transcript
Speaker 1:
[00:13] Rebuilders, today, our episode title is Casino World, Casino Church. What are we talking about?
Speaker 2:
[00:21] Yeah, it's a big one. We get into a lot today. Trying to sort of name a trend that we've observed in the world where the reflective mind, which sees the world as a relational connected place with God at the center, has been replaced by a kind of mind of instant gratification, constantly anxious, moving on from one thing to the next, never settling down a addicted mind. How do we approach this? How do we respond to it? And what can we learn today as the church for this great need in the world that I think could be a fantastic opportunity for ministry?
Speaker 1:
[00:57] Let's get into it. Welcome to Rebuilders. My name is Liddy and I'm here with Mark and Daniel. How are you both today?
Speaker 3:
[01:07] Good. It's been a little while.
Speaker 1:
[01:09] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[01:10] It's been a month.
Speaker 2:
[01:11] A month.
Speaker 3:
[01:12] Four weeks.
Speaker 1:
[01:13] Four weeks.
Speaker 2:
[01:13] Where did the last month go?
Speaker 1:
[01:15] You recorded and I think I was probably a month before that.
Speaker 3:
[01:18] You were two weeks before that. So six weeks since you've been here.
Speaker 2:
[01:21] Six weeks.
Speaker 1:
[01:22] Wow.
Speaker 2:
[01:23] The team's back together.
Speaker 1:
[01:24] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[01:25] Yeah. One thing that's happened since then was that I moved house.
Speaker 2:
[01:31] Yes.
Speaker 3:
[01:32] Down the street from my house is a cemetery. Oh, wow. I was looking and as I do, I'm a man of history. So I went and had a look around the cemetery and there's a plaque at the front of how the cemetery is built back in the 1880s or something. And the first man that was buried there. And there's this picture of this older guy, a big gray beard, like kind of man of the land, kind of back in the outer Melbourne suburbs.
Speaker 2:
[02:07] Anyway, that would have been country back then.
Speaker 3:
[02:09] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[02:10] Not Melbourne.
Speaker 3:
[02:11] Yeah. The city's dirt road to get there.
Speaker 2:
[02:13] Swallowed it.
Speaker 3:
[02:15] Anyway, he looked like, I don't know, put him like mid late 70s or something, kind of guy. Anyway, I went and found his, like the actual grave where he was buried. He was 48 when he died. And it just got me thinking, like he looked so much older than he actually was.
Speaker 2:
[02:39] Was it the 19th century long beard?
Speaker 3:
[02:41] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[02:41] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[02:41] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[02:42] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[02:42] I reckon that's part of it.
Speaker 3:
[02:44] And just, I'm like, all right, what's happened in that like 130 years that mean that 48 men, 48 year old man looks like someone who's 70 something now.
Speaker 2:
[02:55] Well, he had maybe, you know, I mean, it was hard living back then. You know what I mean?
Speaker 3:
[02:59] It was.
Speaker 1:
[03:00] Yeah. And I mean, obviously it would have been quite a rural area. He was probably farming. I don't know.
Speaker 3:
[03:05] Yeah. Weathered skin.
Speaker 1:
[03:07] Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[03:08] Yeah. But anyway, that could be an excellent anecdote or a terrible way to pick up a podcast. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[03:18] So I think anyone who's listening who's 48 years old is pausing the podcast. Going to look at themselves in the mirror.
Speaker 1:
[03:27] Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[03:28] Or do I look like a 19th century Australian farmer?
Speaker 3:
[03:33] It is interesting walking around cemeteries.
Speaker 1:
[03:36] I actually really enjoy doing it. Yeah.
Speaker 3:
[03:39] Sobering.
Speaker 1:
[03:40] Yeah. But it's also a very interesting way to look at the history of an area.
Speaker 3:
[03:47] Yeah.
Speaker 1:
[03:48] And the people who've lived there and the different migrant groups, particularly in a place like Melbourne, they're fascinating places to look around. Yeah.
Speaker 2:
[03:57] You'll often find me on a Friday night with a lot of my goth friends listening to the Smiths, just at the local cemetery. So come on by.
Speaker 3:
[04:11] Wearing fake beards.
Speaker 2:
[04:13] No, just dress up like the cure.
Speaker 3:
[04:19] There you go.
Speaker 1:
[04:20] Very good. Well, it is good to be back. Mark, what are we talking about today?
