christian, and the person who's never heard of Jesus and people in between, that there's this ministry of reminding in the New Testament where the Apostle Paul and others keep saying, I want to remind you about the gospel.

I want to preach the gospel to you, even though you're Christians. Romans 1 begins with Paul saying, I'm eager to get to you to preach the gospel, and he's writing to the church. So to break down the wall between us versus them, the us who have the gospel need to preach it to the them who don't, and to say, can we create kind of congenial spaces where Christians and non-Christians can get together? And everyone in the circle is saying, I need to hear the gospel, either again or afresh or for the first time. So that's the hope of the book Reunion,

that both Christians and non-Christians will get something out of it. I want to return to that. I mean, the message in these books, I absolutely want to return to. And I can tell you right now, I mean, I'm almost positive the majority of my audience here

is going to absolutely resonate with these two books as they are with your ministry, if they're not familiar with it. But let's back up and just give me a quick snapshot of who you are. I don't care about where you were born or the year you're born. As far as like kind of your ministry trajectory and specifically, I mean, theologically, we have arrived at a lot of kind of unconventional views very much independently. And I definitely want to get into there. So maybe that's kind of woven throughout your story. But tell us a bit about who you are, your passions, what you do, and what you hope to aspire to be in the future when you grow up.

What I did with my summer vacation by Bruxy Cavey. Here's the quick overview. So I think you and I have had some similarities in our journey in that um i've grown up evangelical proper um i've been uh pentecostal for most of my life and then was converted to kind of a calvinist perspective in my seminary days basically went into seminary with a lot of questions and it was a race for my brain whoever could get there first and answer my questions got my allegiance and i had a good reform professor who taught a good Calvinist systematic theology. And so that answered my questions.

And so, you know, people talk about going through this phase or that phase. I went through my Calvinist phase during my seminary years and pastored a Baptist church for five years. And in Canada, that's a fellowship Baptist. It's a conservative kind of Baptist. That's the John MacArthur kind of Baptist for Canada, and was all in. And I've appreciated every phase of my church allegiance and involvement. So this is not the testimony of, can't believe I was this, and then I was that. But I actually really have appreciated the diversity of the body of Christ and completely different theological approaches to different topics.

And if we can see that as a strength of the body of Christ, that we actually don't agree about everything and we bring different things to the table, if we can just shift our hearts to see that as a strength, then it drives us together in greater unity. We want to have more conversation with one another as brother and sister rather than just seeing these things as things that must divide us and try and figure out who's in and who's out. I was very grateful for every phase of my church allegiance. I'm grateful for my Pentecostal background and my Baptist and Calvinist years, and I don't approach my own story with disdain of, I can't believe I believed that, and how embarrassing that I used to be this, but rather to see the diversity as part of the beauty of the body of Christ, including the fact that we don't agree on everything, but that the cross of Christ unites us, even when we don't agree about many periphery issues. And this, to me, is a testimony of the beauty and the miraculous

power of Jesus, because any secular organization or any other religion can have unity as long as they agree. A unity predicated on absolute agreement on all things is a kind of secular unity, which can have its place, but the miraculous unity of Jesus, something that Christians should be able to model that another political organization or another religion cannot model, is that we actually strongly disagree, but like family, we've got each other's backs, but we can have robust disagreement over the dinner table. We can have laughs and we can have barbs and we can have a debate, but no one's worried about who gets kicked out of the family after dessert. We enjoy our time together as family. And so I really appreciate that all the more from my background. But while I was a Baptist minister, I was meeting each week with some Jehovah's Witness friends. We did this for a couple of

years. Every Wednesday afternoon for two or three hours, we would get together for evangelistic purposes. I thought I was converting them. They thought they were converting me. And we were both thinking we're making good use of our time. But they challenged me with something. Every time I knew I was kind of winning the debate, you could say, when I was making my point better, I could tell I was because they'd bring this ace out of their sleeve and they'd throw this down on the table. They'd say, well, Bruxy, whether you're right or you're wrong, all we know is you Christians have a history of killing each other for the sake of your earthly kingdoms. And I go, oh, and every time they throw that out, I go, well, you're kind of right. And that really bugs me. And why are we not following the really clear stuff in the teaching of Jesus?

