Jason Swan Clark - Podcast

On New Year eve a short reflection in the face of what we might be hoping to avoid in 2022, after the experience of 2020 and 2021…So as we go into 2022, how is your perception? Are you suffering from target fixation and perceptual narrowing? Are you struggling not to hit the dangers and things you want to miss?

Faith often falters in the face of suffering and loss. Christianity is not about avoiding suffering through some name it and claim it superstition, and it is also not a stoical fatalism and the mere acceptance of fate. Instead, it is something radically different, of participation and transformation that can be practiced, whereby our faith begins to grow and grow instead of dissipating.

Denial does not protect but traps us and deceives us, keeping us from the experience of death and resurrection. Just as its opposite psychological sibling, fatalism overwhelms and destroys us, keeping us buried in the tomb of loss. Both snuff out real Faith.

Perhaps COVID is the great compression, an intensifier, and the great revealing. What has manifest was already there, something underneath that came to the surface under the intense pressures of COVID. COVID was not the cause of many things. It just took what was there and revealed it.

So many words have been used to chronicle and delineate this pandemic. The great _____(insert your choice of adverbial word or phrase); reset, leveller, pause, accelerator, resignation, etc. I prefer the descriptor of 'disruption'. Perhaps the 'Great Unsettling' is a better diagnostic word and account of our time….But what if the nature of COVID or its length meant something else. Indeed what if this moment, this disruption, was a chance to wake up. And to stop putting off all the things I want to be as a Christian and know I could be.

We are entering what is known as the 'recovery phase' of a disaster, and it is the most prolonged phase, taking years. Adrenalin is spent. Exhaustion sets in. Losses have to be counted and processed. Rebuilding in the face of loss takes an effort amid depletion of resources, emotional and financial. But Jesus has a route through it for us, if we choose Him.

Since March last year, I have been working on a project that is almost ready to launch. I have made over twenty long-form interviews with Christian leaders, from three worlds of the academic, social entrepreneurship and prayer. We have called the project ExtraECC - short for Extra Ecclesiam nulla salus. Those interviewed include, Rowan Williams, Frances Spufford, Steve Chalke, Martyn Percy, Jill Weber, Ben Pink Dandelion, Pete Greig, Ruth Valerio, Peter Meadows, Eve Poole, Chris Lee, Peter Owen Jones, and Sam Wells.

The truth is this: Christians need no permission in order to read God’s Word. God delights in speaking to his followers, as they read his Word. But there is another truth. We can also be very bad at reading the Bible. So how on earth are you and I ever going to be able to read the Bible well? A new book by Dr Stephen Burnhope speaks to and responds to this most enormous of challenges. How to let the Bible speak by itself and directly, but how we might also better navigate it with an understanding that we cannot obtain on our own. I this episode I interview Steve about this most amazing book How to Read the Bible Well: http://mybook.to/readbiblewell The Big Story of the Bible - talk by Steve Burnhope: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJzXSIECr-0 Steve Burnhope’s Blog: https://www.talkingofgod.com/conversation

In this short podcast update, I share about two projects you can listen to. An interview about discipleship and 'replanting' church in a post COVID world. Then the other is a collaboration, where I and my friend Dr Geoff Holsclaw, like many in the modern world, are grappling with the consequences of cutting edge science and how it can inform the daily walk of faith, leadership in the church, and the very task of theology. Discipleship and Re-planting: http://jason.so/Multiply TLD Theology and Neuroscience: http://jason.so/TLDlaunch

If A Christian Does Something But Doesn't Post It On Social Media, Did It Really Happen? by Jason Swan Clark

Today’s post is about the first steps for getting help with mental illness. Steps that are not about any lack of faith but are the most important confession of faith to learn to make. It takes courage to say those words, "I am not coping". It is an act of faith, like the Psalmist to declare to someone else how we are struggling, 'My flesh and heart have failed..." (Psalm 73).

I have hit the COVID wall. I am sick of the sound of my own voice as I talk with others for planning, caring, responding, leading. I am, moreover, fed up with my voice in my head. With the promise of coming out of COVID, I am so suddenly exhausted. Perhaps it is always darkest before the dawn. And so I have been considering Not Doing. And I am not very good at it.

(This is part 2 of a series as a podcast what will be a book on mental health and faith) Mental illness is a journey none of us wants to undertake, but we can only refuse it for so long once it comes upon us. For the longer we deny its effects on us, the worse it becomes. Like a warning light on our car's dashboard, where ignoring it makes what happens next much worse. People are prone to avoiding a doctor for physical symptoms, and even more so for the help and support mental illness require.