Theology: Why Should I Care? Jen Wilkin & J.T. English

We had people in our church who could tell you exactly what they thought about whether you should baptize infants or believers, people who could tell you exactly what they thought about what style of worship we should be using, and people who could tell you exactly what they thought about who you should vote for in the next presidential election.

But they were functional heretics in many senses when it came to Orthodox belief. Welcome to Family Life Today, where we want to help you pursue the relationships that matter most. I'm Shelby Abbott, and your hosts are Dave and Ann Wilson. You can find us at familylifetoday.com.

This is Family Life Today. So on my very first road trip with the Detroit Lions as their chaplain, it was a preseason game at Seattle, so a long flight to Seattle. We're flying back into Detroit after, I think we won, but who cares?

It's preseason. It didn't matter. But no, I'm not kidding. We were probably 30, 40 minutes out from Detroit, and our plane gets hit by lightning. Oh, my goodness. Never had that happen. My dad's an airline pilot.

Never. And something just jarred the plane, and the pilot came on, because when you're on a chartered plane, it's like you're talking to each other. He goes, hey, just to let you know, we were hit by lightning, and it could happen again. And all of a sudden, all these guys around me start yelling at me, pastor, chaplain, you got to pray. You know, they're literally yelling out. They wanted me to pray out loud.

And I thought it was so interesting that they turned to me, because I'm like, and I sort of look at them like, why would you? And they're like, you're closer to God than we are, because you're a chaplain. You're a pastor. And I remember thinking, am I any closer than anybody else? Hmm, that's an interesting point. I mean, the question is, aren't we all pastors? Aren't we all? Today, we're going to find out. We have two authors that wrote a book that says we are all theologians.

It's called You Are A Theologian, and it's by Jen Wilkin. And I didn't know this is your former boss, J.T. English. Oh, we can talk about that. Oh, yeah. I would love to talk about that first, but, you know, J.T., you've never been here. Welcome to Family Life Today.

Thank you so much. I'm really glad to be here. Do you know where you are? Do you know what we do?

First time here? Yeah, I do know what you do. I've looked it up, and Jen gave me the lowdown this morning. She's the pro.

Jen's a pro. She's been with us before. So talk about how you guys work together.

This gives us a little bit of your bio anyway. Yeah. I mean, so Jen and I worked together for six years at the Village Church, and I showed up. She'd done a women's ministry event at the previous church that we were at, and my wife went to it. We'd come home crying every single day, like, you've got to hear this Jen Wilkin teach. I was like, she can't be that good.

She's pretty magnificent. I listened to a few, and this is before I was on staff at the Village, and showed up at TBC, and I went to Jen's office, and I was like, are you Jen Wilkin? She's like, are you J.T.? And we just kind of struck up a friendship. She was working in a different department at the time, and I was hired to do some discipleship and oversee some of our learning environments. And the first thing I wanted to do is said, would you come work with me?

And she did. Wow. So you were at the Village Church till last week.

I was. For how many years? Twelve years on staff. I've been at the Village for 16 years. Wow.

Yeah. But almost 12 years on staff, and the last six years serving on the executive leadership team. And yeah, it's been a great run, and I love doing it, and I'm really ready to focus more on what's going on with my kids and grandkids and my parents, and maybe have some thinking space for writing another book. Good for you. Jen, how many Bible studies do you think that you've written? I think it's, I think I've published eight or nine at this point, but I've written more than that.

Those are just the ones that I've gotten out into the world, and then we've written, we did a ton of team writing of studies at the Village as well for the men's and women's Bible studies. I love how he has to think, I think it's eight or nine. And how many books? I think it's two. I was going to say 70. It feels like more than books of the Bible.

It does feel like 70. Okay. J.T., give us a little bit of your story. Yeah, so I grew up in Colorado. My mom was the vice president for the Rockies baseball team, so I grew up in a sports world.

Really? Yeah, parents were divorced at a young age. I kind of grew up in an executive space watching a single mom try to make it in the world, and had a good relationship with my dad.

But I ended up going to school at Colorado State University. I didn't know the Lord at the time, and there was a guy, my roommate actually, invited me to a Campus Crusade for Christ Bible study in the dorm of Corbett Hall. And I just kept saying no, because I thought that was really weird. Like, I'm not going to go study the Bible in the dorm or in the laundry room. So I went, they were studying the book of Jonah, and I couldn't find it. And when you're in a Bible study, I'm kind of thumbing through the pages, and I'm starting to think, am I in some kind of a cult?