We're arguing over the esoteric stuff. But we also just seem to be en masse ignoring what seems to be the really of Jesus. We're arguing over the esoteric stuff, but we also just seem to be en masse ignoring what seems to be the really clear stuff. And so I would say to them, I'll give you that. I think you're right. I still think you're heretics, but I think you're right about the peace teaching of Jesus. And so here I was, but it didn't bode well for me that as a Christian, I thought the only people who cared about the peace teaching of Jesus, I would consider a cult. So I thought, I'm all alone in the world. There's nobody else out there who's thinking like me.

What do I do with this? And then I heard about not only the Protestant Reformation, which I knew well, but the Radical Reformation, the Anabaptist Revolution that followed on the heels of the Protestant Revolution. on the heels of the Protestant revolution. And so very briefly, when the Protestants reformed and revolted in the early 1500s, it was really the very next generation, the students of the Protestants, who started asking the questions. When the Protestants said,

"'You gotta get the Bible inside you. "'You've gotta read it for yourself,' it was their students who said, "'All right, we're reading the Bible, "'and we're finding out that Jesus is teaching things "' that even you guys, our professors, are not following. Catholics and Protestants are both killing each other in the name of following Jesus. And so on the heels of the Protestant Reformation was the Radical Reformation that the Anabaptists really championed. And I thought, as I learned more about that, I thought, this feels

like the people of my tribe, even though I have not been raised this way. Learned a bit more about it, eventually became a pastor of an Anabaptist church, as you said, the Meeting House. And while I appreciate all the diversity of denominations out there, I think I finally found a settled place now where my theology is aligning. And there's this, to think that since the 1500s, there's been this robust movement of people who have 1500s, there's been this robust movement of people who have been saying, let's just really follow Jesus first and foremost, and we'll work out all our theological distinctions as we follow Jesus, but let's keep in step with him as closely as possible. That's been really refreshing for me.

Wow. Gosh, I got tons of questions, Kay. I don't want to interrupt you because you're on a roll, but there's so many. I mean, I didn't know that you had the kind of Baptist, MacArthur-ish, Calvinist background. I just thought you were raised in more of like an Anabaptist tradition. So this puts us even more akin because that was very much my background. I mean, I would say in the last, let's just say 10 plus years, I haven't really thought too hard about like calvinism arminianism um yeah i still have reformed type threads in my theology i think and leanings and there's certain but for me when i say i'm reformed and whenever i say reformed it's definitely like a lowercase r reformed um because i very much value, appreciate, learn from, and enjoy

being critiqued by all kinds of different systems. And I don't even like theological systems. I think all of them end up breaking down. And I'm very much open to changing my views on soteriology if the Bible demands it. And so I'm very non-reformed

kind of just maybe of a posture. But for me, when I say I'm still reformed, it's kind of high view of scripture, a truly high view of scripture, like letting scripture critique my reformed perspective, you know? And going where the text leads, even if it leads me very far away from a reformed background. So I'm that reformed. High view of God, high view of the gospel. But it's funny when I hang out with my Armenian friends, they say, we have a high view of scripture, a high view of God, high view of the gospel. We love God's sovereignty. He is king

over everything. I'm like, no, you're not allowed to say that because you're supposed to say it's all about you. And, you know, so all that to say, I wonder, because I know you now are not of that sort of camp, but man, I even wonder how much I am. But I really appreciate that you love and learn from these diverse traditions. And I sense a real genuineness in that. I hear some people give lip service to that, but then the very next statement, they're like, anybody that say voted for Trump is of Satan, and they're not allowed in our church, and this, that. well that's not really like how tolerant are you really going to be and

um right so i want to come back to the you know we we share very similar if not you know um parallel perspectives on non-violence and um and certain perspectives on hell so So I want to camp out on both of those for a little bit. Let's begin with the nonviolence thing. And you hinted at it by going back to the Anabaptist branch of the Reformation. But give us a little snapshot of your trajectory there. And what was it that compelled you to embrace a Christian view of nonviolence? Sure. It will sound cheeky if I just say Jesus. But to some extent, it does boil down to that,

but I know I need to say more. To bridge some of the things we've already been saying with the issue of nonviolence, one of the gifts I think that Anabaptism can give the broader body of Christ, and I don't want everyone to become Anabaptist, I want us to just dialogue more and have a richer body. And I felt when I became Anabaptist. I want us to just dialogue more and have a richer body. And I felt when I became Anabaptist that to some extent, this branch of the Christian family tree was kind of the body of Christ best kept secret. I had been a Christian my whole life and never, I mean, I knew there were Amish people and Mennonites and Hutterites, but I didn't really know that there were, that there was an evangelical, evangelistic, robust version of this. And one of the, I think,