Speaker 2:
[04:28] Today's title is, actually before I give you the title, I have promised for a little while, I have obviously had so much huge events happen in the world. The huge event we spoke about last time, the Strait of Hormuz, I think we've done two on it or something, almost.
Speaker 3:
[04:46] I think so, yeah.
Speaker 2:
[04:48] It's still closed, and the great crisis is sort of waking, moving through the pipe towards us. But I made the comment that there's sort of been one I just wanted to do more on, I guess, on the church. But as I've been thinking about this one, it's church and a cultural dynamic that's affecting the church. So today's title is Casino World, Casino Church. And I want to begin in Paris.
Speaker 3:
[05:21] New French music.
Speaker 2:
[05:23] Yes, yes, a bit of an accordion in the background. But an interesting story overnight. The prediction marketing platform, the prediction market platform, Polymarket, which we're going to be talking about, amongst other things. Basically, you can bet on so many different things on there. You can bet on Jesus' return. I love it that there's people thinking that when Jesus returns, they're just going to be jumping online and checking their bank balance. Making a win on betting on the date of his return. To aliens too, but just really simple things. You can bet on just the most mundane elements of life. And also, to be honest, quite disturbing things. I thought some people were betting, I think, on the number of people who would die in the famine in Gaza. But there's one bet that you can make, which is to bet on what is the temperature going to be in Paris that day. And so at the moment, apparently, or whenever this happened, the temperature in Paris was getting to about 18 degrees Celsius. And mysteriously, it spiked up to 22 degrees Celsius. And they noted that someone had made a bet on this, that it would jump up to 22. Long story short, what people discovered is that there was a guy who discovered that the particular weather sensor, temperature sensor that they used to determine the temperature in Paris that day is actually on the perimeter of Charles de Gaulle Airport. And so this guy made his bet on Polymarket and then went up with a hairdryer to the temperature gauge and just raised it enough to go up to 22 and then walked away. So the high for that day, really, the real high in Paris was 18. But for a moment, the gauge at Charles de Gaulle Airport went to 22. And I thought this was just a very interesting indicative story about a sense where there seems to be this increasing invasion of large parts of life by a really different dynamic. Large parts of life which weren't touched by the market, by manipulation, by a particular sort of addictive approach, all of a sudden are being touched by this. And this has implications for the church, this has implications for life. And I've been trying to work out how to talk about this episode. So I'm going to start with this metaphor that the economist Anne Pettiford has written a book called The Global Casino. And she talks about in that book that there is the economy. And when we say the economy, most of us think of Fred opening a hardware store, and then Mary opening a hardware store next to him, and then competing for the best prices, and people were going, or a farmer buying a truckload of grain, a small business borrowing money from their local bank. That's all part of the economy. But Pettiford makes the point that that's only about a fifth of the economy. Four fifths of the economy is actually people in international finance moving amounts of money across the world, betting on debt, purchasing debt, all these sort of elements, which seem almost counterintuitive to ordinary people and their understanding of how the world works and the economy. And so much of actually money moving in the world happens in that four fifths world. So she says like a casino, you leave the real world where there's people trading and doing things on the local street to the casino where it's these people who live in this reality, where there's genuine huge amounts of money and capital moving, but it's also sort of disconnected from reality. And you think about how people thought about sort of betting and gambling, it seems to be two extremes. One is the local sort of like shady, slightly grungy sort of betting, different bookies or local betting shop or whatever you call it. Someone betting on a horse, very sort of working class. And then you've sort of got the other extreme, which is James Bond in a tuxedo betting on the roulette wheel, as he's looking at a villain across the table and there's glamorous people all around. But we're seeing this sort of change that is just creeping into, all different elements of life. And it's radically changing how we think. Now, you could hear today's episode and think, Mark's talking about betting. I'm partially am. But you can also hear this and go, Mark's talking about technology. I partially am. But I'm trying to actually grasp something that I think is bigger and more consequential. It's about the rise of sports betting, which has become everywhere. Sports betting now has drifted into betting on things that aren't sport. For a long time, there was regulations around sport betting and the effect it would have because people were concerned about its moral exploitative effects. And so, for example, if you watched sport 20 years ago, I don't know, if you watch the Premier League, a shirt sponsor might be a big international corporation, Nissan or Sony. But now it'll be something like, I don't know, like supercasino888.com, something you've never heard of, which is worth billions located in Macau or something. You see this across all different sports. But then also you see that not just in betting, but this increase of this interaction with parts of life which weren't touched by these things. The rise of OnlyFans. I remember when I wrote Facing Leviathan, I did a bunch of research on Paris in the 19th century. That part of the story is about Paris in the 19th century in that book. And I remember being really shocked by the huge amount. It was something like one in three, I think it was something of 40%. I can't remember the exact number of women. I think under 40 in 19th century Paris were involved in sex work. It was called the demimonde, this sort of underworld. And I remember at the time being shocked, like 10, I would have never read that book 10 years ago or more. But now in some cities around the world, we're back to that level with young women going online in sort of like a gig economy of in a sense, doing sex work online, that sort of scene almost is acceptable thing. And also you see how this increase of, even with AI, as AI tries to move towards profitability and huge capital expenditure that's being spent on artificial intelligence. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, talked about they may sort of insert advertising content into the responses that you get when you're chatting to an AI chatbot. And so you're seeing this creeping infiltration of parts of life that's weren't touched by this before. I'll give you two more. As I said, we have been still in this international crisis with Iran. And there's almost become a joke now that this crisis, which we had this sort of heavy engagement in the Gulf states being hit by missiles and Israel and America bombing Iran and so on, like sort of a hot war. And where we are now is sort of in this weird blockade of a blockade. But there's a pattern that people have noted, which is just before the markets open, often good news will begin to spread. Donald Trump will make an announcement that, oh, the strait is going to be open or something like this, or we're going to have peace talks or something like this. What's been noteworthy, and this has happened not just with the Iran conflict, but this was a trend growing. And again, too, with Polymarket and Kalshi and these prediction markets, that all of a sudden, Trump's going to announce something, and there's huge bets, hundreds of millions of dollars put. Now, some of it's on predictive betting, like Polymarket. Others is just manipulation of the markets, the futures, oil futures and stuff like this. And I think that one was something like 780 million dollars. Like, this is insane money. And then, often Trump will make an announcement, oh, this is going to happen. The oil futures are totally disconnected from reality at the moment. I mean, the Strait of Hormuz has been shut now for how many weeks? Global oil supply hasn't hit yet. Like the last tanker that left before the Strait of Hormuz shut, I think, arrived somewhere on April the 20th. That's only, what, three days before. In the next month, we're going to see the oil reserves that we have start to drop around the world. I mean, the Lufthansa today canceled 20,000 flights. The European Energy Commissioner basically said, Europeans, summer holidays, there's a threat over them now. Basically, I'm paraphrasing, but the effects of this, which we've talked about before, I'm not gonna repeat. But you have real world effects, real world effects. This is gonna cause potential famine in some countries, a potential massive global recession, fuel shortages, we're seeing conflict. And then you've got this weird game, detached from reality, where an announcement will be made that there's gonna be talks or that the Straits of Hormuz is open. And then as the markets close, something else will be said. So pattern of like, the joke has become that on the weekends, it's all gonna bomb Iran. And then as the markets open Monday, oh, there's gonna be a peace treaty. And so all of this is being driven by, again, now this is diplomacy, world affairs, geopolitics now being affected by predictive markets. What the bloke did at the Charles de Gaulle Airport with his little hair dryer is being done now in literally the sort of fate and future of the world. So there's something happening here. There is this insertion into areas that remained previously off limits to manipulation and corruption. And I can't, I think this is bigger than a technology issue. It's bigger than a gambling issue. There's something bigger going on here. I said I'd give two more examples. I'll give the final one. And this is where I want to begin to tie it to the church. When we started doing stuff as a church, putting up stuff on Instagram 10 years ago or whatever, often when you look to your Instagram feed, you would see your friend's church down the road. If you're following your mate who had started a church plant on the other side of the world, they're great, they're growing, whatever. The algorithms change again too in this search for profit. It's getting better and targeted. Its ability to respond has become so much more reactive and powerful. There's definitely a change in Instagram and other social media platforms, but particularly Instagram, where you now are drawn towards brands, big brands, and then people with very large following celebrities, right? So that's everyone's feed. Now, pardon me, if you are then a young person in ministry or someone who's following, you know, you're Christian and maybe you work in the marketplace, but you're on Instagram following, your feed now looks very different. You're probably not going to see your mate's church, which has got a hundred people. What you're going to be drawn to is the largest ministries, the most controversial content, and the sort of biggest followers. And again, to some of that, some of those churches are doing great stuff. But what you're not going to see is you're not going to see someone doing a hospital visitation. You're not going to see pastoral visits. You're not going to see 95% of what actual real ministry and the life of the church looks like. And here again, we see this dynamic where there's sort of this infestation of our mind. I'm trying to think of the right word, invasion of our mind, where how we think begins to change, where our interaction with the universal church is shaped by an unreality. And it's like there's an iceberg, and most of what is advancing the Kingdom of God is unseen because our attention is directed in certain places, because it's become weighted towards benefiting other people. And my concern, and we'll get to this probably near the end, is that this gives us a false view. If, you know, I was with some young leaders yesterday, Trudy and I were doing some training with some young leaders for a denomination. And I was thinking, if you're 25 and you're entering into ministry, being a pastor, whatever, today, you have some experience of ministry at your church. But the view, then, you open your social media is of a world which is only partially true. And I think this is giving us a complete misread of what's happening in the world. So there's something happening where our minds are being reshaped constantly every day.
