Recovering Evangelicals #192 – Looking back at S6 (and forward to S7?)
A retrospective on how well we achieved our goals for this season, and pondering whether we need to do some re-branding before the next!?
August is a busy time of year for us: vacations … road-trips … and getting ready for the return to teaching responsibilities at the university. And for that reason, we have typically gone on hiatus between August and February (when my teaching load is done). This year will be no exception.
In today’s episode, Scott and I look back over Season Six, and ask ourselves if we met the goal we set for this it: of giving listeners strategies, tools, information, and examples to help deconstruct a traditional Christian world view that doesn’t work seem to work very well anymore in the 21st century, and to find a way to another form of Christian belief that does.
And then we turned ourselves around 180 degrees and looked to what might be coming down the pipeline if/when we do re-boot in the new year. We wondered if it might be time to re-brand.
For example, should we change the name: do we still want to refer to ourselves as Evangelicals (albeit “Recovering” Evangelicals)? It seems that that label has been irretrievably tarnished by one particular faction within the Evangelical camp, and to use “Recover” as an active verb may be a hopeless cause. Or do we lean more heavily into “Recovering” as an adjective, and continue to create a safe space for those who are in rehab?
And if we take the latter mind-set, do we focus on listeners who are moving further down the “slippery slope” or reconfigure the podcast to make it more friendly …. less daunting ….. to new listeners who are only just beginning to ask hard questions of their own traditional Christian faiths, and haven’t yet gone as far down the path as the rest of us have done. In a way, it’s similar to the conundrum that many churches have found themselves in over the past couple decades: “do we go traditional, or contemporary, or try to do some kind of hybrid that targets both” (which rarely works well).
If you have any wisdom to give us on those questions, we enthusiastically welcome your input.
Until that time, stay tuned. We don’t expect to go completely silent over the next few months. There will be a couple episodes that are already in progress and will be released over the next few weeks. And we’ll keep our eyes on the news headlines and the book publisher’s releases, looking for any particular events or new book releases that merit a quick episode here or there. If you subscribe, you’ll get an automatic notice of whenever a new episode is released.
Otherwise, check out our Episode Archive through these three links that list all our previous episodes chronologically, thematically, or by guest experts. A majority of our previous episodes fall into the category of being “ever-green” …. you can listen to them years later and they’re still current. I mean, we’ve tackled theological questions that have had scholars talking and authors writing for centuries, so a few years is not going to take the shine off those episodes!?
Thanks for listening. And stay tuned!
As always, tell us your thoughts on this topic …
If you enjoyed this episode, you may also like our collection of other episodes in which we look at a series of releases and try to extract a few general themes to help in re-building a new Christian worldview.
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