one of the gifts they've given me and what Anabaptists can give the broader body of Christ is just a reminder that when we work diligently and well on our theological systems and constructs, it will always be a danger of creating a grid through which we then go back to Scripture and always see things in an effort to reinforce the construct that we have built. And Anabaptists never had the chance to build a theological construct because from their earliest generations, they were persecuted by both Protestants and Catholics. So they were always on the run. So whereas Catholics could have a seminary in France and Lutherans could have a seminary in Germany, Anabaptists never had a seminary in France, and Lutherans could have a seminary in Germany. Anabaptists never had a seminary. They never had all their first-generation leaders who were the academics

who, out of seminaries, became convicted that we should follow Jesus nonviolently. They were all persecuted, they were all killed, and the next generation rose up with no one to lead them and no educational system, and they were immediately on the run, and they met in caves, and they met in homes, and they met in forests, and every time someone would rise to prominence, they would be arrested and killed. And so you have a movement that had to survive hundreds of years into the future with no higher education, and so they were grasping for what is the most simplest core of the gospel that we can celebrate for salvation, and then what's the core of the ethic of what it means to follow Jesus in our lives. And that had to be something they could pass on in almost like childlike simplicity. And that's not to say, as some Mennonite or Amish

groups might conclude, that therefore we're so skeptical of higher education, we're never going to have our seminaries, we're never going to go to college. But it is just a reminder for those of us in the West who are almost addicted to higher education to say, just be humble and be modest and know that whatever the core is that unites us in Christ has to be something that a childlike faith can grasp and then pass on to the next generation. That's something for me, because I'm a Bible nerd, I'm a theology nerd, and I think we share that in common, and I could just get drunk on theological conversation into the wee hours of the night, and it feels like spiritual growth to me, you know? It feels like I come alive, like this is what is connecting me with God, and I realize that that's such a place of privilege in the history of the church,

that I should think that way. So Anabaptism has been good to remind my Bible theologically nerdy brain that there's a way of following Jesus that should be able to be boiled down to something more simple. And that's my bridge to really say when it comes to the nonviolent enemy love of Jesus, Anabaptists just, they knew there's a lot in the Bible they didn't understand, but they thought that's pretty plain. It's, as I read through Matthew 5 and Luke chapter 6, and look at the example of how Jesus lived and died, starting with Jesus and then radiating out into the rest of Scripture, I think to myself, if, and this is what I would ask listeners who are more just war leaning in their theology, I'd ask them just to ask themselves this question.

If, theoretically, God did want us to live nonviolent lives, enemy loving, peace loving, nonviolent lives, what more could he have said in scripture? What more could he have said through Jesus and modeled through Jesus to make that clear? I don't know that there's anything more he could have said. I read through the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5, Jesus not only teaches it as a principle, but then he rolls into specific examples in case people say, well, that's in principle we're to love our enemy. Well, we run them through with the sword. And so he gives the principle, but then he gives examples, recurring examples of what that looks like. And then he ties it back into saying, this is how your heavenly father loves. When you look at the weather, think about nonviolence. And then this is

how you're going to be like your father in heaven. And so that just one chapter says to me, okay, he's gone above and beyond the theoretical to make sure that this is very clear. And to see that that's how the early church interpreted the teaching of Jesus for the first few centuries tells me that I'm not far off when I think maybe it is as simple as following what Jesus said, trusting him at that. And that will raise a whole bunch of questions. I realize it raises a whole bunch of questions, but every theological construct and every ethical position raises a whole bunch of questions. To some extent, deciding what you believe about this is a matter of choosing which questions you're going to spend the rest of your life asking. That's so, yeah.

Oh, my gosh. I'm going to ask Jesus questions about peace. You know, you mentioned the early church. It was, I mean, no doubt about it. You know, I'm a Bible guy. I'm going to go with it, try to go with the text leads. And so when I was looking at what the scriptures say about nonviolence, it was very much compelling. But then I'm like, man, maybe I'm just like, am I just reading this?

Or is it just a few kind of fringe Anabaptists that are seeing this stuff? But then when I looked at the early church, the pre-Constantine church's perspective on these issues, it was really that that just blew me away. It was, you know, when you think about the early church, the pre-Constantine church, I mean, there's tons and tons of diversity, largely because the early church was geographically segmented. It was, you know, they were being persecuted. They couldn't just have these huge ecumenical discussions about what they believed. And so you had a lot of diversity, you of diversity brewing in different segments of the early church. And this is why they couldn't agree on the Trinity, the deity and humanity of Jesus. And they couldn't even agree on what books belong in the Bible.