Speaker 1:
[19:09] What do you think the deeper background is to this? Where has this sort of emerged from?
Speaker 2:
[19:16] Okay. So as I've been trying to work this out, my brain is always like a little Sherlock Holmes trying to figure these things out. And I was reading, a couple on you wrote a book called The Great Transformation. And it's a book really about the economy. And it begins with something that happened in the medieval period, in the Tudor period in England, where you had what was called the Commons. The Commons was land that anyone could farm or be on, and peasants, often the feudal period is seen as quite negative. And obviously, there was negative things with it. But you said one of the sort of benefits is there were these Commons, which were sort of under the crown, that everyone could access. They could forage on them, and they could let their animals go on them and stuff like this. But then there was this sort of movement where people started to enclose parts of the Commons. I'm going to grab that, right? That's actually not for the common people. That's for whoever had the means to do that. And so slowly, more and more parts of England basically started being enclosed. And less and less public space was available to people. And he talks about that as that's the beginning of his great transformation. And in some ways, you look at today's, you'll see things like if you've done any sort of graphic design or whatever you're aware of, sort of the Commons and copyright and what's being able to use for everyone. But if you think about, I'll give it in this analogy, we all have this in our minds, all of us have lines of where the Commons and what is private should begin and end. Imagine for a second that you are heading towards the funeral, you're heading to a funeral of a loved one and you're on the way, you're running a bit late, but you really want to get there to the church or the cemetery or whatever. And you're following Google Maps and you get to a back street, you're almost at the church, you just about get ready to get there. And then you get to a road and the road is blocked off by some guy who's, I don't know, put garbage bins or a plank across the road. And he's standing there with a gun and you pull up to him like, what are you doing, mate? And his response is, well, to pass here, this is my street now, you have to pay $500. You would be inevitably angry. Yeah. And your first thing would be, hang on, mate, this is a public street. That's the idea of the commons. We naturally believe that there's certain streets that we should be able to drive down, because that's actually open to the public. We don't expect to drive into private houses or private golf courses. That's enclosed.
Speaker 1:
[22:04] Yes.
Speaker 2:
[22:05] And I think, like, what we're seeing here is an extension of what Polenia was talking about, but the commons is now our minds. They're being enclosed in really powerful ways, and very few of us are aware of what's actually happening, because it's like a frog being boiled in a kettle. And if you think about large parts of life, the markets that is to come into large parts of life. And again, I don't even want this just to be at the market. This is not about technology. It's not about just the market. It's not about gambling. This is something bigger. And so, if you think about the Strait of Hormuz, the Strait of Hormuz was seen as a transit, water transitory space that was the open sea. We literally have these agreements of the open sea, which nations sign up to that you should be able to travel on and trade on and that's what happened. Iran said, no, no, this is ours. The Strait of Hormuz is now Iran's, and we're going to shoot you if you don't. And then America said, well, we're going to blockade yours. And there's now this fear around the world that these different straits, where there's the channels like the Panama Canal, the Suez Canal, or the Malacca Straits in Asia. So Taiwan Straits could be closed. Part of the Greenland thing is that they're being closed there. So you see this dynamic where that's, I think, happening to our minds at the moment. And so there is this long-term trend where how we think and how we feel as humans is, in a sense, being reshaped before our very eyes.
