Building a Movement: Why the Church Needs Hebraic Thought—and What We’re Doing About It Ep. #210

Dru Johnson (00:03)
Okay, Mike, back in November, way, way, way back in November, we recorded a podcast where we said, like, hey, we’re restarting this thing called The Center for Hebraic Thought. ⁓ And here we are, ⁓ however many months after November it was. ⁓ We’ve been doing a lot of work, mostly behind the scenes, a little bit out in front. And I guess maybe we could review what we said we were gonna do and where we’re at on our checklist.

for the people who are wondering what’s going on.

Mike Tolliver (00:34)
Yeah, we have been very busy. A lot of it has been behind the scenes, ⁓ but some pretty significant things have been out there sort of for the community, both academic and lay ⁓ altogether. So it was worth an update. Behind the scenes stuff, I’ll just say very, very briefly, we filed our 501c3 paperwork with the IRS. So we are a legit independent.

nonprofit, we formed our board, we just formed the advisory council. ⁓ So like, you know, some significant things kind of behind the scenes that help drive our creative efforts, both as a hub and as a creator. So that’s fantastic. And you might not necessarily see that stuff happening, but there’s ⁓ significant effort given by a number of different people towards those things.

So that’s behind the scenes.

Dru Johnson (01:33)
Yeah, and

I will say anybody who’s ever formed a board and then tried to get people busy, you know, you good people on the board, which good people are busy, and then trying to get busy people to get together on the same night and participate in subcommittees. And ⁓ it’s actually been ⁓ very comforting to me to see people who are very busy, who are hyper-competent, give their time to help guide us and have, you know, the insights and advice have been stellar, so.

Mike Tolliver (02:00)
Absolutely. ⁓ Yeah, many hands makes light work and especially when you have ⁓ great and capable hands like theirs speaking into this thing, it’s been a blessing. ⁓ Now the forward facing stuff, obviously if you’re listening to this podcast, that was like the first thing that we did.

was to get the podcast going again, to get really good, meaningful, timely interviews done with folks that are doing the research and ⁓ putting it out there publicly. And that has been received very, very well, ⁓ continuing to grow. ⁓

the community through that tool ⁓ that is primarily aimed at a lay audience, although we love that scholars in the field are actually listening to this thing, excited to contribute to it themselves, using it in their classrooms. ⁓ That’s been a huge encouragement as well. ⁓

Dru Johnson (02:45)
Mm-hmm.

Mike Tolliver (02:59)
And so, you we were just talking, we re-kicked this thing off with, I think it was episode 175, and we’re about to release episode 209, I think that’s right. Yeah.

Dru Johnson (03:11)
Yeah, somewhere around there.

We have more than that in queue, but yeah, 209, you’re right.

Mike Tolliver (03:17)
It’s true.

I think that’s the Chris Wright interview. ⁓ So, you know, really great stuff happening there, but ⁓ we’ve also started to do our workshops again. So back in April, we did a workshop in Holland, Michigan there on Hope College’s campus, which was awesome.

and we’re looking to do those at more, you know, either churches or college campuses in the coming months and certainly next year. But we’re actually really wanting to connect that work to our newly launched Hebraic Thought Community. And so this was sort of a dream of both Dru and I, as we’ve said that Hebraic Thought needs to not be a Dru thing.

Hebraic thought needs to not be a Dru and Mike thing. It really is our desire to see that as a movement in the church, in broader academia. ⁓ And so we needed a place to connect the people that are actively practicing and contributing to Hebraic thought. And so we created the community for that purpose that lives digitally.

you know, on Facebook, essentially, you know, that the joke, tell me you’re 45 without saying you’re 45. Well, you create a Facebook group. So we did. And that’s where it lives. Makes it easy for people to connect. There’s already a lot of people on that tool. So.

Dru Johnson (04:49)
A few

hundred people we got within the first week or two. was shocked. People were like ready to sign up for a Facebook group.

Mike Tolliver (04:53)
Yeah.