Like, they have more books of the Bible than my extreme teen study Bible had. And so the leader next to me, his name was Nate Miller. He was just a sophomore at the school. He literally took his finger and opened my Bible to Jonah, Jonah chapter 2. And for the first time, I heard about God's grace, and it just blew my mind that God would be gracious to sinners, to people who were disobedient to him. So Nate, it was very clear that I just didn't know what was going on. I didn't understand the Gospel. So that sophomore took me to lunch the next day in our student center. He bought me Burger King, and literally, in the most uncompelling presentation of the Gospel in the history of the world, he pulls out the four spiritual laws, which is a great tool.

He just didn't use it well. He handed it to me, and he said, I'm supposed to read this to you. And we just read it.

Like, as a sophomore, he wasn't trained by staff, and he just was bold in sharing the Gospel. And I just learned that God loved me and had a plan for my life, that I was a sinner separated from God, and Jesus had come to offer a sacrifice for my sins, and I could have everlasting life. And I'm not exaggerating when I say, I'm eating a Whopper while I accept Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior.

Yeah, literally, I'm eating it. And I prayed to receive Christ. And so that was my freshman year at Colorado State University, and just kind of was raised by a crew, did summer projects, and thought I was going to join staff, was in the support-raising process. And that's when I really realized, I don't know my Bible as well as I'd like to. I don't know theology as well.

I wouldn't even have been able to use that term at the time. And then I bounced around for seminary for a few years and got involved in local church ministry. Now I pastor church back home.

It's actually really fun. I played basketball as a high school student, non-Christian, in the high school gym that the church that I currently pastor was planted in. So it's back home for me.

I didn't read that part of the Bible where Jesus says, you know, a prophet isn't welcome in his hometown. So I'm realizing the challenges of pastoring back home, but we're really glad to be back home and pastoring. It must feel like you're back home in terms of being with crew, like you're on crew campus. And actually CU's crew team meets at our church every single week.

So we get to pray for them and encourage them. And yeah, really, really thankful for crew's ministry in my life. Married kids? Married kids.

Yeah. My best friend is my wife, Macy. She comes from a ministry background. She's the first Christian I met after I came to faith.

Well that's convenient. And so you married her. And so I was like, you? I think you're amazing. You love Jesus and you're beautiful. And so in all seriousness, I've learned more about the Lord from my wife than anybody else.

She walks with Jesus in some really deep ways. And we got two kiddos, Thomas and Bailey, currently eight and six years old. And just talking with Jen this morning, I have like it's the sweetest part of my life right now. Great family. We're having a blast. Those are great ages too, aren't they? Oh my gosh. It's just amazing. We're having a ton of fun. You're not making them CSU fans, are you? Oh yeah.

They already know the fight song. That's what I hear. Yeah, that's great. Jen, kids and grandkids, how many?

Yeah. So Jeff and I have been married 30 years this past summer. And we have five kids, Matt, Mary-Kate, Micaiah, Claire and Calvin.

They're all between the ages of 27 and 23. Wait, what happened to Calvin? What happened to the M? Yeah, I thought it was going to be all M's. Oh, I know. Yeah.

Well, Claire, Claire and Calvin. Oh, that's right. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And then we have three grandchildren so far, but we are fruitful and multiplicative.

So who knows what will happen in the next year or so. Yeah. That's great. And now they get grandma's going to be present. That's pretty cool.

That's right. Okay, so you write this book called You Are a Theologian, which obviously, as I talked at the beginning, I'm not kidding, when the players called me out to pray, my perspective is different than theirs. Mine is every member or minister. You probably said that at church. If you're a Christ follower, you have gifts. It may not be a shepherding pastoral gift, but in a sense, you're a pastor. So I think you're a theologian. Most people don't think that.

That's right. I'm not a theologian. You guys are.

You're professional ministers and vocational workers, but I'm not a theologian. So obviously, what's your message? Yeah. I mean, I think there's a few things to say here. What I would say first is Jen and I tried to write the book that I wish somebody would have handed me right after we came to faith. Really?