Speaker 1:
[23:41] So I just want to go back to what you just said about our minds are now the commons. Can you unpack that a little bit more, help us understand?
Speaker 2:
[23:50] Yeah. In some ways, our minds are obviously not open to everyone. Perhaps a better way of putting it is that our minds, human minds, in a sense of not, they can be taken over by ideologies at different times. But I guess what I'm trying to get at more is that there's parts of the human experience which have always been unable to be co-opted in the ways that they're being co-opted now. Has there been historical examples? Yes, but there's a particular powerful dynamic happening at the moment where you look at, we talked about OnlyFans, that is like human sexual relations now are being manipulated. Not just, obviously lust is a driver in there, but there's a form of exploitation, but monetization of that at an incredible scale. The enjoyment of sport is now being monetized. I've been at sporting events now. You just see multiple people around you just on betting markets, just like with their phones out, like you're following the game. Those people are not participating in the game in the embodied sense, in the same way that a fan is writing every tackle and mentally kicking every ball and cheering their team on. And even you look at dating apps, there's an element where they can facilitate people meeting, but then there's also this other element that there is something in them where their profitability will decline if they were super successful at just connecting everyone at a record time. So, there is something where what has happened here is that the profit dynamic of many of these seemingly public spaces that we now connect over has been invaded. So, sport has been invaded by a profit dynamic, which is aided by technology, but also facilitated by addiction. This is the point I really want to get at. This is what I mean by the mind. So, this is probably where I'm getting into the mind. If you can imagine that our minds, our human nature are participating in a space, that the profit drive, and I think this is also being so prominent, because as a society, productivity, I've talked about this before, productivity, we're struggling to grow the economy with productivity. We had this industrial era, and the economy grew massively, and after the war, there was a productivity thing, we struggled with raising productivity. The internet hasn't raised productivity. The big promise is AI is going to raise productivity, and there's many questions around that. But I think in terms of how do we keep growing the economy, it's like there's, in the past, someone might go and chop down a forest and turn that into wood, or chop down a forest to get oil out of the ground. It's like now that's happening, but it's happening to parts of the human experience, which are previously at least partially resistant to that. And I think, in the past, the people went to prostitutes, in the past, there were bedding shops. But this immersive way, that that is a dominant reality for so many people at the same time, where now it's even driving the behavior of governments. This is new. And so maybe it's the scale is new. So what that means, so what I mean by the mind is that your brain is now being shaped towards a sort of addictive, reactive, no delayed gratification. This, this just very fast reaction. You think about, let's say a 22-year-old guy these days. He's grown up, sadly, many would have just grown up with large scale exposure and addiction to pornography, betting apps. There is just this Pavlovian thing, even just social media, this Pavlovian response where your mind is shaped in a particular way. And we now know through neuroscience that this stuff does shape our brains. Human intelligence has risen, IQ tests have risen, they're starting to drop off. And why is that happening? That is happening because our minds have, in a sense, become something to exploit. Now, again, as Christians, we've got a larger view of the human than just a bunch of material in our skulls. That this is also linked to who we are as humans, what we are orientated towards, what we are attentive of. And so there is a takeover of our brains. So our brains aren't commons in the way you're writing some, perhaps the metaphor, I'm stretching it too much. But I would say that commons that have never been truly taken over have been taken over. And that is now affecting our minds. And in some ways, human minds, if we look at them collectively as a commons, which we had freedom to think and respond to things, is being attacked in a way that I think is far bigger than people realise today.
Speaker 1:
[28:54] And it's not like this has just happened either. No. It's been a incremental.
Speaker 2:
[29:00] But I think there's an acceleration that's happening of late. And I just had one thing. Like in our country at the moment, there's a huge debate around funding for a national disability insurance scheme and funding around attention deficit disorder. Lots of people being diagnosed with attention deficit disorder. But some sort of psychologists and psychiatrists have talked about almost a cultural ADHD. And I think some of what we're talking about. So what I'm saying there is almost like collectively, there is this low attention rate. What's the next thing? You know what I mean? And you see that in the world where there seems to be at the moment a kind of denial about what's happening with fuel. Because, oh, what's the next thing? This is taking a period. We're not used to it. It's a different time scale. So yeah, all of that.