⁓ Yeah, which is great. And so we sort of launched that like about six weeks ago ⁓ and have as a part of that dreamed of doing four main things, at least at the start. The first two are highlighting members of the community. So there are already people out there who are creating stuff that is right in line with Hebraic thought. And it can be papers and books, which

is probably what you think of right off the bat. But you met a gentleman who had done like a huge art project inspired by the Bible at one of our workshops, right?

Dru Johnson (05:37)
Oh, I get all kinds of the end.

fact, I was got arts. got this book was written in response to that article that we wrote with CT.

on of the Center, me and Celina on daily devotions and whether people should still be doing daily devotional reading. I got a great article from a lay person the other day where she was working out an issue on the thinking of scripture using a particular parable of Jesus ⁓ and saying, and the whole time saying, I’m not a trained person, I’m just a lay person, I’m reading it going, this is better than most grad papers I read. ⁓

Mike Tolliver (06:17)
Hahaha

Dru Johnson (06:19)
And really thoughtful and yeah, and sermons, know, someone who went to the workshop sent me a sermon they did on violence in the Bible and I thought, wow, this is actually one of the best, most carefully constructed, like for a 30 minute slot on violence in the Bible, I certainly couldn’t have done it as well as this person had done it. So ⁓ there’s lots of people out there doing great stuff and obviously you don’t have to be a scholar to do biblical thinking very well.

Mike Tolliver (06:47)
Yeah,

and we really wanted to highlight that really good work that’s being done and to share it with the community who’s primed to receive it. ⁓ Because it’s one thing to send that to, you know, maybe your congregation. ⁓

the people that you’re rubbing elbows with in the pews who care about you relationally. It’s another thing to send it to a community that understands what you’re doing under the hood ⁓ and appreciates that. And so, I’ll even just say ⁓ for me personally, as we’ve been doing this ritual practice of sharing things every week, ⁓ I am not super strong on my historical theology and have recently gotten turned on to the Cappadocian Fathers and

Dru Johnson (07:28)
Hmm.

Mike Tolliver (07:33)
and

the way that they conceived of theology and philosophy. And it turns out it actually sounds kind of Hebraic in…

you know, many of the things that we would talk about, even as it’s ⁓ contrasted with Augustine. So that’s kind of been blowing my mind lately. And I did not come up with that. That came as a fruit of ⁓ the community. So we do that every week, ⁓ you know, whether something has somebody has something to share or not, we make sure to at least create that opportunity.

The next thing that’s of community driven is what we call our weekend reading. So just as you head into the weekend, ⁓ what ⁓ resources are you learning from and kind of cross pollinating those things? So not necessarily something that you created yourself, but what are you learning from? And it doesn’t have to be directly connected to Hebraic thought, but it meaning that it like showcases it.

Dru Johnson (08:38)
Great.

Mike Tolliver (08:38)
So again, for instance, I was.

watching a series of lectures from Roy Clouser who he’s a neo-Calvinist guy, reformational philosophy. ⁓ And so he goes in a different direction than we would say is hebraic. But his starting point was actually where I learned about the Cappadocian fathers. ⁓ And so there’s a shared heritage there that we can absolutely affirm. And his first like 19 lectures on that were awesome. ⁓ Yeah.

Dru Johnson (09:09)
just the first night of team. After that it really

went downhill.

Mike Tolliver (09:12)
It goes downhill to the episode 36, think, or whatever it is. ⁓ So having that opportunity to kind of cross-pollinate and, hey, I hadn’t even heard of that book that you’re reading. ⁓ Is it good? And to really foster those communication between members in the community.

Dru Johnson (09:14)
Yeah, so 23, 52, yeah.

Yeah, and I noticed lots of people were posting more what I consider like background or introductory material. So like people were posting that they’re reading John Walton’s work or something this weekend. And I’m always interested because, know, I know John, he’s a colleague and I disagree with him about a lot of things. And same thing with Mike Heiser. I like Mike Heiser’s work, but I disagree with him about a lot

Mike Tolliver (09:44)
Hmm.