Yeah. So I mean, when I came to faith and I had no resources and that sophomore that I already shared about, I said, can you give me some resources? And he handed me two. He handed me Max Lucatos and the Group of Grace, which was amazing because it's a beautiful book about God's grace. And he also handed me Wayne Grudem's Systematic Theology. And I was like, these two things are different, you know, helpful, helpful in their own context, but different. I bet you read one of them all the way through it and the other one so much.

Yeah. And I really wanted to know theology, even though I didn't know what that was. I knew that it was going to help me understand God better.

But it was intimidating. It was a long book and this is supposed to be an introduction. And so we realized there's probably not a resource out there for people who have not ever thought about themselves as theologians. And so the other thing we tried to accomplish in the book that Jen, I'd love for you to talk about is what does it mean? When we say you are a theologian, what is theology? Yeah, even I'm thinking, Jen, as you answer that question, I'm thinking of moms listening like, should I listen to this one?

I'm raising my kids. I don't have any time. Theology?

It's open right now in the corner. This has nothing to do with me. Well, and that was me in a lot of ways, other than the fact that I started teaching in the local church. And I was very aware that I didn't know what I needed to know to be able to stand up and meet any kind of requirement that James 3 might put on teachers being judged more strictly. And I didn't know where to go. And so in the same way that this is a book that JT needed, it's a book that I needed. I began to discover theological categories, although I don't even know that I would have known to call them that.

My husband was listening to a radio program where they were teaching on some things, and we were having conversations. And for my 30th birthday, he gave me Louis Berkhof's systematic theology, because he's a diehard romantic. And I dug in.

That was a birthday gift. Yeah, I dug in, but I used it on an as-needed basis. It was like if I was teaching on a particular thing, I would duck in and grab when I needed. But the idea of a systematic way of approaching the way that we thought about theology was not something that I understood until years later. I wrote two books on the doctrine of God, not even knowing that I should call them the doctrine of God. And so I'm the average learner in the church who was wanting to teach and didn't have what I needed to be able to do what I should to pass on the good deposit.

J.T. has a Ph.D. in Trinitarian theology. I have an English degree, and so I still have to sort of psych myself up to say, no, I'm a theologian.

But I do understand it to be true, because that word, theology, is a combination of two words. I mean, theo, which is God. Theos.

Say it in your... Yeah, you got it. Theos. And then logos, meaning that we have knowledge or words about God. That's what a theologian is, which means that even if you're an atheist or an agnostic, you're a theologian. You know, I have an agnostic friend who is actually quite religious in the way that he talks about God not being knowable. And so we all have thoughts about God. It's a question of whether Christians have distinctly Christian thoughts about God. And that's what we're hoping to accomplish with the book is to help the average learner, and we always use that term without any negative connotation, but to help the average learner in the pews to understand the historic Christian faith that is their legacy. Not only that it's their legacy, but is their charge to transmit to the next generation. And we have concerns that we're not actually being able to do that well based on some of the statistics that are out there right now about people's knowledge of just basic theology.

Ooh, what are those? Can you share some of those statistics? Yes, I thought you'd never ask, Ann.

She's always ready with these. But every year, ever since 2016, I think it's actually every two years, the group Ligonier and LifeWay, kind of co-ministry partners, come out with a study. They call it the state of theology, and they're talking about the basics of Christianity. What's important to highlight here is we're not talking about second tier, third tier issues that Christians might have slight disagreements about. We're talking about things that Christians have agreed upon for 2000 years and that the Bible is really clear about.

So here are a few examples. Yeah, so they survey both unbelievers, which is interesting to me, unbelievers and evangelicals. And then they kind of, so we won't, you know, the unbelievers, that's, I can't do a whole lot to help them with good theology.

But as someone who's leading in a church, I absolutely want to help believers. In response to the statement, God learns and adapts to different circumstances. So that means is God immutable or not, right? Forty-eight percent of evangelicals agree that, yes, God changes.

He learns and adapts. In response to the statement, everyone is born innocent in the eyes of God. Sixty-five percent of evangelicals agreed with that statement. In response to the statement, God accepts the worship of all religions, including Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Fifty-six percent of evangelicals agreed. And then in response to the statement, Jesus was a great teacher, but he was not God. Forty-three percent of evangelicals agreed, and that statistic had risen from 30 percent only two years earlier.

And so the problem is not just existing, it is getting worse. And what we saw, even in our own local church setting, JT was one of the first people to point this out to me, was that we had people in our church who could tell you exactly what they thought about whether you should baptize infants or believers. People who could tell you exactly what they thought about what style of worship we should be using. And people who could tell you exactly what they thought about who you should vote for in the next presidential election. But they were functional heretics in many senses when it came to orthodox belief. So we have trained people.

