Beeson Podcast, Episode 477
Russell Moore
Dec. 31, 2019

Announcer:          Welcome to the Beeson podcast, coming to you from Beeson Divinity School on the campus of Samford University. Now your hosts, Doug Sweeney and Kristen Padilla.

Doug Sweeney:       Welcome to the last Beeson podcast of 2019. I am your host, Doug Sweeney. I'm here with my cohost, Kristen Padilla and we would like to wish you all God's best for the new year.

Doug Sweeney:       Today's guests is well known both among Southern Baptists, among Evangelicals, among lots of Christians here in the US and around the world and he is here today to help us think about how to engage cultural issues with greater faithfulness and fruitfulness as Christians.

Doug Sweeney:       Kristen will introduce him in just a few minutes, but before she does, let me remind you that our fall 2020 admission deadline is February 15 and that everyone who submits his or her application by January 15 will be entered into a $500 scholarship drawing. So please head on over to beesondivinity.com/admissionprocess to begin your application.

Doug Sweeney:       Kristen, how about if you introduce today's guest?

Kristen Padilla:    Hello everyone and welcome to the podcast. Today, we are so pleased to have Dr. Russell Moore with us. Dr. Moore is president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is the author of The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home, which was named Christianity Today's 2019 Book of the Year, and he's also author of four other books including Onward: Engaging the Culture Without Losing the Gospel.

Kristen Padilla:    Previously, Dr. Moore served as provost and dean of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky, where he taught theology and ethics. He is married to his wife Maria and they are the parents of five sons. Welcome to the podcast.

Russell Moore:      Thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Kristen Padilla:    Let us begin with a fuller introduction. We would love to know just more about you; where you're from, your Christian background and anything that you would like to share with us.

Russell Moore:      Well, I grew up in Biloxi, Mississippi, which is right on the coastline Mississippi, just out from New Orleans and I grew up in the church that my grandfather had pastored long before I was born and came to faith there. I was really nurtured within that community. Went through a really difficult and sort of life forming spiritual crisis as about a 15-year-old, where I started to see some things in the cultural Christianity around me that caused me to wonder if Christianity weren't just a means to an end.

Russell Moore:      And so I really went through a really difficult crisis, but thankfully my mother had read the Chronicles of Narnia to me as a little boy. And then I had re-read them all through my childhood. So I recognize the name C.S. Lewis on the spine of mere Christianity in bookstore and took it home. The Lord really used that to reorient my entire life because I could just tell from his tone of voice, for lack of a better word, coming through the pages, that he wasn't trying to sell me anything. He was really bearing witness to something that was real. And so that really was a defining moment. And I met my wife there in Biloxi and we've been together for 25 years this year.

Doug Sweeney:       Wonderful. Congratulations.

Russell Moore:      Thank you.

Doug Sweeney:       Dr. Moore, you are probably best known these days as the president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention, and a lot of our listeners of course already know about that commission. But for those who don't, would you introduce us to it? Just tell us a little bit about what you do, what the ministry is and how you got there.

Russell Moore:      Well, we really do two things. One of those things and the most important is to equip Christians, Christian families, Christian churches to apply the gospel to the full range of decisions. So everything from what do we do about sort of end of life questions when we have an elderly parent or grandparent and the doctors are giving us options, all the way over to how do we address racial reconciliation in our churches, how do we minister to pregnant women in crisis or to those in need of adoption and foster care. It is the full range of those sorts of questions, along with marriage and parenting and dating, and every aspect of what it means to sort of carry the cross and follow Christ.

Russell Moore:      And then the second thing is to speak out of that to the outside world. A lot of what I do is interacting with people in government, media, tech industry, and finance industry, and those places, speaking from a Christian perspective in all of those different arenas.

Russell Moore:      We work in just a lot of different areas. So each day, we'll kind of move from dealing with a foster care initiative to turning around and dealing with artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies to dealing with situation in Hong Kong to questions of churches as they're grappling with child protection policy. So it's never the same thing any day or even really hour to hour.

Doug Sweeney:       Wow! That'll keep you on your toes. And you've been there for about four or five years now?

Russell Moore:      Seven years now.

Doug Sweeney:       Seven years now. And how did you become the president?

Russell Moore:      I don't know, except to know. It's one of those ... And I think most people can sort of see this in their lives when they look backward. And to say there are a lot of things that seem to be cul-de-sacs, where you think at the time, I've sort of wasted some time in this area or that area, but then later you can see how actually the Lord was preparing you and putting all of those things together. And that was certainly the case for me. I can look back in now, make sense of what the Lord was preparing me for in all sorts of ways. I had a call to ministry really early as a 12 or 13-year-old. That spiritual crisis I mentioned sort of diverted that, and I ended up very early on in the political arena and was a staff member to a United States congressman. And then the Lord brought me back into ministry very quickly.