Hahahaha

Dru Johnson (09:56)
things or I would be skeptical on some edges of their work. And so I always wonder how people are integrating that with this, with what we’re talking about in the Center for Hebraic Thought. ⁓ for me, it’s always a learning experience. Just seeing what people are reading is interesting and then seeing how they’re processing it. ⁓ Okay, and for me, probably ⁓ the most exciting thing we do is like the most basic thing we do.

Mike Tolliver (09:57)
Mm-hmm.

Dru Johnson (10:24)
is we have a Zoom, we call it public reading of scripture, but it’s really a public listening to scripture, it’s a PLS. And ⁓ where we just listen every week, Wednesday, the Zoom link is in the group, so if you just join the Hebraic Thought Community group on Facebook, we post the link and then we get on there and we listen to one song. ⁓

Mike Tolliver (10:30)
Hmm.

Dru Johnson (10:47)
that is sung by, we may probably shake it up, but right now we’re going through Poor Bishop Hooper’s versions of the Psalms. And then we listen to the Torah portion for the week. Those are already preset Torah portions just following the Jewish reading cycle of the Torah every year. So a few chapters of the Torah portions. And then a few chapters of a gospel. We’re going through Mark right now. It will be done, I guess, in a couple of weeks. And actually it’s bummed me out that I didn’t get to be there last week and then I’m going to be on the plane to the UK

Mike Tolliver (11:13)
You

Dru Johnson (11:17)
⁓ for this week’s one. So I’m gonna miss it two weeks in a row, I ⁓ really look forward to it. And the people who show up are super interesting. I think it’s fair to say, and then when we’re done listening, we have discussion. Like, what did you hear? What perplexed you? What kind of questions do you have? And I think it’s fair to say we are not short on discussion at all. I get all kinds of, people are mentioning things I’ve never thought about before. And some things I’m a little embarrassed that I’ve never thought about them before. But yeah, it’s fantastic.

Mike Tolliver (11:29)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-mm.

Yeah,

it’s been great and I’m chuckling as you suggest changing the name to public listening of scripture. We actually probably really should ⁓ make that change. We’ve been calling it PRS, public reading. ⁓ But it is that discipline of leading ⁓ or listening and we should probably revisit that in just a second. ⁓ you know, this doing that in community and

Dru Johnson (11:54)
Right.

Mike Tolliver (12:09)
⁓ recognizing that the listening experience is a different one altogether. you ⁓ know, we jokingly have said every week, we did not intentionally line up the gospel reading with the Torah portion purely accidental. And yet there are just so many clear connections between what Jesus is doing and what is happening in the Torah portion. ⁓

Dru Johnson (12:35)
and

not reading into the text. Like clearly, like you can see direct echoes and parallels. ⁓ And we started in numbers of all. I was a little nervous about starting in numbers. It turned out like to work really well.

Mike Tolliver (12:45)
Yeah

So that has been great. ⁓

Now, I do actually kind of want to lean into a little bit of why, like what under the hood of what’s happening with the public listening of scripture, why do we as a Hebraic thought community feel like that is such an important practice?

Dru Johnson (13:03)
Right.

Yeah, I mean, it goes to episode number whatever, 100 and something, where I just kind of gave this plea of something that’s really been working inside of myself and a bunch of colleagues as well. I’ve been talking about this for years.

⁓ about scripture being written in order to be heard. I know everybody has these views about the orality of scripture that it was an oral tradition that was eventually written down. As a biblical scholar, it’s very difficult to assess those kinds of claims as the veracity of them. ⁓ But what I can say for sure, it is written to be heard, even if it wasn’t heard and then written. It was certainly written to be heard. ⁓ And so I think… ⁓

just putting our money where our mouth is and just saying like, we actually believe people should sit down and listen long form, know, 30 to 40 minutes to big chunks of scripture, and then discuss like what, you know, what did you hear? And kind of listen to other people in a very non-confrontational way and just say.