I mean, there were people reading like Shepard or Hermes instead of Revelation. Right, right. But when you look at all the early church thinkers whose writings have been left behind, when they addressed the issue of nonviolence or should Christians kill, it was unanimous. Yeah. And I really do mean, I mean, as far as we can tell,

there was no dissenting voice from like several different thinkers that when the question came up, should Christians serve in Rome's military? Should they ever kill somebody? Even quote unquote, origin talks about good killing versus bad killing. You know, can you kill, obviously you shouldn't kill a good guy, but can you kill a bad guy? And he says, if you're a Christian, no. Christians don't kill. And I was blown away at how uniform that perspective was. And then also when you see in the post-Constantine

world, when the church left its position of weakness and became part of the, you know, in positions of power, that now they started to read these questions through a very different lens, very blatantly. Like, they're like, okay, how can we rule the world through Rome, you know, kill the barbarians and maintain our Christian faith? I mean, it's simplified, but it was almost like blatantly syncretistic. Like, we need to kind of be worldly and Christian, and how do we do this with this question of nonviolence? And it was then like blatantly syncretistic, like we need to kind of be worldly and Christian, and how do we do this with this question of nonviolence? And it was then when they sort of really adopt this sort of just war theory. But I see the same thinking today in a lot of circles,

where there just seems to be kind of blatant, syncretistic, you know, very cultural and kind of Christian perspectives coming together in this lens in which people are reading these issues. Not for everybody, but for a lot of people. I'm coming to a question. Have you seen that, the sort of blend of cultural influences and people still trying to wrestle with what it means to love your enemies? And you kind of come up with this blend of cultural ideology and some Christian stuff woven throughout? Absolutely, Yes. And as America's little brother to the north, it's easier sometimes to kind of just sit back and watch and listen and see what's going on. And I think that sometimes,

culturally speaking, a nation's greatest weakness is just its strength overplayed. And to some extent, America is this blend of weaknesses and strengths and great failures and great successes. And there is, while it has a shameful aspect to the story of its founding and its relationship with its indigenous peoples, there's also this strong Christian motif that Christians will often just naturally gravitate to and want to retell to themselves, and the Christian background and ethos of the country, and the great religious freedom of America. There's so many strengths there, but as we tell that tale to ourselves, to feel good about our Christian identity, our faith and our nation start to blend together,

and we start to just look at the positive stories, which is, you know, it could spin the whole story of America differently, not only in its relationship with the, with, with indigenous peoples, but in the fact that it was a rebellious movement against the rightful authority, which is England. And if Hawaii right now said, we don't want to be taxed and we want to break off and we're no longer, how dare we be American? Americans will say, why are you being so rebellious, right? We're the rightful authority. And so you can tell, you can emphasize different aspects of the story, but when we highlight the strengths of a nation, and there are real strengths there, they can eclipse our theological understanding of so many things, especially how theology interacts with nationalism. And I'm afraid I see a lot of that happening.

Wow. Let's make sure we have time for a few other things we got to talk about. Let's transition. Let's take a sharp turn to your journey when it comes to the doctrine or nature of hell. Because I think that journey is maybe still happening or is maybe more fresh. I mean, you've been an advocate for nonviolence for as long as I've known you, known of you. Yeah, talk to me about how you've been wrestling with hell. Yes, sure. I was just surprised. Hell is one of those things that I preached on regularly. And in doing my own study, I became a little surprised at how under-supported the classical view of hell was scripturally. There's less than a half a dozen good texts in the New Testament that would suggest that the more classical traditionalist view of

eternal conscious torment, it would be true. And so I'm not saying they're not there. There's a handful, and literally a handful, I can count them on one hand, the primary ones, one from Jesus in Matthew 25, and then the other couple of primary ones from the book of Revelation. And aside from those, it was interesting how there's just hundreds, hundreds of other verses that don't make that assumption that hell is eternal conscious torment, but that hell is simply the dissolution of being. It is the end of life. It is the undoing of our existence. And just as physical fire destroys physical things, there is a spiritual fire that will destroy your spirit. And that understanding of hell is just so overrepresented throughout Scripture, and especially the fact that the classical view was based,