Russell Moore:      And so I would look back and say, “I don't see how all those things fit together.” But ultimately they did. And so that along with ... But I tell people, I think I mentioned this to you earlier today, probably the thing that I think has prepared me for all of my ministries that I've had more than anything has been youth ministry. Serving as a youth minister in a local church actually is the most significant thing for how I do this ministry, because it's actually the same thing. If you can get a van full of teenagers to youth camp and deal with so and so's upset with so and so because of this or that, or somebody's going through a difficult crisis because of breakup, all of those things. The issues change, but the human realities are all the same.

Kristen Padilla:    Well, we wanted to have you on the podcast to help us think about how to engage these cultural issues in a faithful Christian way and just to start thinking about this. Is there a biblical approach to how we, as Christians, should engage the culture and especially in a politically polarized world that we live in today?

Russell Moore:      I think there is, in terms of the broad parameters, it's like anything else. Different people have different callings and different to parts that they're going to play in that. But I think that Jesus creates a culture, embodies a culture that is to reflect the kingdom of God within local churches. And then those churches shape people to be able to serve in a variety of different ways.

Russell Moore:      So I think often of John the Baptist preaching, when the tax collectors and soldiers repent and come to him and say, “Well what do we do now?” And what does John do? Don't extort people, don't defraud people. In other words, live a life that's honoring to Christ in the place where you've been called to serve. Obviously, that wouldn't apply to someone who has no power to extort money from someone. So it's the same thing, the life of Christ in terms of what that obedience is going to look like is going to look different for someone who's parenting a three-year-old as opposed to somebody who is starting a business or somebody who is a student at a university. But all of us are called to live out that life of Christ.

Russell Moore:      I think the most important thing is, in American Christianity, I think we tend to reverse the biblical pattern of 1 Corinthians 5, where Paul says, “It's not those on the outside that I judge.” Of course by that, he doesn't mean moral discernment. He means I don't hold those on the outside accountable. It's those on the inside that we hold accountable and we bear witness to those on the outside. In this sort of a, as you mentioned, polarized kind of environment, it's always easier to do the reverse, which is to say whatever's happening among us, we sort of let go and we're very muted and ambiguous about and we rail against our mission field, which I think is not the pattern of Jesus. Jesus is not ... When you see Jesus angered in the New Testament, it is never at those moments when everyone else around him is becoming angered, it's when he sees what's happening in the temple courts, for instance, that he's angered and no one else is. In all the other instances, where everyone else is either panicking or angry, Jesus is remarkably tranquil.

Russell Moore:      I think that tranquility comes out of confidence in the Providence of God and in the mission of the Holy Spirit. I think we ought to reflect that. It is often when I'm telling people is that the most dangerous cultural issues that they face are not the things that they're debating on Facebook right now. They're the things that aren't showing up on those debates at all, either because we sort of already accommodated ourselves to those things so they don't alarm us or because they're just far enough around the corner that we're not preparing ourselves for them at all. That's where I think we're in real peril. But it's easier for people to simply continue having arguments not as a means of persuading one another or discipling one another, but simply as a means of self-expression. And I think that's a very dangerous aspect of the current time we live.

Doug Sweeney:       That's a good word. Speaking of accountability and judgment, your commission in October posted a national conference called Caring Well: Equipping Churches to Confront the Abuse Crisis. Many of us here at Beeson, many of us in the Beeson podcast community have watched the stories and events unfold over the last couple of years regarding the sexual abuse crisis in the SBC and in the Roman Catholic Church and in other churches as well. Can you talk a little bit about the crisis itself and the way your commission has been trying to get involved and help and minister in the midst of this crisis in a way that would inform our audience, bring them up to speed with what's going on, and maybe even give them some biblical tools to use as maybe they have to deal with parts of the crisis in their own lives?

Russell Moore:      Yeah. Well, I think one of the things that's encouraging to me is for years and years and years, whenever I would talk about these issues of church sexual abuse, I would find a lot of places having an attitude of invulnerability because people would assume, well that would happen in the Roman Catholic church, but it wouldn't happen in my evangelical church. Or it might happen in some other theological tribe, but it wouldn't happen in my tribe. Or it might happen in a larger church or a different sort of church, but we all know each other in my congregation, and not really understanding how the dynamics of sexually predatory behavior actually works. It's not, in almost no situation have I ever seen, it's not someone who comes into a church and appears to be scary or threatening, the very means that that person uses is a sense of familiarity, of service, of kindness, and then uses that to groom people toward abuse.