I heard this. Okay, that’s interesting. I didn’t hear that. Tell me more about that, right? Or, wow, I’ve never thought about that before, but now that you mention it, I can’t not see that anymore. ⁓ And we do think that this is probably the practice that Hebrews and later Jews, and certainly the early Christians, were doing. We know from the little bit of evidence, we know that they were doing something like this. ⁓ And I would say it’s probably the practice that is most sadly absent. ⁓

from worship services and churches these days. And so if you’re not getting it there, maybe you can get it here, and then maybe we can start little fires everywhere. So the goal isn’t to make a massive multiplayer public listening of scripture with a thousand people on. The goal is to have a thousand public listening to scriptures going on all around the world. And we do have people around the world tuning in.

Mike Tolliver (15:03)
Yeah.

I appreciate you saying that because I think there’s even a little bit of that method to our madness in the time that we’ve chosen for this first ⁓ one that we are kicking off in the community. And that is to say that we do this every Wednesday from three to four PM Eastern. And that’s an awkward time for a lot of people. There are some folks on the West Coast who join us for their ⁓ lunch hour, which is awesome. ⁓ But

Dru Johnson (15:36)
Right.

But Kathleen, our friend in the Philippines who’s done work for the, she can’t participate, right?

Mike Tolliver (15:44)
Correct, correct. That’s three in the morning for her. ⁓ And, you know, for a majority of folks, you know, that’s ⁓ late at night in the morning or during the workday. ⁓ So if that is during your workday, it seems like it would actually be a really good fit for pastors and their staff to join us to get a taste for what this could be. ⁓

Dru Johnson (15:48)
Sorry, it’s escalating.

Yeah.

Mike Tolliver (16:13)
as a devotional practice for their church, even if it’s just pastors and their staff, not necessarily even their congregants. ⁓ But it really truly is a powerful practice that ⁓ I think unites people across the globe focusing on this text that’s meant for everybody.

Dru Johnson (16:33)
And I think your point is ⁓ extremely important that I didn’t quite get it. In principle, was like, yeah, we should listen to scripture. And then you do it a few times, you’re like, I get it. Like, okay, I see how this works. This is actually, this is way better than I thought it was gonna be. Even, again, I think the very first week we did, we started in numbers with chapters of reading off the names of the tribes, right? Like, so was just, but I think we all walked away from it going like, wow, I’m glad I did that because I.

Mike Tolliver (16:55)
Mm-hmm.

Dru Johnson (17:01)
I think I wouldn’t have noticed certain things unless I just sat there and had to listen to it. I couldn’t fast forward, I couldn’t skip, I just had to listen to it.

Mike Tolliver (17:06)
Right?

Yeah, and I think that was where I was really hit. One, I mean, so it’s intimidating. I mean, we’re spending 30 to 35 minutes just listening to scripture. It’s a long time to focus on anything and I get distracted. ⁓

you know, I’m just going to own that. ⁓ So it helps me to read because we do have the words up as we go through it. It helps me to read along. But I found that first week that we were doing it, I was reading ahead and reading ahead actually defeats the tension that reading it out loud and like participating with the person who’s reading by not reading ahead. ⁓ That tension gets built.

Dru Johnson (17:41)
yeah.

Yeah. It’s like the kids that want the subtitles

on movies. And then like the key line pops up in the subtitle like three seconds before the person says it, you know.

Mike Tolliver (17:57)
Yeah.

Yeah. So it does help me to focus, but I have to be sure to only read like the word as it’s being read. So yeah.

Dru Johnson (18:12)
Yeah. Whereas I don’t look at the screen at all. just,

I just listen, listen, listen, listen. Yeah.

So, and there are different ways you could do it. We’re doing it one way. Obviously there are different ways. We are inspired by Grace and Mercy Foundation, who has really been pushed public reading of scripture. Grace and Mercy really likes you to do it their way. And they’ll give money to you if you do it exactly their way. ⁓ But they’re also very generous about like, hey, we’re not copywriting anything here. We just want people to do this. So they don’t care if you do it other ways. ⁓ But they really pushed this as like an agenda for the church. Like we need to be doing this.