I mean, primarily, there's one verse of Jesus, and then primarily in the book of Revelation, I thought it's interesting that my, I remember my seminary professor, good Reformed professor, would tell me that since Revelation is a very apocalyptic book and filled with imagery and symbolism, we don't tend to do theology by starting with Revelation and then projecting what we discover there back through the rest of Scripture. We start with what are the most clear texts, and that will help us understand what Revelation is getting at. And so all of that just got me to question, am I being as robustly biblical as I should be as a follower of Jesus in just accepting the classical view? And just began to really read, study, and in the end,

I think I've now crossed the line. I'm open to being wrong and always wanting to be corrected on this, but I think I'd have to say now that I would hang my hat in the camp of being an annihilationist and say that fits with Scripture for me the best way possible. You know, it's fascinating and encouraging, and I very much echo your, if I can say, your humble hesitation, just out of respect for, you know, the ECT, eternal conscious torment, the traditional view has been the dominant view for at least 1500 years that there has been dissenting voices but there has been a that's a strong weight of tradition and and i sense your hesitation i mean it's taking you a few years to really get to where you say

you hang your hat and and i very much uh echo and appreciate that um and i and i i always like to emphasize that whenever i talk about sometimes i can get excited or feel like I'm being too dogmatic on these things. But I mean, I would very much echo your perspective that the overwhelming, not that there's not a few verses that just by themselves could not be understood, you know, to support the traditional view. But man, the overwhelming, overwhelming. view. But man, the overwhelming, overwhelming, I need to add these up because it's in the hundreds, if not thousands of passages that when they talk about the final state of those who reject God or don't accept God is language of finality is the way I kind of put it, you know, whether it's destruction, perish, death, end of life, cessation. I mean, it's right now I'm actually going back and reading through a lot of the Old Testament passages on this. And, and it's funny that the

traditional is hardly ever even talked about. They say, you know, hell's not really mentioned in the old Testament. It doesn't really talk about, let's go to the new Testament. I said, well, your, your version of hell's not mentioned, but, but the, the, the, the broad category of what will the end be for the wicked is all over the place. It's hard to read a prophetic book in the Old Testament without seeing that kind of everywhere. So, man, I thought you've been fairly public about this, right? I mean, have you preached on it? Yes, I've preached on it a few times, and initially what I did is I did, and I do this regularly, when I preach on a topic that has a variety of views within Orthodox Christianity, I will tend to cover all of the views and say, now here's where the meeting house stands. This is where our denomination, our church stands.

But here's what the broader body of Christ believes. Because I want to teach in two ways. I want to teach where we are at and be honest and authentic about that, but also in a way that breeds increased unity and understanding about the broader body of Christ with whom we may disagree about this topic. And rather than, you know, create a sense of we're the only game in town, rather to appreciate us and our denominational distinctives in a way that also helps us appreciate other churches around us. So I've taught on hell in a way that has looked at all the different ways, boiling down to the primary three, the traditionalist and the universalist, and then in the middle, the annihilationist view. And I really was non-conclusive. My point was, do your study, understand where you stand,

and know that these are views that different Orthodox Christians have held at different points in history, and be respectful as you enter into the dialogue and make it a season of learning. And then more recently, I cycled back and I did the same thing, but I did the same thing also being clear that this is where I stand. I've now arrived at the conditionalist or annihilationalist view, and yet I still want to teach a healthy dose of respect in the dialogue for the other views. You know, it's fascinating. You mentioned the apocalyptic language in Revelation. I've been looking or really revisiting some of the early Jewish texts as, you know, a lot of pre-first century and first century Jewish texts that are apocalyptic.

Some of them do have these real violent descriptions of, you know, hell, Gehenna, or just, you know, the end state of the wicked. What's fascinating, I've noticed, especially in the Dead Sea Scrolls, that they will use this kind of over-the-top, apocalyptic, real almost hideous description of what God's going to do with the wicked, but then they'll turn right around and talk about finality, destruction, the end. So you almost get the sense that the apocalyptic language used to, it sounds very eternal conscious torment,

is still spoken maybe hyperbolically or just apocalyptically within an overarching framework of, of course they're going to die and pass out of existence. Right, right. And that is, and people should remember, that is the conditionalist or annihilationist point of view, is that there is a hell, and hell may be the experience of a significant amount of torment and punishment that is lived out. It's not to downplay the experience of hell. It is just the belief that this is not something that God supernaturally sustains forever as our existence.