Speaker 1:
[29:50] I appreciate it. Well, where could this lead? That's where we're sort of at now. But what does the future look like if this continues?
Speaker 2:
[30:00] We are seeing escalating corruption. If you can bet on anything, like part of the reason that there were limits imposed by governments and law around particularly gambling and prediction is that there's always the case that you're going to influence events. Prediction is deeply linked to organized crime. And that's bad if there is a corruption scandal around a football game, but it's much worse if there's corruption scandals around the stock market, currency, and now wars and geopolitics. But also, this leads into, I must would call a moral or cultural corruption as well. You know, I was at the art gallery on Monday, and I deliberately wanted to go there because I was thinking about all this stuff. And I particularly went to, you know, I deliberately wanted to go and look at a number of landscapes.
Speaker 1:
[31:12] Which gallery were you at?
Speaker 2:
[31:14] The NGV, National Gallery of Victoria. And, you know, there's a particular state where a particular appreciation of a landscape requires one to be attentive to the world in a particular way. To sit, to notice the sun, to notice the composition of the geography, to see in a particular way. And I began to realize that, you know, what's happening is that sort of sitting and looking at a painting for 10, 15 minutes and really noticing it requires a particular sort of approach to the world. That approach to the world, which humans have had, and I also think, lays some foundations for seeing creation and God in the world, is being attacked. You know, if you're just, next thing, next thing, next thing. And again, too, we can look at social media, but go back to MTV brought in fast cuts. You know, people, there's a lot of people, I can't watch old movies because the scenes are too long. You know, there's something here where there's a kind of cultural corrosion where if our leaders can't work on long persevering, a number of the problems that we're facing in the world or the people are complaining about are big stinking problems. They're going to take possibly more than one generation to fix. But with a low attention span, how do we get these things done? You know? And so I think that this then also creates a new field of exploitation. You know, there's been great social movements which have, you know, raised exploitation through racism or sexism or slavery or whatever, economic exploitation. And in a sense, you know, the world sort of, I think it convinced itself would have moved on from this. I think this is opening new parameters of a scope of huge exploitation of people. And, you know, I don't think people are creating this because they've got the best interests of people at play. There is a societal wide thing where we're seeing people increasingly exploited.
Speaker 1:
[33:26] What are the ripple effects of this, like second order kind of consequences?
Speaker 2:
[33:30] Yeah. I mean, I think I've outlined some of them there. But, you know, I think what we're seeing is this rewiring of our brains. Like, if you hear anything, our brains are being rewired to approach the world in a way that humans have not seen the world possibly before. And that what this means is, you know, that there is this... The world is seen as increasingly just simply objects. There is, you know, we've talked about objectification before, but the whole world becomes objectified. That man objectified the temperature in Paris.
Speaker 1:
[34:11] Yep.
Speaker 2:
[34:12] And, you know, it didn't become a thing that he experienced. And while today I'll take a jacket and, you know, feel it, experience the human being. It's something then if you objectify to manipulate, and it's non-relational, it takes things out of their context. You know, Ian McGill-Christ has, you know, written this book, The Master and the Amazury, talks about the two sides of the brain and, you know, the left and right hemispheres. And, you know, he says that, you know, there is this one hemisphere of the brain is the holistic one. It tries to see the bigger picture, the intuition, that's the master. But then there's the emissary, which is like objectifies, analyzes, you know, looks at sort of like the engineer brain in some way. And he says the danger is that the emissary is sent out, but it's now sort of taken over. So it's a world where everything's measurement doesn't see the big picture, doesn't make inferences. And so everything becomes an object, you know, and I see that what this big trend I'm talking about is doing this on scale. And so the whole of the world becomes things and objects to be used. And this just creates this just continual, non-reflective instant gratification where life is about shortcuts. That there's no process I want to enter into, which I subject myself to, to become a better person, that, you know, the whole of the world becomes, relationships are instant gratification. You know, I'm not going to do that job because it's hard. And, you know, we have this real world dynamic now, that there are a lot of jobs that are going to not have anyone to do them because they're hard work. And, but those jobs are key for the kind of lifestyles that we have and want us to go for, but we just want someone else to do it. So, you know, to summarize what are the ripple effects, I would just summarize them all, is that we are moving from the natural reflectivity that humans had to now addiction and an addicted brain being normal.
Speaker 1:
[36:09] That's a very sobering thought. Well, with all of this in view, how do we respond?