Mike Tolliver (18:24)
Mm-hmm.

you

Dru Johnson (18:49)
⁓ Yeah, so that’s something that if you’re on the, sorry, the Hebraic Thought Community, HTC as we call it for short, ⁓ you’ll just see that pop up every week that we’re gonna be hopping on that Zoom. But yeah, I think it would be delightful if people do it for a little while with us and then go do it on their own, right? ⁓ And we could even put those times and places on there as well. ⁓

Mike Tolliver (18:58)
Yes.

Absolutely. Yeah. so ⁓ real quick, then the fourth thing that we do infrequently, but perhaps more frequently in the future, ⁓ is to actually invite scholars to come for Q &A sessions ⁓ for the Hebraic thought community. And so I think we’ve talked about one as we’re concluding numbers ⁓ to have somebody who’s

written a commentary on numbers come in and speak with the community about that. ⁓

Dru Johnson (19:46)
Yeah,

that’s all that requires a little bit more planning. think it’s worth saying too, that right now it’s everything that is happening is all volunteer hours, mostly by you. I mean, you’ve put in several hundred volunteer hours on the website, which we’ll discuss in a second. But everything we do from recording to the guests, the guests don’t get paid, we don’t get paid, nobody’s getting paid. But that’s not sustainable, right? So at some point we do need to…

Mike Tolliver (19:50)
Mm-hmm.

you

Mm-hmm.

Dru Johnson (20:15)
And there are a group of people who are very generously giving recurring donations, the goal is actually to be able to pay people for their labors, even though there will always be ⁓ volunteer time baked into the system.

Mike Tolliver (20:32)
Right.

Dru Johnson (20:33)
and I’m happy

to volunteer for it because I see it as a service as long as it’s good and it works for people, then I’m happy to volunteer, but not everybody can give that time. Like you, you have young children. My children are all grown, so I got nothing to do with my life outside of this kind of stuff, so yeah.

Mike Tolliver (20:45)
⁓

Yeah, I mean, it has been a passion project and I’ve been ⁓ blessed to be able to contribute to the mission. But ⁓ yeah, so I guess we’ll mention the website and then I do want to circle back around to the donation piece because we are coming at a critical junction. ⁓ So we just updated the website. ⁓

Dru Johnson (21:12)
Yeah, well, update

is a mild term. We rebuilt the website from scratch. You did, right? To say it like, you know,

Mike Tolliver (21:17)
We did, we did. Yeah,

so in order to update it, we basically had to rebuild it from scratch ⁓ for a variety of reasons that we won’t get into lest we bore everyone on the podcast. But ⁓ it is new. It released ⁓ about an hour before we started filming this. I think this will…

this podcast will come out in a week or two. So it’ll be old news by then. But a lot of effort went into that. And the reason that we did that was because we wanted to make our past articles, our past podcasts, our past videos and books, things that we’ve highlighted and curated and created, we wanted to make them as easily accessible and easy to search. There’s some really good stuff in there. And as it had grown organically over time,

⁓ You know things had had just kind of gotten lost in the shuffle which is okay, and that’s to be expected ⁓ but to bring that kind of up to to current standards we ⁓ Reengineered the whole thing and that is now ⁓ live so the main thing that we did that you’ll see from the front is that we’ve split and made very clear the distinction between hebraicthought.org and the biblicalmind.org

Whereas before that was kind of navigationally a little confusing. Now that’s

Dru Johnson (22:48)
We should clarify

what those two, so hebraicthought.org is more the scholarly side.

where we’re inviting scholars to participate in certain things. And Biblical Mind is more for laypeople, even though I know lots of scholars listen to the Biblical Mind podcast and they probably read our articles. A lot of them use these articles on the Biblical Mind that are really for laypeople and maybe even for undergrads or seminary students. They’ll assign these in their classes. We know that because we can see on the back end, know, 30, 40 colleges and universities and seminaries are using these articles in their classes. ⁓ But we do have to give a

note that with the new website you might need to check the link and make sure the link still works and if not just shoot us an email and we’ll fix it.

