Andy Root on BlogTalkRadio w/ guest Tim Snyder (hey...that's me...weird).

Last week was a jammed packed schedule: Doug Pagitt guest in our Young Adult Ministry class, Kenda Creasy Dean on campus for the Aus Memorial Lectures, and then Mitri Raheb from Palestine all day on Thursday. I'll get around to reflections on those this upcoming week. But first a shameless plug:

Tuesday I'll be sitting in with Andy Root (Assistant Professor of Youth & Family Ministry at Luther Seminary and author, Relationships Unfiltered) on his LiveBlogRadio Show. It starts at 3:30p (CST) and its just a short 15 minutes of focused conversation around a chapter of his newest book The Promise of Depair: The Way of the Cross as The Way of the Church. If you've listened in before, you know how rich these conversations are, and if not you'll be pleasantly surprised (I hope...if I don't ruin it). The format of it is fascinating to me and has all kinds of wild potential...

Really though, "the promise of despair"? Sounds kind of dark...and it is. Look, I've read a lot of books about re-thinking church, about how what we need is a church that embraces the cultural realities of this millennium, of this generation. Those books are good and I actually agree with them (for the most part). But Andy's book wrestles with a God that would dare to meet us in the darkest place -- death. Death as in "gone forever/in the ground-and-not-coming-back-dead" but also death as in dying -- the loss of jobs, bills piling up, children in addictions, relationships broken and lost, dreams not met and loneliness suffered. What Andy and I will be talking about is nothing short of an invitation to imagine the church birthed out of that promise...the promise of meeting God in the deep sufferings of the world. The conversation is much deeper than organizational structures, engaging our new global, media culture, and re-framing old theological questions for a new day (as important as those may be), and it goes to what we know about the heart of God.

My guess is that it will be a challenging, honest, and raw conversation. That's my hope anyways. So please if its been a while since you've had one of those kind of conversations, listen in at 3:30pm. There's a number there...you can phone it and join the conversation. Of course it will be posted there afterward if you can't make it but still want to engage the conversation. --- Pax! TKS.

Andy Root on BlogTalkRadio:

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