Speaker 2:
[36:20] Yeah. I think number one, and I want to zero in on the church here. You know, I think, Jesus comes, and Jesus... Okay, I'm going to bring this back to Irenaeus, who was an early church father, Irenaeus, had this sort of doctrine, which was really a doctrine that Jesus walked... Jesus was incarnated into the world, God in human form, and he walked through life to show us what it really is to be a human. He died so that we wouldn't have to die eternally. He rose on the third day, and then he ascended to the right hand of the father. And that shows us, he goes ahead of us, and Hebrews has that image of the high priest going to God's image. Daniel has a vision in Daniel 7 of the ascended Christ, and that's God in human form, but also the human Christ coming into God's presence. So we see the direction of redeemed humanity in the life of Jesus. So there's something here where Jesus shows us how to be fully human. And I think in many ways, what this trend of outline today, and I still haven't come up with a great term for it, but this trend that I've outlined today, I think is dehumanizing us. It's de-creating the world. If God creates a coherent creational whole for flourishing, this turns the world into objects and things for exploitation, which I think is the opposite of flourishing, and ultimately decline and degradation. And so I think for young leaders who have grown up with an idea of first level of ministry in the church that is totally disconnected from reality. And again, I don't even want people to go away, oh yeah, it's just all the big churches. When I speak at big churches, you get there, and they're doing normal ministry. 90% of what they do is normal ministry. But there's something where it's not just about normal ministry, it's about real life. It's about being a human. I read this post this morning by, I think his name is John Michael Greer, who's like, I think he's like the chief witch, chief druid of America. He's become a real proponent online for the occult, and he's a master mason. Every esoteric, magical thing. And he's an evangelist for the occult, and quite smart and quite a good communicator. And he just wrote this post, he said, I've been visiting my local Anglican church.
Speaker 1:
[39:08] Wow.
Speaker 2:
[39:10] And he said something like, I think there's a prayer, it's a higher church, and there's even song or something. There's some service he goes to, which is less songs. And he said something like, I went to the service, and there's people playing worship and stuff like this. And he said, I think this is why I realized why I'm not a Christian, because it didn't feel spiritual. It felt like the noisiness of a sixth grade school concert. And I thought about this, I thought it's fascinating. So like his model then is, well, the real spiritual is silence. Because in the silence, I don't feel that the world is impinging on me. A sixth grade concert, he used that term negatively. But a sixth grade concert is kids, yeah, often playing off key. But it's parents and grandparents and noise and life and pride, and people in the process of learning. And in a sense, it's like a glorious, organic, wonderful relational world of messiness, but God's creational order coming into being. And the mystery of music, well, yeah, you want to hear the great composer, but there's something of humans like building towards something in that. And I just think that's what the incarnation is. Jesus coming into the mess of the world, coming into human life, and in all of its imperfections and showing us, okay, this is the way forward, this redemptive vision that I have, this creative order that I have. So first thing I would say to any young leaders is, if you have gotten an idea that basically you need to do A, B, C and D, and you're going to get Instagrammable success in ministry, please understand that there is a beautiful, glorious mess that you're invited into, and Jesus walked into it and we followed behind him. And it's messy, sometimes painful, but glorious and wonderful, and there's nothing like it. The second thing I would say is, that in the same way as they were inviting leaders to see that, I think we need to realize that we're beginning to disciple people's minds. Now, part of the way that we thought about people's minds is, there's a lot of ministries out there like, and good ministries, I'm not having a go, apologetics and biblical worldview stuff, which is actually trying to help people understand ideologies, of this ideology, this negative ideology, or Gnosticism, Marxism, whatever, all the isms. And that's important stuff. I've probably done some of that on here at times. But also, I wonder whether there is a new ministry, which is actually for the addicted mind. The exploited mind, the mind which is anxious and just riven by just bouncing thoughts and captive and captive to various addictions. Whether there's a kind of ministry that's going to emerge, where we help people move from being the addicted mind, which sees the world objectively in its things, to the reflective mind. You know, as Pascal I think said, you know, the problem with humanists, the problem with humans, we can't sit in a room alone in silence. And you know, that sounds different to, you know, it sounds like I'm saying something similar to John Michael Greer. I don't think it is. I think it's more, that's actually about the mind and the reflective state to actually situate ourselves towards the world, where we understand the world as creation, as a gift. Where we stop and we see the world in a very different way that we're participating. Did I tell the story about, and I apologize if I've repeated stories, I forget what I tell. Cause if I've said it before, tell me. Of being at the Sydney Chinese Gardens with the koi fish, or did I say that in church? I can't remember.