Mike Tolliver (23:32)
Yeah,

thank you for that because that’s a pretty critical point in sort of separating of the two sites to make it more clear ⁓ meant that some of those ⁓ URLs would change. We think we caught most of them. So by the time the sites went live, you actually wouldn’t even notice a difference.

But if you do discover a broken link, please ⁓ reach out to us at admin at hebraicthought.org or through the contact form on the website and we’ll get that. So cool. ⁓ Yeah, so we’ve been making lots of really significant ⁓ changes, updates, improvements, getting those things that we do really, really well going again. ⁓ But many of the things that we actually have in our strategic plan,

as a nonprofit with a board who’s overseeing these things, ⁓ we really do need additional support to get a lot of those things going, like commissioning articles, for instance. ⁓

So ⁓ to do that, we have essentially created a platform for micro donors. Those folks that listen to us, those folks that read our stuff and love it and want to contribute to that, you can go to hebraicthought.org or thebiblicalmind.org slash give ⁓ and contribute to the mission that way through one of two means. One is a one-time gift, or you can go through to the recurring donor

page, we’ve actually created a book series to give to our recurring donors as a thank you ⁓ for not just giving that one time, but for really partnering in this work. ⁓ That’s ⁓

you know, a beautiful thing. And so we just want to say thank you to those recurring donors through this book series. And the reason I want to mention this now is because the first ever 2025 donor series book we released back in February, there’s a second printing of that book coming out in August. And this is a rhythm that we will keep as long as we do the donor book series.

of February and August for that year’s book to be released. So if you’ve not yet become a recurring donor and you would love to receive that book, then we would love to include you in the 2025 distribution. This is gonna be the last time we’ll have that second print, the second printing available for the 2025 book. We will also announce the 2026 book shortly thereafter.

So if you’ve already gotten your first book, ⁓ know, then keep tuned, stay tuned for the 2026. So yeah, was there anything else you wanted to say on that piece of things?

Dru Johnson (26:21)
Stay tuned. Yeah.

No, think it’s a, you know, I always feel a little squidgy about asking people for money. But then I remember there are people like me, I’m a recurring donor to the Center for Hyperic Thought, our family is. But I always remember there’s people that are like grateful and glad to give, ⁓ just as I am grateful and glad to give to the various things that I give to. So this is not an NPR drive where we’re just going to keep on hammering this for hours and hours. It really is just to find those people who are grateful and are glad to give to this work. And for everybody else, you’re off.

the hook, no worries.

Mike Tolliver (27:00)
⁓

Yes. Cool. Well, I think that’s all the updates we had, right? Okay.

Dru Johnson (27:04)
Okay, that’s all the updates.

So also if we are looking at a season, I think finally we want to say for workshops, we had this one workshop, which we’ve done workshops in the past. They’ve been a lot smaller and more local in the New York City area, Washington, DC and Philly.

Mike Tolliver (27:13)
Hmm.

Dru Johnson (27:21)
but, I think we want to start doing workshops again and that, you know, pastors might consider whether they want to host one those. We learned a lot from the one we did here, which is the first time where people drove in from all over and got a bunch of people who didn’t know each other, got really good critical feedback. I think we’ve got it in tip top shape now, what we need to do differently and better. But I think even what we did was pretty good and people enjoyed. ⁓ so yeah, if, if you’re someone who’s interested in thinking about like, that would be great to host a workshop in our city. ⁓ then we.

Mike Tolliver (27:43)
Mm-hmm.

Dru Johnson (27:51)
Feel free to reach out and we’ll talk to you about it. So and outside of that I think Stay tuned on the website for anything upcoming anything new All right, thanks Mike

Mike Tolliver (28:01)
Absolutely.

Thanks, Dru.