Becoming God’s Family: Against Church Hurt, Isolation, and Autonomy (Carmen Imes) Ep. #214

Dru (00:00)
Can you be a practicing Christian and skip out on going to church? Our guest Carmen Imes has written a new book called Becoming God’s Family and we talk about why it doesn’t even make any sense for you to call yourself a Christian and not be part of a Christian community. Obviously we talk about reasons why people have problems with the Christian community but ultimately why leadership problems and all the hurts that Christians can cause to one another shouldn’t be ultimately a reason not to be in a community.

Join me for a spicy episode where she really hits hard with some of her wisdom on what it means to be a community of God and why that’s so important for us.

Carmen Imes (00:42)
Yeah, so this book was born out of the kind of post-pandemic situation where I realized that church attendance was no longer obvious, that a lot of people disconnected from a weekly habit that had been so much a part of their life that they had never questioned it before. But once they had the option of staying home on the couch and watching YouTube, it was like, go back? And you sort of pair that with so many headlines of

pastoral failures and sins and church hurt and abuse that then it becomes this almost a moral issue. I shouldn’t go back because I don’t want to be complicit or I don’t want to participate in this thing or I don’t want to be hurt. So I think there’s a felt, there’s less of a felt need to go to church than there used to be when you and I were growing up. And I think what I wanted to help people see was that we are actually not

built to do the Christian life alone. We are designed to become part of a family of faith that is essential and integral to who we are and why we’re here. And it really, the tipping point for me was sitting around a campfire with some of our extended family members and my, ⁓ an extended family member across the fire said, you know, I still believe in God and all that. just.

I just don’t go to church. I don’t need church. I don’t want anybody telling me what to do. And so there’s this sense of like to go to church violates my autonomy or it doesn’t serve my interests. So I’m disconnecting. And I realized that there’s a whole paradigm behind that that is so deeply American, Western, European, this individualized way of looking at the world.

Dru (02:17)
Hmm.

Carmen Imes (02:31)
that is alien to the scriptures, where we are meant to belong to each other. so I was, I’m kind of going after this issue from a number of different angles, but my hope is to woo people back who have disconnected from the church and to encourage people to stay who have one foot out the door and are just like on the verge of leaving and to inspire and equip people who are all in, they’re invested.

Dru (02:33)
Hmm.

Carmen Imes (02:59)
but maybe they haven’t really thought through what are we supposed to be doing and why are we here.

Dru (03:05)
Yeah. Wow. Okay. Well, that was a very good summary that dredges up about 12 chapters worth of questions in my mind. Yeah. Well, and I think, you know, I always use the example. I always try to hook people with very, you know, salacious lines, like you can’t perform the ethics of the Bible by yourself. It’s like physically impossible. Right. and I think it’s hard. What you’re doing though is harder though.

Carmen Imes (03:13)
Here we go.

Right? Yes, perfect. Perfect.

Dru (03:33)
because you are talking to people who have been hurt. And of course the rhetoric today is almost like, you the subtitle could have been like, why we can’t cancel church or something like that. ⁓ Even when it hurts us. So you’re trying to do a lot of things at once. I wonder what parts of scripture you really hang your hooks, you know, the hooks on that, which you hang the whole argument.

Carmen Imes (03:37)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, so this turned out to be an interesting project because what I knew is the Bible is far more collectivist than we’re prepared to notice as Westerners reading the Bible. And so I want to help people unlock these collective dimensions of texts and realize this isn’t about me personally, it’s about us. And I didn’t know where that would take me, but I realized as I started working through the text, I wanted to focus on places where this, the…

people of God are gathered together in community and God’s presence shows up in order to say, like, look what we’re missing out on when we don’t gather. And yet, ⁓ I found that when we gather, sometimes really bad things happen. Sometimes God’s people really misbehave, sometimes we’re barking up the wrong tree, we’re there for the wrong reasons. And so I actually ended up including a bunch of biblical stories that are bad examples of community.

then paired that with some of the headlines that we’re seeing about churches that have become toxic, authoritarian places or places that have supported or covered up abuse so that we could look at how does God respond to this situation. So I begin with Abraham in chapter one. This is the.

This is the couple, Abraham and Sarah, they’re the couple that God chooses to create a family that’s the basis for this nation. And so really does start in the nuclear family that then becomes an extended family. But we right off the bat get stories about Abraham and Sarah that are problematic. ⁓ Abraham traffics his wife twice and benefits handsomely from it. He ends up gaining Egyptian slaves out of the deal and presumably one of those slaves is Hagar.

Dru (05:30)
Yeah, toxic. Yeah.