Russell Moore:      What we've been working on is sort of a multipronged strategy, which is to help churches, first of all, to put measures into place to seek to prevent church sexual abuse. What are best practices to make sure that you can see to it that you have mechanisms in place and to have policies in place for when there has been an allegation of any sort, how do you respond?

Russell Moore:      The problem in a lot of different church communities and secular communities has been a tendency to cover up. Sometimes people assume, we're covering that up because we don't want the outside world to get a bad ... We don't want Jesus to get a bad reputation with the outside world. But Jesus never protects his reputation by covering up injustice instead he deals with it. And so what are the policies for dealing with this when this happens?

Russell Moore:      I have seen many congregations in recent years who there has been something that has taken place in the orbit of that congregation, they immediately call the civil authorities, work with the civil authorities, completely transparent, both with the congregation and with the outside world. That kind of integrity is needed here. And then also to minister to people who are survivors of church sexual abuse.

Russell Moore:      At the conference, one of the things that was striking to me is how many conversations I would have with people who were there with ... You know churches would bring their entire staffs and someone would come up and say, “I'm a survivor of church sexual abuse, and the rest of the people on my church staff don't know it.” And so it's, “I'm working through this right now.” Well, I think virtually every congregation has many survivors of sexual abuse in that congregation. And many of them believe that they would be judged as though they had done something wrong, that they would be ... And in many cases, their abusers have used shame to make them feel as though they've done something wrong.

Russell Moore:      So to help equip churches how best to care for and minister to survivors within your congregation and within your communities. Those are our sort of key pieces to what we're working on.

Kristen Padilla:    I mentioned at the beginning that you wrote a book called The Storm-Tossed Family, what were you trying to do with that book and what were you trying to say about the role of family in the home?

Russell Moore:      One of the things that I've noticed in working with everything from premarital counseling, all the way over to parenting preparation and those sorts of things is that sometimes there will be people who will have an idyllic view of what marriage ought to look like or what parenting ought to look like. And then when they come into a place of difficulty, they assume, I must be doing something wrong, Jesus must be mad at me, or something like this, or even worse, they simply walk away. Without realizing marriage, parenting, being parented, caring for elderly parents, caring for grandchildren, all of these things are always going to mean a sacrifice. It's going to mean pain and vulnerability as well as a joy. And so the sense of self protectiveness that we sometimes put up can sometimes protect us ... We're protecting ourselves from love.

Russell Moore:      For instance, there are many people who will ... I've heard people critique sort of the decline in marriage rates and they said, well, this is because of a low view of marriage on the part of younger people. I completely think that is wrong because when I'm talking to younger people who are fearful of marriage, it's not because they have too low a view of marriage, it's because they have too high a view of marriage in one sense. They think I have to make sure that I'm finding the person who is clearly and visibly my soulmate, who can meet all of my needs and I can meet all of this person's needs. And that person doesn't exist. Being married means pouring one's life out for one another. Parenting means the same thing. Being parented means the same thing. Being in a church family means the same thing.

Russell Moore:      And so coming in to say, if your life is about carrying a cross, being conformed in the image of Christ, that's not just about your personal individual life. It's also about how you love one another in families and how you love one another in church families. And that's I think is may be especially true for ... There are a lot of people who assume that because they've come out of what somebody may call dysfunctional family background, that that means that somehow they're damaged or they're broken in some unique way, and they then can't actually be productive in serving the Lord in terms of families. I found that can be true if people don't understand what the dysfunction is in their past, but the best husbands and wives and fathers and mothers and church members and everything else that I know are often people who have lived through really awful things back in their family of origin and who say, “I'm not going to repeat those patterns. I'm going to go in a different direction.” I think that's true in some way of all of us.

Russell Moore:      And so the aspects of brokenness that are present in your life are opportunities for redemption and to be able to, if you think of the way the Apostle Paul talks about his sufferings to say it was in order that we would not depend upon ourselves and so that we could minister to you. I think a lot of the things that go on in our family lives are the same way.

Russell Moore:      And what really I think probably prompted me more than anything to write this book was a conversation I had when I was serving as a preacher in local congregation. We would have a Wednesday night Bible study, and we would have a time for prayer requests and people would ask for prayer requests for surgeries and sicknesses and everything else. But one night after the service was over, this woman came up and I could see her look around, make sure nobody was around, and then she whispered, “Would you pray for our daughter who's away at college who told us that she's an atheist.” And she's whispering this the whole time. And I said, “Yes, but why are we whispering?” And she said, “Well, I don't want people hearing that and wondering what we did that our daughter is an atheist.”.

