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Episode Summary

Pastor Josh Williams (Elm City Vineyard) on lament, justice, joy, and protest.

Matthew Croasmun interviews Pastor Josh Williams (Elm City Vineyard, New Haven, CT) about being a black pastor of a multi-ethnic church in New Haven. In this conversation, Williams provides a window into the incarnational theology that truly makes a difference in the world; he reflects on how increased attention to police-involved violence against black life has impacted his life and vocation; he focuses on lament as the first step toward action and justice, but talks about joy and spiritual discipline in the act of protest, and finally, reflects on the fundamentally challenging question everyone is wrestling with right now: What does it mean to love our whole city?

Show Notes

  • Josh Williams, Elm City Vineyard Church
  • A pastor’s perspective on increased national attention to police-involved shootings since 2014.
  • Leading community through following Jesus in the face of racial violence
  • The difficulties of multi-ethnic community in these times.
  • The assumption that police are good and trying to do right.
  • An expectation that the nation is just.
  • A practice of lament
  • The “Night of Joy”
  • Joy is critical because his existence as a black person in American is a protest.
  • Bittersweet joy versus vibrant joy
  • Joy helps us remember the truth of the fight.
  • Living for the sake of the Black and Brown community in New Haven.
  • Christian responsibility to the ethics of justice.
  • Hopes for the work of understanding from the police.
  • Hopes and demands.

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Tolerating Doubt & Ambiguity

Is your faith a house of cards? If you were wrong about one belief would the whole structure just collapse? If even one injury came to you, one instance of broken trust, would the whole castle fall? If one element was seemingly inconsistent or incompatible—would you burn down the house? This depiction of the psychology of faith is quite fragile. It falls over to even the lightest breath. But what would a flexible faith be? Resilient to even the heaviest gusts of life’s hurricanes. It would adapt and grow as a living, responsive faith. Psychologist Elizabeth Hall joins Evan Rosa to discuss the domains of psychology and theology and what it means for each to “stay in their lane”; she introduces a distinction between implicit and explicit knowledge, and identifies the social- and self-imposed pressure to know everything with certainty; we reflect on the recent trends toward deconversion from faith in light of these pressures; and she offers psychologically grounded guidance for approaching doubt and ambiguity in a secure relational context, seeking to make the unspoken or implicit doubts explicit. Rather than remaining perched upon our individualized, certainty-driven house-of-card faith; she lays out a way to inhabit a flexible, resilient, and relationally grounded faith, tolerant of ambiguity and adaptive and secure amidst all our winds of doubt. This episode was made possible in part by the generous support of Blueprint 1543. For more information, visit Blueprint1543.org.

Elizabeth Hall