Carmen Imes (05:43)
and she is then trafficked or sexually abused, used by her owners, masters. And yet, so we take a look at that story as an example of how sometimes even when God chooses his people and calls them into a life of faith, they don’t do it well. And God has to actually work outside of and alongside of them to meet Hagar in the wilderness, to show her that she’s seen, that she’s not been forgotten.

Dru (06:02)
Mm-hmm.

Carmen Imes (06:12)
that God has a future for her. so we linger, Haggar might seem like a strange place to start the story when it’s supposed to be tracing the family of faith and she’s like the outsider. But I think it’s so important for us to see how God works with the outsiders and works to incorporate them into the family or to walk with them when God’s family misbehaves.

Dru (06:35)
So surely and the problem here is I didn’t get the book in time to read it so I don’t actually know what you say But I can imagine someone worried that Like this sounds like you’re coaching people to stay in an abusive relationship

Carmen Imes (06:50)
Yeah, the Hagar story is tricky because the first time she runs away, God tells her to go back. And so I do name that head on and give my theory for why God does this. In her current state, which was a pregnant woman, ⁓ she was at risk of dying in the desert. And so it was a life-saving operation to send her back temporarily.

but then God releases her later to go and start her own life. So I don’t think this is any kind of paradigm for keeping people in abusive relationships. And in fact, I have a section in the book about when is it the right time to leave a church? You know, I’m trying to mostly get people to come and stay, but I do believe there are scenarios in which it is unhealthy to stay. And so it’s not meant to be an exhaustive list, but I talk about three different scenarios that.

that I think are reasons to leave, and one is if the church has abandoned the word of God as their, you know, their foundation or the thing they keep coming back to if they’re now sort of setting it aside because it’s outdated, not the right church, if the leadership is authoritarian or if they’re abusive or covering up abuse, those are scenarios that I don’t feel like the church can healthily become all that they’re meant to be.

Dru (08:12)
Yeah, we, you know, we’ve talked about this a little bit on this podcast, like when Caitlin Beatty was on with her celebrities for Jesus. ⁓ I think that covering up authoritative and covering up, cause I, you know, I’ll just be honest. I was in a church that we had to leave during COVID because it was what I consider some inappropriate leadership, nothing immoral, but it was just inappropriate style of leadership that was problematic. And part of the problem was, and I’m someone who was a pastor for eight years on an elder board.

Carmen Imes (08:17)
Yeah.

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Dru (08:41)
⁓ full-time pastor and then pastor part-time and lots of other contexts. And I still was giving the benefit of the doubt all the way up to the end until finally we’re just like, okay, no more grace can be extended. So I think that’s the one that I now can see it 12 miles away in the dark. ⁓ But at the time I was blinded by this, well, like, surely the pastor wouldn’t do that.

Carmen Imes (08:49)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Right.

Dru (09:08)
Surely the

pastor wouldn’t think that. I’ve had conversations with him where, yeah, so I wonder, yeah, go ahead.

Carmen Imes (09:11)
And I think benefit of

the doubt ⁓ is a good posture to take ⁓ to the extent that like we shouldn’t always be thinking ill of other people. Our default shouldn’t be to suspect them. But I actually think we’re not in a good position to evaluate potential abuses of power when we’re too close to it. And so if there’s a situation that comes up in your context where someone is being accused of abuse and it’s your friend, like,

Dru (09:30)
Mmm.

Carmen Imes (09:39)
all the more reason to call in a third party to do an investigation because you’re not in a good position. You’re bringing too much into it of past knowledge that could blind you to the truth about abuse of power.

Dru (09:54)
Yeah, absolutely. And that’s what we did. That’s all our only request is bring in somebody else because we knew we could, you know, we could be too upset or incoherent in our thinking. ⁓

Carmen Imes (09:57)
Yeah. Yep.

Yep, either too

upset or too forgiving. Like it goes either way, but like we just aren’t, we’re not usually calibrated in the right way to handle it. And if we don’t have the training to know how to investigate, the investigation itself can cause more harm than good.

Dru (10:08)
Too friendly. Yeah.

Yeah, exactly. And then, you know, I, I’m not speaking of my own case, but in many cases where the person is skilled and raising up a small army around them of people who will always give the benefit of the doubt. And, um, and they gets framed in loyalty language. Uh, let’s just say that listening to Mike Cosper’s, uh, podcast, was it? The rise and fall. was, my wife couldn’t actually listen to it for a long time. And then.

Carmen Imes (10:33)
Yes.

I

now when I hear Mike Cosper’s voice like on another podcast, I feel like I have this sort of mild PTSD reaction to it. I’m just like, here we go. I don’t know if I can do this. But yes, listening to that podcast series was part of what galvanized my desire to write this book. Because I think we need to not only name what’s wrong in the church and shine a spotlight on toxic and unhealthy churches, but we need to

Dru (10:48)
Yeah

Yeah, is mildly true.

