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In this episode John and Gregg are joined by Evan from Virginia, the second person ever to contact the podcast. Evan found the UC podcast through his wife’s concerns about Kyle Idleman’s not a fan.

Having mentioned that he plays in a church worship band Evan joins John and Gregg to share his insights on Church worship music.  Evan notes that not only the order / type of music is strategic but that, in his church, the worship players are very aware of the type of setting that they are wishing to create and take time to re-assess how well they are doing at accomplishing their goals.  They also discuss how they believe that God is at work in the church and through the worship experience and how this seems to be impacting the community.

Gregg wonders about whether Christians are ever “taught” to praise or to worship and questions whether the assumption that such teaching is unneeded is valid.  John then wonders, What would such instruction look like?  Evan notes that the worship team typically sets the scene and that the congregation “follows” the worship team.
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In this episode John and Gregg discuss the article “Between Easter and the End,” posted in the Untangling Christianity private Facebook group.

John found the article both tough to unpack and to be difficult to connect with / find value in. When Gregg wonders why John feels disengaged from the article, John notes that in his view the author is globalizing her experience to all Christians (rather than presenting the matter as her own experience), and this makes it hard for him to relate to.

Particularly, John finds the author’s contention that our lives are not “improving” / Christians are not becoming more Christ-like fast enough to be unrealistic and even inaccurate. Gregg echoes John’s concerns and notes that the matter is presented by the author in a very nebulous way, and yet Christians who complain of not being like Jesus should be able easily to identify what constitutes Christ-likeness. If not, then such transformation may already be happening without one’s knowledge.
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In this episode John and Gregg return to their discussion from the last episode titled Problematic Praise Music following comments by listener “Lynette.” In partial response to Lynette, Gregg undertook to re-write the lyrics to one of the main Christian choruses of which Gregg was critical.

Gregg’s new (amended since their reading in this episode) lyrics to “How Great is our God” are:

Creator, father, king,
You sought that everything
Through Abraham be blessed:
A response to faithfulness.

So you called a single race
And asked them to embrace
A law to set apart;
To circumcise their heart.
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In this episode John and Gregg follow up from the previous episode where they both find it problematic when there is only one “politically correct” view on a given matter. Gregg offers an example of this, when he was living in Vancouver and attending a party. At the party a number of people were commenting on how their children’s personalities were directly related to / determined by the moon’s stage in its cycle on the date of the child’s birth.

Beyond the fact that Gregg finds this view very unlikely (if not hopelessly untenable), Gregg notes the difficulty in broaching the subject of what leads people to hold this view and / or inquiring about what would be sufficient for these people to change their minds.

John raises the example of a coaching seminar that he attended and how, if the “good vibe” that participants experienced during the seminar was experienced in a Christian context, this would explained with the blanket statement that “the Holy Spirit being present” Gregg agrees that in Christian contexts emotionalism (and particularly the experience of positive emotions) tends to be equated with the presence of the Holy Spirit, yet the Bible abounds with examples of God acting via the Holy Spirit to admonish, correct, and otherwise critique human beings. And such situations are not accompanied by “positive” emotions—just the opposite!
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