Russell Moore:      And it has struck me as profoundly sad that she felt like she needed to protect herself from her brothers and sisters, when in reality, every family in that room, in some way or another has lived through that experience and every family in the Bible. Every family in the Bible that I can find has at least one prodigal, including the family of God. But there was a sense of something that's really common in our culture, and especially I think that's magnified in a social media sort of context, which is everything's about winning and displaying. So all of life becomes a Christmas card photo that we're presenting to the outside world. But that's not what life in Christ is about. We ought to be able to bear each other's burdens. That was really where that concern came from.

Doug Sweeney:       Another one of your recent book projects is a volume that was actually written by one of my former teachers, Dr. Carl F.H. Henry called, Has Democracy Had Its Day? Would you tell our listeners who Dr. Henry was and what he has to contribute to our thinking even now about democracy and cultural engagement?

Russell Moore:      Dr. Henry is probably indisputably the most significant evangelical theologian of the last 200 years, certainly in an American context. And he had been editor of Christianity Today magazine, the founding faculty at Fuller Theological Seminary, and served in too many capacities to even recount here. He had published this little book about the future of democracy with the organization that I now lead 20 years ago or so. And we noticed that it was there, that we held the copyright, but I assumed this will be too far outdated to even look at again. I went back and reread it and realized much of what was concerning Dr. Henry at that point were things that he could see, but hadn't really manifested itself on a widespread level the way it has now. So the book is really, really relevant.

Russell Moore:      The same thing would be true, maybe even more so, well, definitely more so, but I don't own the copyright to this one. His little book, The Uneasy Conscience of Modern Fundamentalism, which was really an influential book for me early on in ministry. And it's striking to me how picking it up and reading it now, it is just as relevant as it was in 1947 when it was published, if not more so. So he really is a gift to the church even long after his ... He died in 2003, but he's still serving.

Kristen Padilla:    Well, if you could perhaps attempt to do what Dr. Henry did and look into the future a bit, what cultural issues do you see on the horizon that haven't maybe completely manifested themselves in a widespread way, but that you see that will be challenges to the church ahead and how can we prepare as Christians for what's still to come?

Russell Moore:      Well, some of those things are going to be the same from generation to generation, they just manifest themselves in slightly different ways. And then some of those things are going to be strikingly new in the way that they appear.

Russell Moore:      One of the things that keeps me up at night is technology and not because up to ... I think that technology is a tremendous tool, not only for human flourishing but for the advance of the gospel and the mission of the church. But if we're not conscious about what's happening with technology and how technology is changing us, it can be really difficult and problematic.

Russell Moore:      So that ranges from the fact that right now, for instance, there are so many adolescents in American life right now who are living the way a politician does through social media, the way a politician would look at daily polling, tracking numbers of his or her approval ratings, except without an election day insight. Every day is judgment day, where people are having to think through, what do my peers think of me. Now, that is difficult for everybody who's going through adolescents, but much more so when you sort of have what you believe is an objective recounting of that all the time and it doesn't end at adolescence, it continues on. All the way over to issues of artificial intelligence and facial recognition technology and augmented reality. Those sorts of questions are headed toward the church. Almost no one is thinking about those things.

Russell Moore:      So even something as simple as ... Not long ago, I taught my two oldest sons to drive when they turned 16. Planned to do that next year when my other son turned 16. They probably won't teach their children to drive. There probably will be driverless cars by the time that their children out there in the future or that age. Well, that's going to bring a lot of benefit to a lot of people. It also is going to mean that very real disruptions in terms ... If you think of how many people in our churches drive trucks, drive Uber or Lyft or taxi cab drivers or delivery people. When all of that suddenly evaporates, they're going to be very real challenges for congregations in terms of helping people to find their sense of identity, their sense of calling, all of those things.

Russell Moore:      I find often we're a few steps behind because the technology seems to be science fictiony and out of reach until it's ubiquitous. I mean right now one of the ... Well, I say one of the biggest issue that I deal with, with parents has to do with technology. What do I do with smartphones? What do I do with video games? Those sorts of questions that wouldn't have made any sense 10 years ago, much less 20 years ago in the way that they're manifesting themselves. But that was when we really needed to start preparing for that is what do you do with smartphone technology? What do you do with social media? Before you're in a situation where everybody has it.