I know.

Carmen Imes (11:14)
cast a better vision for what we can become. And one analogy that I’ve used is, you if you go to the grocery store, buy a gallon of milk, and you go to pour yourself a bowl of cereal, and the milk is like sour. You’re like, well, it’s not even past its expiration date, but the milk is sour. You don’t give up drinking milk from here on out. And you probably don’t even give up shopping at that grocery store. ⁓ It’s a matter of like, okay, is this a pattern?

Do I consistently get milk that goes bad before its expiration date at this grocery store? I might need to switch stores, but I’m not gonna give up eating. And I think too many people have seen the problems in the church and they’ve been like, I’m out. It’s like, well, what are you gonna eat? Because we actually need food.

Dru (12:00)
And maybe even worse than that, I suspect a lot of younger folks have not seen these things in their own church. They’ve heard about them at other churches and they get the kind of, the world is worse now than it’s ever been. And I’m like, no, it’s actually kind of, it’s not bad right now. Actually in the seventies, it was pretty bad. But it’s that overexposure to other local information that gives us a sense of outsize proportion.

Carmen Imes (12:12)
⁓ yeah.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah, right, right.

Yes. Yes.

One of my missions in this book is to tell stories that paint a broader picture, stories of out of the way little churches that are being faithful to Jesus and loving their neighbor. And as I’ve traveled more to speak in places all over North America, I keep encountering these stories and being so inspired by them. And I’m like, these are not making the headlines, but we need to talk about them.

The churches that have courageous ideas, creative ideas, how to reach out, just showing up for each other and loving each other through hard things. And that’s what the church is meant to be. Let’s talk about it.

Dru (13:02)
Yeah, and honestly, I became a Christian coming from a fairly non-Christian life. And ⁓ so in a non-denominational, charismatic, I mean, it’s everything that you wouldn’t picture me in today, ⁓ even though I still like those churches. ⁓ And they did everything wrong. Evangelistically, they weren’t seeker-sensitive at all. By all the rules, they were doing everything wrong. But it’s the place where I encountered God and real authentic

Carmen Imes (13:10)
Yeah.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dru (13:31)
Christians who were really serving and it was a great pastoral experience. So I was kind of inoculated from the, can’t, this isn’t a real thing for churches to be faithful, broken and faithful at the same time. ⁓ but.

Carmen Imes (13:31)
Yep. Yep.

Yeah, yeah.

I kind of love it when a church hasn’t refreshed their brand. They haven’t installed fog machines. They haven’t swapped out the orange carpet, but they just keep showing up and loving all the kids in the neighborhood and having VBS. And I think we need more of that, not less. We need more of people who are so busy loving each other that they haven’t thought about how to make this slicker and turning it into a marketing campaign.

Dru (14:11)
Yeah. And that, you know, I always remind people that the last I checked, I heard it was the average church in United States is still about 86 people. ⁓ most of whom are related to each other, right? They’re small family groups of kids, which had come with their own problems and dynamics. ⁓ but they’re just doing the work and, and yeah, I like you. I’ve just been around to dozens and dozens of these churches where nobody would think twice, but they’re actually, they know everybody in the community. They’re showing up.

Carmen Imes (14:19)
Wow.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Dru (14:39)
the school board or the city council to defend people who are being, ⁓ know, where the police are busting in apartments just checking occupancy and ticketing everybody, know. So I think that’s an easy story to tell. I find that most people are not convinced by that. They don’t hear that story and go, I should go to church.

Carmen Imes (15:02)
You

know, I’ve been, so I’m dabbling in Substack. I haven’t actually started a newsletter yet, but I’ve been posting, I’ve been posting notes on Substack. And I’ve just been posting stories that I hear that inspire me. And people are responding so enthusiastically to it because I think we’re starved for good news and starved for stories. You know, this week, what I posted is I showed up at church on Sunday and last Sunday we had

Dru (15:07)
Oh, that sounds like a drug. I start in a little small substack every once in a while.

Mm-hmm.

Carmen Imes (15:30)
prayed for a guy who was having brain surgery on Tuesday for an undiagnosed tumor. And so we prayed for him. They had a meal trained for him. And so this week we thanked God for a successful surgery. And then when we were filing forward to take communion, I’m like, my word, he’s here. The man who had his brain opened on Tuesday made it to church today.

Dru (15:54)
Wow.

Carmen Imes (15:55)
And he had scars on his head and he was walking forward like he was hanging onto the bench as he walked forward. And I thought, yeah, this is it. He didn’t want to miss a Sunday because these are his people and this is where he encounters the presence of God. And that’s what I’m seeing over and over again with college students who do not want to miss church, who figure out a summer job to stay in La Mirada because they don’t want to go home because it would mean leaving this church.

where they feel like they’ve found community and where they’re being shepherded in very non-flashy ways. We don’t even have PowerPoint during our sermons and there’s no stories or illustrations and we’re doing liturgy and they love it. ⁓ And I think like that’s inspiring to me.