And so I think sometimes a classicalist will try and downplay those who hold the other views by saying, oh, you're minimizing hell, you just don't, so you think it's just a party, we die. And if that's the case, why bother to evangelize if we're all just going to heaven when we die or else we're just falling asleep and never waking up when we die? And to say no, I think, in fact, all three views, even the restorationist, the universalist view, would say that there's hell as a kind of purifying fire, but it's not necessarily a positive experience. And they want to warn people of hell as well, that apart from Christ, that everyone will experience hell. We all agree on that. The question is, after that experience of hell,

what happens? Just more hell? Or we cease to exist? Or we're saved out of hell? But we all agree that hell is a bad thing and we want to avoid it. That's so good. I often get accused of, you know, well, yeah, that's the guy who used to believe in hell. He got soft and, you know, now he's nonviolent and he doesn't believe in hell and he hates Jesus. I mean, I kid, but I don't. I mean, it's really fascinating how some of the the um the critiques are not even a you know they just hear through the grapevine or whatever and it's it used to be frustrating to me it's like you know what that's just human nature i guess i guess so but it's a shame that we've gone backwards in our ability to have robust dialogue in unity from

the early church you were saying how the early church didn't agree on a whole lot of things. We agreed on peace, but we didn't agree on a whole lot of stuff, but we still considered each other brother and sister. There were six schools of theology in the first four centuries of the church in different cities where Christians studied, and what's fascinating is that they did not all agree. In fact, at the time, the majority view was the restorationist or universalist view, and then there were also smaller schools, representation of what became the classical eternal conscious torment view, and then our annihilationist view. But it was moving, it was shifting throughout history, what was the dominant view. But whatever the dominant view was,

it still accepted the other views as the views of brothers and sisters who we are having a debate with, who we're disagreeing with. And to think that we've lost that, that we've gone backwards in our unity, I think that really is sad from the point of view of the project of Christ to bring together this one new creation. That's so good. I got an ecclesiological question for you, and then I want to talk about your two books, and then we'll close out. And this is really just, I've been wrestling with this

in my own life, in my own church, and just in my thinking. You know, it sounds like your church is very similar to ours, and really my general ecclesiology of that you should have, you should give people space, really really to wrestle with things and not sort of excommunicate people for not signing off on, you know, a 10-page doctrinal statement with all these little things. And I love, I want to foster healthy theological diversity within a church context.

At the same time, I still do believe in, you know, certain things are really important. And I do think that the church should stand for certain things. And I've got to think about what my actual question is. When it comes to, say, do you have any kind of membership policy or something like that? Or where do you say, okay, to be a member or maybe to be a leader or to be an elder or deacon or whatever, you do need to have some of these things a bit more

ironed out. How do you balance all that? That's a great, great thought. The church has maybe in some ways done itself a service and a disservice by having something called official church membership, so that we use the word member in the Western church in two different ways. We might say you're a member of the body of Christ, and you're a member of this local church because you're a believer, but then we have official church membership with a roster and a certain short list of doctrines that you agree to and certain practices you will ascend to, you know, throwing your heart behind. And we'll, after you pass the interview and you get your name on the roster, now you're an official church member. And we will often in membership documents quote biblical passages that use the word member, like from 1 Corinthians 12, talking about being a member of the body of Christ. We'll quote those

passages, and we'll talk about official church membership, which intentionally confuses the issue in people's minds, and we say, well, hold on there. I'm a member of the body of Christ. I just am. You know, by grace, praise Jesus, I'm a member of the body of Christ, and if I attend this church, I'm a member of this local expression of the body of Christ, and I want to be involved here. So there's no new level of special membership beyond that. So what we have, what some people might think of as church membership, we just call leadership. If you are a leader at the Meeting House, if you qualify for leadership, yes, there there's a screening process. There is a coming together to say, do you align with the beliefs, the specific beliefs of this church?

Because leadership is when you invite someone to stand in a place where they are going to advocate for the distinctives of a particular church, and they're going to mentor other people and counsel others. So if we have someone come who disagrees with us on an issue, we don't have to say to them, you can't be a member of this church. We say, welcome, you're a member of this church if you love Jesus, and we will continue to agree to disagree about many things and have robust conversations, brothers and sisters. But if you want to be a leader of this church and be in a position where you represent the distinctive views of this church to others, well, then you would need to agree. That would just make sense. Or you'd be putting yourself in a position of hypocrisy

