the cost with John Ray (ep 3, 27).

⚠️ Content Warning: This episode contains adult subject matter and other content that may be disturbing to listeners, including grief and personal loss. Listener discretion is advised. John Ray landed in Elm Springs, Arkansas in 1988 for a one-year Youth With A Mission program he signed up for mostly to prove God was not real. He stayed. Almost four decades later he sits on the leadership team at Vine & Branch Church in Fayetteville, and he describes faith not as a conclusion you reach but as a practice you keep. Belong, become, believe. That is the order his church works in, and he has lived what that order costs.  In 2009 his youngest daughter was killed and everything he believed came down to the foundation. A Quaker seminary in Portland gave him something to rebuild with. Then, at the end of 2019, a leadership team split fifty fifty over the role of women in ministry and the inclusion of LGBTQ people looked at the most credentialed person in the room and told him to decide. He did not want the decision. He made it anyway, and a friend had warned him what would follow. Thirty percent leave because they disagree, and that part is clean. Another thirty leave who agree with you but do not want the mess. It was closer to forty. Three hundred people became thirty. They sold the building, bought a smaller one closer to the most diverse part of Fayetteville, and moved worship to 4:30 on Sunday afternoons for people who work the brunch shift.  This conversation is about what that cost, and about the cultural force John names without flinching. White Christian nationalism, described not as an insult but as water, the thing you swim in and cannot see, the thing that makes your life easier the more you move with it. He talks about privilege, about the pastors he sits with who have reached the same conclusions and cannot afford to say so, about deconstruction that never gets to reconstruction, and about a redemptive theology that gives a person the backbone to name darkness out loud. He would do it again a thousand times. Episode Webpage:  https://theunderview.com/the-cost-with-john-ray-vine-branch-church About the underview: The underview is an exploration of the development of our Communal Theology of Place viewed through the medium of bikes, land, and people to discover community wholeness. Send us a Voice Message at https://www.theunderview.com/ Website: ⁠⁠theunderview.com⁠⁠ Follow us on Instagram: ⁠⁠@underviewthe Host: @mikerusch