Dru (16:37)
Hmm.

Yeah, I also wondered this on this axis of church.

⁓ But when students ask me what kind of church should I look for, especially when we were in New York City and they had all these different types of churches that they had never encountered before, I kind of usually say look for people who preach the scripture in their words and in the actions of the church. ⁓ So I am always a little wary of a church where you can show up on Sunday worship and that’s all, it’s kind of an exchange.

Carmen Imes (17:09)
Yeah,

Dru (17:10)
You led me in singing the songs and making me

Carmen Imes (17:11)
transaction, yeah.

Dru (17:12)
go, hmm, about Jesus. And then I go home and do my thing for the rest of the week. ⁓

Carmen Imes (17:15)
Yeah. If there’s no

meal train, if there’s no pickleball club or midweek Bible study or something where people are actually doing life together, then something might be missing.

Dru (17:25)
Right. Right.

⁓ Okay, so this issue of the people of God. Okay, so those are the people who are in or on the fringes who need to come back in and reconsider, take a second look at the church. ⁓ You were a missionary in the Philippines and you encountered some very non-Christian, Philippines is Catholic, but there’s some very non-Christian parts of the Philippines as well. ⁓ What about the people on the outside? Are they God’s family?

Carmen Imes (17:37)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

So in my previous book, Being God’s Image, I argued that part of what it means to be the image of God is that we are part of God’s royal family, that all human beings are the image of God, and to be God’s image is like being kin to God. And so there is a sense in which every human being is part of God’s royal family. Part of why I chose the title, Becoming God’s Family, is because actually learning to live like we’re family

involves an intentional decision to meet together and to be discipled, to be formed in our life, our shared life together. And so I think the process of becoming like Jesus and the process of gathering to worship is what really knits us together so that we’re acting like a family. So maybe it’s already there in our DNA, but we need to be like captured and brought back in.

Dru (18:53)
And the power of that image of God being part of the kingdom of God, ⁓ I think, so I was with these scientists at Wheaton all week long, when you’re with scientists, you always learn, like, they say things offhandedly that are crazy, and then they accuse me of saying offhanded things about the Bible that they think are crazy. ⁓ But one of the things that came across was there are no subspecies of human beings. This is a computational biologist claim.

Carmen Imes (18:58)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Yes. Love it.

Dru (19:20)
Every chimpanzee, there’s subspecies, it doesn’t matter. You take the shortest, weirdest morphology person in Indonesia and you put them against the tallest, weirdest morphology in Amsterdam and they’re the same species. But we do recognize all of this diversity in the human species, as it were. ⁓ And that’s culturally linguistic and everything that runs the gamut

Carmen Imes (19:45)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Dru (19:48)
I wonder what you see as the biggest impediments ⁓ to people encountering ⁓ culturally. Cause I, at the same time I’ve lived in, like you have lived in lots of different countries ⁓ and I love lots of different cultures, but I also have come to appreciate.

Carmen Imes (19:51)
Mm.

Dru (20:03)
careful here. I want to say sinful patterns in culture, know, certain cultures all have like certain sin patterns that kind of let, yeah, that they let people get away with. So in American religion, we let people just get away with this rugged individualism and concern for themselves, yeah, consumerism. So what cultural blind spots have you seen that just are impediments to people like becoming the family? Outside of America, maybe we can kind of move into some specific ones.

Carmen Imes (20:08)
Okay, yep, yep. We all have blind spots, yep.

We do consumerism, yep, self-centeredness.

Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, so outside America, this is interesting, this kind of came out as I was looking at the individualist versus collectivist societies. Outside America, people’s fierce loyalty is to their biological family, and the thing they need to really embrace is that Jesus is calling them to be part of the church as a family, which means the loyalty to the church needs to be

Dru (20:48)
Mm.

Carmen Imes (20:59)
even stronger than the loyalty to their biological family, which is a hard pill to swallow if your whole social structure is built around that loyalty to your blood relatives. So I think actually, yes, yes, I think Paul and Jesus and the New Testament writers are proclaiming a message that is very countercultural, even though they’re in a collectivist society and they’re saying, we are supposed to be a family.

Dru (21:10)
That’s kind of so unnatural for so many people.

Carmen Imes (21:27)
The family they’re forming is cutting through lines of class and race, or race is a little anachronistic to say, but like people groups, ethnicities, cultures, languages, ⁓ gender, and they’re saying, you you all need to sit around one table. There’s no, no one’s higher than another. And that is radical. ⁓ I remember in the Philippines being so,

Dru (21:35)
Yeah.