Speaker 1:
[43:16] I can't say.
Speaker 3:
[43:17] I think it was a Rebuilders episode. I feel like we had some banter around some fish. We had some fish banter.
Speaker 2:
[43:25] That's right. I'm repeating stories. I'm getting old.
Speaker 3:
[43:31] Feel free to, it was a while ago, so feel free to go there.
Speaker 1:
[43:34] I mean, to be honest, I don't remember it, but I could have fallen victim to Instagram.
Speaker 2:
[43:38] Apologies if you've heard this before, but at the Sydney Gardens, it's all built around the Chinese idea of building a garden of harmony and reflection, and there's all this stuff around it. Anyway, I sat on next to the pond and noticed that it was close to feeding time, but behind me was a large school of koi fish, giant, beautiful fish. And I realized that they were completely attuned to me. They thought I was about to feed them. And it was one of those moments where I realized that I'm not just looking at something, I'm participating in the world. And all of us participate in the world. Now, if you've heard that story again, I'll give you a new one. There was a great article yesterday in our ABC News, and it was a story, Australia, New Zealand, and the US are increasingly deporting people who are permanent residents, but not citizens of their country involved in organized crime. It was about Tonga, the Pacific nation, and there's been a number of criminals from those three nations I mentioned being deported back to Tonga, often people who left as babies or left as young kids. And it followed an Australian Tongan guy who had been deported back to Tonga, and he's involved in organized crime. And he talked about that when he got there, he thought, well, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna set up a chapter of the bikey group, organized bikey group, that he was involved in, Australia bikey group. And so he goes about starting this organized crime bikey group, and it horribly fails. The whole bikey sort of thing is, often you'll see bikeys have 1% patch, and they're like this 1% of society that doesn't fit in. The origins of the sort of bikeys or bikey movement can be traced back to the end of World War II, where a lot of them were bomber crews, and they couldn't fit into society. That's why a lot of them were led the jackets. They actually wore this sort of flight crew jackets and sort of drove around on motorbikes. And obviously, there's a big overlap between organized crime and bikeys. And so it's this alternate society that rejects the society. But he found in Tonga, like Tonga's too communal and too connected. This idea that people need to have this ometer, this silence. You don't say anything, but Tongas are just sharing everything with their uncle, and he just couldn't organize it. And I just found it fascinating, this idea that organized crime biker groups can flourish in certain cultures, but in Tonga, it's just completely falling over, because Tongan people were interacting with the world in a completely different way. Now, there is a challenge of organized crime and drugs coming across the Pacific from South America. There's all that. So I'm not saying Tonga is a complete paradise or anything like that. But what it made me realize is that there's certain times where there are certain cultures which are resistant to certain nefarious things. And I think I feel like we're a culture which has become attuned to these addictive things. What if the church became a place which created a culture of a different way of situating ourselves to the world, where we understood creation, we understood how we were positioned in the world, and we actually discipled people into a more reflective way of looking at the world. I think that's not just done by our services. I think that's a whole-of-life discipleship. But I actually think there's a spark of a thought here. Often Rebuilders is chucking out sparks, and we love the emails back, hey, got this idea. So here I am, I'm sending some hot sparks through the airwaves. What if there's something that you could get involved in? Maybe it's just a small group, maybe you're a pastor, maybe you're in the marketplace. What if there's something that you could do to disciple the mind, not in helping people think right about ideologies, but to actually again approach the world as God gave it to us, with a different way of viewing the world that leads to flourishing, which understands Jesus is going ahead of us, showing us how to be human, and which freed people from the oppression of the addicted, constantly anxious adult mind?
Speaker 1:
[47:54] Great encouragement. Thank you, Mark, and thank you, Daniel. Any final thoughts before we finish up?
Speaker 2:
[48:00] No, that's it.
Speaker 1:
[48:01] That's great. Well, thanks again for joining us for Rebuilders. If you want to hear a little bit more of the behind the scenes of the episode, we record subscriber chats, and we send it out a couple of days after the episode airs. So you can subscribe by heading to rebuilders.co and subscribe there. And we'll see you next time.