Russell Moore:      I think those are things we have to be looking for and on the watch about. And then beyond that, that more fundamental question of, what does it mean to be human? When we live in a time of technology to this degree, the temptation is to start to see ourselves as an aspect of technology and to see one another as tools. That becomes really, really difficult.

Doug Sweeney:       Dr. Moore, one of the services you've provided for book readers over the years is an article that usually comes at the end of the year about the best books you've read in the previous calendar year. Are you writing one of those this year? And if so, do you have some recommendations? We've got some serious book readers listening to us now. Most of them are pastors or a serious Christian [crosstalk 00:28:13] people. Any books you want to put on their mind?

Russell Moore:      Well, I just posted that up on my website this week. I'm trying to ... The problem of remembering them is because I'm also working on for next week, the best books of the decade. So I'm confusing those two.

Doug Sweeney:       But we'll take wither.

Russell Moore:      But for this year, there are several things. One of them is Library of America did The Collected Essays of Wendell Berry, altogether beautiful volume. There's a great book that Crossway did by Peter Williams scholar in Cambridge, Can We Trust the Gospels? That's just magnificently done. A friend of mine, Andrew Peterson, who's a singer songwriter, has done a book on creativity, Adorning the Dark. Normally, I don't include friends' books because I like to have that rule so that in case I forget a friend's book or don't like it, I could say I have it [inaudible 00:29:15]. But I had to include it because it's so good in terms of helping people to think through how to engage with creativity no matter how they're gifted in those terms. And then there's a novel by a novelist, Mary Miller, she's new, who wrote a novel about my hometown, Biloxi. That is really insightful in terms of what it means to navigate family, especially in the definition of family right now.

Russell Moore:      So those are a few of them. For the decade, one of them that stands out is a book that I really wish everybody in the church would read called The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, social psychologist who goes in and explains how people change in terms of their perspectives and how persuasion actually works and why you can have people who can argue all day long and for a lifetime about certain issues and completely see things in opposite ways. It's a really important book in terms of understanding other people's perspectives and being able to speak to them on terms that they can understand.

Kristen Padilla:    We didn't mention, but you're here at Beeson today because you gave our commencement address earlier this morning. What did you tell our graduates? And for those who are listening to the podcast who are either serving in ministry or they're currently in seminary, what would you tell them about preparing for a lifetime of faithful gospel ministry?

Russell Moore:      Well, I think that ministry carries with it the same dynamic that we talked about a little bit earlier as it applies to the family, which is that need to project an image of confidence and swagger and invulnerability of winning and displaying and success in a way that's ultimately devastating.

Russell Moore:      I talked this morning about the life of Elijah, which I think what God is showing us in the life of Elijah is a dramatic enactment ahead of time of what cross bearing looks like. So you have a prophet who always seemed a little intimidating to me. Someone who is, it's hard to imagine someone with more boldness and bravery and confidence than the prophet clothed in camel's hair, calling down fire from heaven. But the pivot point I think of his life, was not that moment of a visible victory, but the moment in which he's in the wilderness crying out for God, which I think is the pattern every Christian goes through. And that's actually where God tends to manifest his power in terms of every Christian's ministry.

Russell Moore:      I can think of, I was at a friend's retirement party not long ago who had been through some awful situations in ministry, and his life did not turn out the way that he would have expected it. It turned out much better, because having been through that sort of tumult, he found himself ministering to people he never would have even known were there, if he had not been somebody who was deeply hurt and wounded. And I think there's tremendous beauty and grace in that, but it's very difficult to see when everyone's protecting themselves from any image of somehow being vulnerable.

Russell Moore:      That's what I tried to say on one of the happiest days of people's lives is that this isn't actually the good part. The good part isn't going to feel like the good part at the time, but that's often when you're going to most experience the presence of God.

Doug Sweeney:       Amen. And we're going to have to let our listeners know, Kristen, when we get the video of that sermon posted on our website as well. It was so edifying.

Doug Sweeney:       You have been listening to Dr. Russell Moore, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. He is the author, as we've said, of The Storm-Tossed Family: How the Cross Reshapes the Home, which was named Christianity Today's 2019 Book of the Year. I don't think it made it onto Dr. Moore's book list, but it makes it on to ours and we commend it to you strongly. Thank you very much for being with us. God bless you and goodbye for now.

Kristen Padilla:    You've been listening to the Beeson podcast. Our theme music is written and performed by Advent Birmingham of the Cathedral Church of the Advent in Birmingham, Alabama. Our engineer is Rob Willis. Our announcer is Mike Pasquerilla. Our cohost are Doug Sweeney and myself, Kristen Padilla. Please subscribe to the Beeson podcast at beesondivinity.com/podcast or on iTunes.