Carmen Imes (21:55)
uncomfortable with how sharply hierarchical the structure was even in the church. This, you know, this great deal of honor given to the people on top of the pedestal and then sort of a groveling by everybody else. And because we were white and had money enough to come to the Philippines and had an education, people were trying to always put us on the pedestal. So my husband, who really thrives helping behind the scenes,

could never exercise those gifts because people wouldn’t let him help. He would want to stack chairs and they’re like trying to hand him a microphone and put him as the big white man up front. And he’s like, no, that’s not how I’m wired. This is not good. So ⁓ I think there was a hierarchy that was unhealthy. And I think we have the opposite problem in many places in the US where we’re so ruggedly individualistic that the idea of belonging to someone else and expressing loyalty to them is almost like offensive.

As my extended family member expressed around the campfire, I don’t want anybody telling me what to do. Like you’re impinging upon my autonomy and that’s just the worst thing he could think of.

Dru (22:54)
Hmm.

Yeah.

That is so funny. The lat, I have a funny story of somebody not wanting to be told what to do in bootcamp. That was air force bootcamp. So take that with a grain of salt. We had a Hawaiian guy. remember, I don’t remember his name, but we called him five Oh and uh, threw himself down a set of concrete stairs in order to break his leg. Uh, I don’t think he broke his leg. He did end up hurting himself. He ended up getting recycled. So he actually ended up going through bootcamp twice essentially, but on his way out when they were sending them to medical.

Carmen Imes (23:12)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Okay.

no.

Dru (23:36)
We were like, Five-0, did you throw yourself down the stairs? And he goes, I hate bootcamp. And we’re like, yeah, we all hate it. It’s the nature of bootcamp. He’s like, well, I just can’t stand people telling me what to do. And I thought, were you not aware of how the military works? did you not? But I almost feel the same thing about Christianity, right? Are you not aware that this is the game that, you know, when you’re redeemed, you’re redeemed as one of the many?

Carmen Imes (23:51)
You

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

The book of Exodus is not setting people free so that they can go live their best life now, right? The book of Exodus is a transition from serving Pharaoh to serving Yahweh. We are very much going to be told what to do for here on out. And yet the way we share the gospel ends up being so hyper individualistic that it just sort of plays into that stereotype or that.

set of values that we’ve inherited in the West.

Dru (24:29)
Yeah, so I hadn’t thought about going back to your comment about the extending the the loyalty to family out beyond your family. ⁓ Shai held when we interviewed on his book, Judaism is Love, he talked about ⁓ this is that the great thing that’s missed is that love your neighbors yourself, ⁓ loving your family. Like this is the J.D. Vance discussion where he said, well, I think we should love our families more than we love other people. And that’s Shai held’s point as well. But Shai says.

Carmen Imes (24:37)
Mm.

Dru (24:57)
But loving your family is actually training ground for loving your neighbor, which is then training ground for loving the stranger. Like you’re actually being pushed beyond the boundaries as part of the law, which seemed to have been lost on JD Vance. I don’t know. didn’t hear the whole reason. I can’t judge it.

Carmen Imes (25:00)
Mm. Mm.

Mm.

Yeah right.

I have a short section of the book where I talk about the Ananias and Sapphira story from Acts and how you know they’re there so this like my other two books this book traces the theme of the community kind of all through the whole Bible so it’s got Old and New Testament and the the story of Ananias and Sapphira is so fascinating because they are selling their land and putting part of the money at the Apostles feet so that they can benefit from

looking like benefactors without actually belonging to one another like a family. They are trying to play church by the rules of the world around them, which is that if you have wealth, then you use it for the public benefit and then you accrue honor. But by bringing the money to the apostles, you’re actually supposed to be surrendering.

Dru (25:51)
Hmm.

Carmen Imes (26:03)
your right to honor because it’s sharing with family. Just like if you give money to your brother in your family, like that’s not, that doesn’t give you any special kudos. There’s no honors. You don’t need a plaque put up because your family, like that’s what families do for each other. And Ananias and Sapphire are trying to treat the church like it’s part of this game, this honor accrual process. And that’s why God’s like, no, that’s not how this works.

Dru (26:13)
You don’t want to plaque it up at Thanksgiving.

And so it doesn’t take too many leaps of the imagination to think about in our context, pastors, elders, even, I hate the word, but Christian influencers. ⁓ Who are, I mean, it’s funny, like if you want, I always say, well, honor shame, we don’t really have anything like that. And I was like, except on social media. It’s like.

Carmen Imes (26:48)
no. Yeah, except

both publishers send both of us books that we didn’t ask for because they’re hoping we will talk about them publicly.