to say, you know, I'm a leader of this church and I'm representing what this church believes, but I don't personally believe it. And that has really helped us work through a lot of issues where people say, can I be a member of this church if I disagree about a number of theological issues? And we can say, yeah, you are a member if you're here and you're part of the body of Christ, but can you be a leader? That's a different question. And most people understand that. So when you say lead, is your concept of leadership in very broad? Like, do you have like, is like 25 or 50% of your church considered leaders? You're not talking formal leadership, like they're on staff or they go to the elders meetings or something. Right. Well, first of all, for understanding the meeting house, we're from the outside looking in,

we might look like a large church that maybe has a small group program. But from the inside out, we see ourselves as a house church movement that also has an optional Sunday morning large group program. So we have over 200 house churches that are led by lay pastors. So that would be an example. There's a lot of leadership being developed for that, but also leading whether it it's in our kids' ministries or youth ministries. There's ways of volunteering in a church where you might be in a journey of even figuring out what you believe, and most churches will say, well, here's a place where you can serve while you decide if you want to follow Christ, but leadership is when you stand in any position in our church where you are then mentoring or discipling others and representing the views of our church to others. Okay, okay, that's helpful. Man, I gotta think about that. That's really,

that's helpful. I don't like member, non-member. I don't like those as language or even categories because they are, in a sense, they are largely secular categories, except, I mean, Paul does say member, but I think he means something different than when we talk about membership. And we have, you know, if you're a member at the country club and a non-member walks in, do you, you know, what's your, what's, you know, how does that member treat the non-member? Well, you kind of like down upon them, like, oh, you don't, you don't really belong and you have to do all these things and then you can be long and you're not one of, like the member of the country club is not going to serve the non-member. They're going to kind of look at them with suspicion.

And the categories that I've been trying to explore and even advocate for are family guests. So do you want to be actually be part of the family? And then that comes with the assumption in any kind of joining a family that there are certain ways the family behaves, certain things they do, certain rhythms of life that they participate in. And when you say, I want to be part of the family, you're at the same time saying, I want to be part of the rhythms of the family. And if you don't want to be that, or you're not there yet, you get to be a guest, which means you get to be served,

be lavished with love and kindness and all this stuff. And again, both family guests has, I think, deep, significant roots in scripture with, I mean, obviously family, but even guests have the hospitality of being served by the family. It's a good image. When you're having a meal together with friends over, you have guests and you have family members all equally dining and fellowshipping and having a great time. But the difference happens when the meal's over, the guests go home and the family members do the dishes. Right, exactly. Yeah. So I think that's a wonderful way

of describing the distinction. Yeah, yeah. You were going to say something too before I cut you off. Oh, I do think that this double talk on the word member in churches is just something that I pray the church in North America

will grow through over the decades ahead and get away from because it leads to a strange place where if you have a Christian who is at your church and is involved, but maybe they've had a bad experience with another church and they're hesitant to, I don't know, sign to their absolute agreement with everything on the statement of faith, or they just don't like to fill out a form and go through the process, but they're there, they're committed. Or maybe you have to be baptized as a believer at your church, but you have a very mature Christian who was baptized as an infant,

believe in infant baptism, so they don't agree about that, but they're willing to serve, they want to be part of the family, and to say to them, well, you're like a non-member member of our church is like talking out of both sides of our mouth. So we just tend to say to people, listen, if you're here, you love Jesus, then you're part of the family, you're a member of our church. Could you be a leader and still advocate for infant baptism at an Anabaptist church? No. And I wouldn't go to a Presbyterian church and expect that I could be a leader there and teach why infant baptism is wrong. And if I'm going to teach that infant baptism is right, then I'm being a hypocrite. So we all seem to be able to understand that we have to draw a line at leadership.

But otherwise, I just hope everyone who loves Jesus can say, wherever I'm attending church, that's where I am fully a member of the body of Christ here. That's super helpful, Brex. I appreciate that. I may actually follow up with you on some of that because I'm really working through these on several issues. But let's talk about your two books. Tell us about your first book and what that's all about and why people should go out right now and buy it.

I've written two books, and both of them are addressed to non-Christians in such a way that Christians can eavesdrop on the conversation. There are fantastic, wonderful books out there, many of them written to Christians about how to share the gospel with your non-Christian friends, and they're just precious few by comparison books written to non-Christians that I could read as a Christian, I can learn from, and then I can hand out to my non-Christian friends and say, read this. There are some good ones, but there are very few and far between. So both of these books fall in that category. The first one, The End of Religion, just looks at the life of Christ

and how part of what needs to be embedded in our understanding of the gospel is the great undoing of the old covenant to allow the new covenant to flourish, and what a tumultuous time it was for the early church to realize that how I eat and what my traditions are and who I fellowship with and my sense of identity and how I practice my faith through ritual. I'm not going to kill an animal. Instead, I'm going to participate in the Lord's Supper. And there's so many things that for the transitioning Jew who follows Jesus in the first century, it is a massive upheaval of how they did life still worshiping the same God. And so I wanted to talk about the end of religion from that perspective and also apply it today to say, what does it mean for those of us?