Dru (26:55)
that’s true. We’d associate

our, my massive platform with it. You actually do have a big platform. ⁓ But yeah, I guess what, and I’m thinking, cause you have recently mentioned how making list of things actually ⁓ gets more, more people’s attention on the internet than I guess in other things, which makes sense because I, I’ll watch those videos more than other things. ⁓

Carmen Imes (27:01)
Yes.

dear.

Yeah, indeed. I want to know

if his six books are the same as my six books, know, top books or whatever, like, are we on the same page? Yep.

Dru (27:22)
Right, right, exactly, Exactly.

And I always pick up a few gems when I watch those things. So I wonder what are some of the, we talked about kind of the red flags or the flares that should fly up when we see certain things going on. When this, like what’s the ananias and sephira flare we should be looking out for?

Carmen Imes (27:44)
Yeah, pastors with green rooms, maybe. Like it is a thing. You know, when your church gets so big that you can’t be out with the people shaking their hands and checking on them as they’re arriving, you’re in the back with your like sparkling water and your change of outfits. And then you just come out in the lights. Like, I just want to say where.

Dru (27:49)
Is that a thing?

Carmen Imes (28:10)
did the church go? Where did the family go? This has become church as production rather than, and I understand there are factors like certain personalities need to like have a clear head to be able to give a clear message in the service. So I understand if a pastor needs to disappear for a little while to just sort of like get in the right head space to give the message. But I’m very concerned with the whole concept of a green room in church. ⁓

Dru (28:40)
It’s not labeled a green room, right? You’re just using it.

Carmen Imes (28:40)
where? Yeah, actually,

actually, actually Dru So often I get to a church and they’re like, okay, here’s your green room. And I’m like, my word, what are we doing?

Dru (28:50)
Does it have the &Ms

with all the brown ones removed? I will not enter that space unless it

Carmen Imes (28:56)
I did not look at the M&Ms, but there are always snacks, yes. ⁓ And I think, so we’ve turned church into a concert or production or something and you can show up passively, ⁓ participate and then leave without knowing anybody or being known. And I wanna say there can be real spiritual benefit in a mega church context. There can be.

really powerful preaching. The worship can really help people connect with God and help them rehearse the truths of the Christian faith. There can be inspiration for the week. But I think actually the primary thing church is supposed to be doing is gathering us together and helping us to admit we don’t have the answers, but that we’re actually waiting for God to break in from the outside to fix what’s broken in our world. And we’re gathering to

to acknowledge we don’t have the answer. And I think somehow along the way we’ve lost the plot and the church has become the place that has this polished and branded answer factory. Like we’ve got it down, so come join us and you’ll be on the winning team. And there’s truth to that, but I feel like it’s kind of all mixed up with the influencer and it becomes a happy, clappy place instead of a place where we can lament.

where we can sit in sorrow with each other. Sorrow and green rooms just don’t really go together very well.

Dru (30:28)
Yeah. Yeah. I, I talked to somebody who was a worship leader and he said, and we were talking about laments and, and, and the worship time. And he just said, well, you know, it’s people come on Sunday, they’re just not ready to like, they’re just not jazzed by this. I thought, well, yeah.

Carmen Imes (30:43)
Getting

jazzed is actually not the point of gathering. That’s actually not the point.

Dru (30:46)
Yeah. Yeah.

And I don’t I don’t know how to rejigger the thinking on that one. ⁓

Carmen Imes (30:55)
If we

can think of church as gathering together to wait for God, then we can wait in sorrow as well as in hope. ⁓ But if we think, but if we see our job as like giving people a sort of pep, like pep talk or pep rally for the week, then I can see how a lament would ruin that. But what ends up happening inadvertently is people have all kinds of sorrows they’re carrying through the week.

Dru (31:02)
Right, right. And that’s always my pitch.

Right.

Carmen Imes (31:22)
and they walk through the doors of church and they feel like this is not a safe place for me to bring these things or to wrestle with these things. I can’t admit them.

Dru (31:30)
Or worse, think spiritual pep rally is the antidote to their lament. Yeah.

Carmen Imes (31:34)
Right, right. And I’ve been

really grateful this year, I discovered the work of Andrew Root and he’s just got great stuff on this topic. His book, Evangelism in an Age of Despair, so good. And he’s talking about how, ⁓ you know, actually in our world, what’s really counter-cultural is to be willing to sit and cry with someone. Because most people avoid people who are sad because that…

is an interruption to my personal quest for happiness. And if we see ourselves as trying to form a family rather than trying to be personally fulfilled and happy, then that makes space for all kinds of collaboration and familyhood.

Dru (32:17)
So that was going to be my next question is ⁓ if people who don’t have the answers and they’re sitting waiting for God for the solution, is part of that solution always going to be the people in the room?

Carmen Imes (32:30)
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. ⁓

Dru (32:32)
You say yes,

but they’re also part of the problem.

Carmen Imes (32:35)
They are. We are. Yes, we are part of the problem and part of the solution. And we’re asking God to remake us. And so we have to have communities where confession of sin is something we take seriously. And we’re recognizing we need Jesus to cleanse us. And we have to work through conflict with each other because it’s hard to be a family. And any family has moments of conflict where we have to figure out like, OK, why are all the dishes getting piled up on the counter and they’re not getting

washed. Like we actually have to be a team about things. And so just like a family church is messy, but you wouldn’t say, because my family has some conflict sometimes, and not everybody does the chores when they’re supposed to. I’m just going to go live on my own on a desert island and I don’t want to have anything to do with anybody ever again. Like, no, we, we keep trying with families because we recognize the need for connection and relationship.

Dru (33:30)
Yeah, I was thinking about this the other day though, just independent of your book, it struck me though, do you know this movement to like ⁓ basically divorce your parents? Have you heard of this? So I’m thinking, well, that’s not good for the church, right? If you’re willing to do this to your own parents because it’s, know, for your mental health and predict, which obviously there are certain situations where that is necessary for a time. ⁓

Carmen Imes (33:40)
⁓ yes.

Right. Right.

Yes, this is certainly

a cultural trend to refuse to associate with anyone who doesn’t see the world exactly the way you do. And so we get ourselves into smaller and smaller echo chambers and we treat church like, I got to find my people. And so then we’re going to try to find a place where they agree with me exactly on everything. And as soon as we think we found a place like that, then it’s only a matter of time before we discover, ⁓ that’s how you read Isaiah or that’s how you think about end times.

Dru (34:21)
Yeah.

Carmen Imes (34:24)
or that’s how you, know, what music, whatever the thing is, there will be a time when a disagreement comes up. And if your goal is to find your exact match, then you’ll be on an endless quest that you’ll never meet. We all have families with, you know, the crazy uncle and the, know, sibling or whatever that’s just a little different and we’ve got to figure out how to.

Dru (34:39)
Hmm.

Carmen Imes (34:51)
how to do life together and we don’t have the luxury of just saying you don’t get to be in our family anymore. And the church is similar to that. And so one of the things I’m challenging people to do is don’t leave over minor doctrinal issues or over differences in preference for the style of preaching or music or the kinds of outreach that is happening. Be willing to stay even when you would do it differently because it’s about being a family. It’s not about getting it perfect.

Dru (35:19)
Yeah. And I think, you know, I was at a church when I was a pastor, we did have quite a few people leave specifically over the worship music, ⁓ and the, and the control of the worship music. had control over there. And I remember having just horrible dreams, ⁓ just like in tears because I couldn’t figure out why people thought this was the thing worth leaving the church. And again, I don’t hold it against any of those people. I think it is part of the charismatic world at that time.

Carmen Imes (35:41)
Mm-hmm.

Mm.

Dru (35:48)
that they put maybe a little over emphasis on these things. But there was also, ⁓ there was a feeling of family there. mean, these were people who’d spent been on missions trips around the world together, building orphanages and churches and to see them split on something so petty. I do worry that if this movement to kind of like for your own mental health, you have to break up with your parents or break up with your siblings. Man, that’s just like half a step away from just saying I don’t need my church.

Carmen Imes (36:00)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah. Yeah.

Dru (36:17)
anymore because one person offended me and it’s, to me it just sounds like a, you know, panic outbreak of borderline personality like across my community or something.

Carmen Imes (36:24)
Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. I think there’s even, I mean, we could even back up and say there’s a church planting strategy called the homogeneous unit principle that tries to plant, that it argues, and this has been around for decades, it argues that the fastest way to grow a church is to target a micro demographic of like-minded people. So you get your young urban professionals with no kids.

Dru (36:41)
yeah.

Carmen Imes (36:50)
you know, in this downtown area or something. And it will grow fast if you are attracting a bunch of people who are like each other. And that goes along with, you know, your question earlier, what sort of, what are our sin patterns? Like one of our sin patterns is the quest to be with people who are just like me, which is, which runs roughshod over the New Testament call to love our neighbor and to sit around the.

communion table with people of every class and race and gender ⁓ background. And I feel like we’re setting ourselves up for this unhealthy, toxic kinds of churches when our starting premise is we’re trying to attract people like ourselves. And then as soon as they’re not like ourselves, we can leave. Like, no, what if we treated it as a neighborhood church? We’re reaching the people in this neighborhood.

Dru (37:37)
Right.

Carmen Imes (37:46)
However diverse this neighborhood is, that’s how diverse we want our church to be.