Who've been stewards of particular tradition for a long time? Are we open to newness and freshness and to? Challenging some of our own sacred cows. So that's the end of religion and then the newer book reunion I just wanted to zoom out and do an overview of the gospel that I could hand out to my non-christian friends and And invite them into the conversation. So that has a study guide coming out this spring as well that will be like an eight-week course that churches or home groups can use to where Christians and non-Christians can hopefully gather in the circle together and learn.

And that study guide will come with eight video introductions. It's kind of going to be like an Anabaptist alpha. So if somebody has non-believing friends, they're really talking about these things, this is designed to be kind of an avenue for them to get together, have these conversations with people that are thinking about Christianity, have questions, or they're seekers. Yes, it's one of the things we try and encourage in the Meeting House,

to say, how can we provide tools for our own people and then share that more broadly so that you'll read it yourself or you'll listen to the podcast yourself and you'll feel you'll learn but then you'll immediately think of some friends that you could share this with and offer hey i'm going to be reading it do you want to read it well i'm reading it again we can talk about each chapter it's kind of a rendezvous place for conversation is what we're trying to use it as. Oh, that's super helpful, man. So, yeah, if you're and obviously it's people always ask me, where can I get your books? And I'm like, you know, there's this thing called Amazon.

There's a lot of books. So, yeah, if you're interested, you guys check out Bruxy's books. And again, well, you've heard them. So by now, if you're not sold, then you probably won't buy them. But I imagine the majority, you know, pending whether you can afford it or not, will at least go on and check those out. I highly recommend anything Bruxy says or writes to you. Bruxy, thanks so much. You have the best name, by the way. My gosh. That's great, Brandy. Yeah, it's true. So if people want to learn more, more too either it's about my church or just myself my my blog is what's bruxy.com when you've got a weird name like bruxy might as well make

use of it so is that your real name is that your real name no you know what it's a childhood name that stuck and uh my parents named me bruce and i i couldn't pronounce it and then my friends made fun of me and turned into bruxy and then i grew grew up as a Bruxy so I officially changed my name and now I am B-R-U-X-Y Bruxy so okay it's official then okay cool it's official now yeah I was I was getting on a plane flying down to the states sometime just after um uh the uh September 11th into in in uh it was 2001 and the uh I I got stopped and because half of my IDs were Bruxy and half of them were Bruce. And they, they said, uh, well, you know, you could be your evil twin brother. We don't know who you are. And, and said, you better, you better change. You better make it

official. So I finally made a. Plus he kind of looked like a terrorist. I mean, if you guys haven't Googled Bruxy yet, Google Bruxy KV images and And you're not going to – it's not a mistake. He really is a pastor. He's a terrorist or a hippie drug dealer, I think. I haven't stopped more times than I care to mention the border. In the olden days, I used to sniff my wallets, go through my luggage, bring over the guard dog. Do you get hit up for weed quite a bit? Like people try to buy for you?

That's true. I do. I'm an undercover pastor. I'll take that as a compliment. One more question one more question that blew me away and i was actually really excited is you're obviously an advocate for non-violence and looking at your bio one of your favorite movies as is mine is gladiator is gladiator what's up with that man i i get called on that a lot like Like, you're a hypocrite. It's just history, brother.

The truth is that while we can be for nonviolence in how we live our lives, to stare into the fact that this is a world of violence, whether in the movies that we watch or in the books that we read or the Bible that we read. To be someone who advocates for living a nonviolent life doesn't mean that we live in a world of pretend where violence never happens. And so whether you watch violent movies, you don't watch violent movies, I think the question is what's going to be the net effect on your spirit or on your soul. But I don't watch Gladiator because I'm trying to learn new sword techniques. It's a fascinating story embedded within a certain time of history, and I love it. That's cool, man. Awesome. Bruxy, thanks so much for being on. Preston, this has been great. Good to know you, my friend.'s cool, man. Awesome. Bruxy, thanks so much for being on. Preston, this has been great.

Good to know you, my friend. Take care, man. Thank you. Un disesame, diso ame, Thank you. I am the one who is the best. La notaku tullenotuna