Dru (37:51)
Yeah, I know that church planning strategy and I very much suspect, and it may just be the case, that the premium is placed on a stable core of people and a stable core of giving, right? So I can imagine there are certain denominations where you have to have money stabilized in certain ways. It does make me think the opposite though, because I’ve lived in Scotland.

where you go to a Scottish church and they’re all Scottish people and they all have the same heritage and there’s not a lot of diversity. So I wonder, know, what do you do with the Finnish church or the, you know, where you get into homogeneous societies where there really isn’t a lot of variation.

Carmen Imes (38:20)
⁓ Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

I think if you’re in an area where that’s all who lives there, then fine. I’m not saying like you can’t be a church if you don’t have a multicultural presence. But I would be concerned if the makeup of your church doesn’t match the makeup of the local public school. I would want to look at the demographics of the local public school and then say, do we reflect that? And if we don’t, why? Like who’s not here and why? And instead of…

People who are not like me just are invisible to me. I’m not thinking about them. Can I think of them as potential family members that can worship alongside me? It’s hard to find good models of it, but.

Dru (39:12)
And I’m.

I imagine also, like where I live, it’s mainly white, but there’s a large Mexican population here, strangely enough, in West Michigan. And obviously Spanish-speaking Mexican population, might want to, you you can imagine why their heart language that we’d want to worship in Spanish only. So would you make room in this idea of family for like churches, where Spanish-speaking churches and…

Carmen Imes (39:27)
Yeah. Yep.

Dru (39:37)
and more Anglo churches would worship together at times. They would have meaningful relationships between the churches but wouldn’t necessarily worship every Sunday together.

Carmen Imes (39:46)
Sure,

so I actually dedicated this book to a Mennonite church that we used to be part of in Oregon, rural Oregon, Calvary Mennonite Church. And years ago, they recruited a young Spanish speaking couple to come start a Spanish speaking congregation that would meet in the same building, ⁓ know, Sunday afternoon or whatever. And so when we went out as missionaries back in the early 2000s, both of those congregations supported us as missionaries. We, you know,

Dru (40:06)
Okay.

Carmen Imes (40:15)
met with both of them. But over the past 20 years, something really beautiful has happened where ⁓ the Anglo church has gradually declined in numbers and gradually aged. And the Spanish speaking church has gradually grown where they outgrew the space they were using and needed to use the sanctuary. And then they started having once a month joint services with translation headphones for those who didn’t speak English. And now they have become one congregation.

and the sermons alternate between English and Spanish. So it’s not like we’re expecting all the Spanish speakers to acclimatize or assimilate to our way of doing things. There are two pastors, an English speaking and a Spanish speaking pastor. They co-pastor the church. The songs have a verse in English and then a verse in Spanish, and the teams are multicultural. And when I visited over Christmas break, the sermon was in Spanish and we had English translation.

Dru (40:50)
nice.

Carmen Imes (41:15)
⁓ in our headphones and I love that and as I talked with some of the longtime members and I just said this is amazing. I’m really inspired to talk about like they’ve never rebranded. ⁓ It’s an old aging A-frame in a rural area where the carpet is way beyond need to be replaced. You know there’s these old bulletin boards whatever like it’s not flashy but it’s so inspiring to me.

Dru (41:15)
nice

Carmen Imes (41:43)
And one of the longtime members said to me, Carmen, it’s hard, but it’s magical. There’s something like the spirit of God is showing up in such a powerful way as they come together. So there’s a church near me here in La Mirada that has ⁓ it’s a Baptist church and they have three congregations that sort of work together. So Korean speaking, Spanish speaking and English speaking. And they have services.

kind of adjacently and then all of the services let out into the same courtyard where they can fellowship with one another and they have joint events. I think that’s another way to do it, to address the language issue, but also to say, hey, we are actually part of one family. So there’s different ways to think about it.

Dru (42:29)
just thinking more creatively about it. I’ve heard stories like that before. That’s ⁓ particularly a good one. ⁓ I always think nothing says you care about people more than like taking some time to learn some of their language, right? I mean, that’s a huge cognitive and time investment and it really does show the compassion. ⁓ Well, Carmen Imes, thank you so much for your wisdom. This is the third.

Carmen Imes (42:44)
Yes.

Yes.

Dru (42:56)
a book in a trilogy, Becoming God’s Family. It’s Bearing God’s Image, Bearing God’s Image, Bearing God’s Image.

Carmen Imes (43:02)
Bearing God’s No, no, bearing God’s name. Being God’s image.

Becoming God’s family. I set myself up for this, I did.

Dru (43:12)
No, no, that was,

I don’t know why I can’t remember something so simple and logical, but thank you for your wisdom and looking forward to reading the book now.

Carmen Imes (43:23)
Yes, yeah, thanks for having me on to talk about it.