It's just a question of whether we've trained them into a historic understanding of the faith. I mean, those numbers are scary. Scary. But not surprising.

I mean, I was like, not shocked. I don't know why. I'm guessing some of our listeners listened to those and thought, hmm, I wonder what I think.

Sure. Not even sure where they would stand on those questions. Well, and we like to make clear that if the people who are sitting in the pews don't know the answers to those questions, it's not because they have failed. That's something that we as people who are training people in the local church need to ask, why is this not happening in our churches? It doesn't do any good to point to people who are sitting in the pews and say, why don't you know this yet?

So, you know, one of the things that we really want to see is a rebirth of places in the church where people are sitting and discussing and learning these ideas so that we can pass along. I remember in seminary hearing this quote, if people are falling asleep during the sermon, wake up the preacher. You heard that one? Yeah. That's sort of what you're saying. Yeah. It's like, it's not the people's fault. That sermon is boring. It's not their fault they're falling asleep. Of course, it could be they were up all night watching CSU play football or something.

Like a maniac. But no, you're saying, and you opened the book with this statement that one of the things it feels like the church has missed is the Great Commission. Yeah. And it isn't just making converts, but talk about this, because you talk about, we have not made disciples. Yeah, at the heart of learning that you are a theologian and have thoughts about God, that's really what it means to be a disciple, is to be a learner of the way of Jesus Christ, who is God Himself and God embodied.

And so I think one of the things about discipleship and that we've neglected the theological aspect of discipleship is that people are intimidated by it. It's something that, like even sharing those stats, and maybe you don't know where you stand on some of those questions, is we have kind of closed the door for some people on discipleship. And really what we're hoping this book does is to say it's okay that you don't know the answer to these questions right now, but we'd like to come along as guides and help you and help your church find the right theological answers to these questions. It's not an invitation to get a theology quiz right. It's an invitation to know and love God well.

And so it's okay to be wrong about stuff. How often do I, what I'm teaching in the life of the local church, get a question from somebody and I don't know the answer. So it's okay to say, I don't know, but we want to have the kinds of churches and ministries that say, I don't know the answer to that, but let's go find out together because that's what discipleship is. It's a lifelong journey of following the way of Jesus and learning to know and love God well.

Now, what would you say to the person that heard those stats and said, that's not a big deal. Why is it that important that I know theology, that I know doctrine? Well, the reason that the Christian church has endured for 2000 years is because there has been a faithful work to transmit what we know to be true in the Bible from one generation to the next. And yet we find ourselves in this generation with what is very likely unprecedented levels of biblical and theological illiteracy. And they're existing in a time where we don't just have a Bible literacy or a theological literacy crisis. That is a subset of a general literacy crisis.

We have a generation of people who have perhaps not been trained how to think about difficult issues of any kind. And so you add to that that in the church, the discipleship model that we have gravitated toward over the past 30 or 40 years has been heavily focused on building community as its primary virtue or primary goal, which is great. We want community in our churches, but when community is the highest stated goal of a gathering, then teaching is going to be a difficult presupposition. It's going to be something that is going to be done to a degree, but perhaps not to the degree that it should. And then you add to that that within the church, what we have seen is what JT and I have called the expert amateur divide, which is the expert who stands on the platform and passively the amateur in the pews receives teaching or a way to think from that person. But it's not dialogic and it's not invitational. In other words, there's no back and forth and the person on the platform is always going to hold the space of expert and the person in the pews is not receiving tools that moves them toward the person who is on the platform.

So when you have that, when people are just passively receiving content, first of all, the retention is going to be a lot lower, but also the buy-in is going to be a lot lower. And so we really want to see restored to the local church spaces where people are in active learning spaces where the highest stated goal is learning something. You actually form great community in those spaces.

And I don't want to go to a church that doesn't have community as one of its highest stated goals. I just don't want every space to have that as its highest stated goal. And the question that you asked is a question that we get all the time from people. Like, why does this matter to me? Or sometimes when we're teaching these concepts, people say, is it really important that I be precise about this?

And I think one of the examples that can help people understand why this matters is because relationships matter. You guys don't know my wife, but let me tell her about you. She's short with brunette hair and she's super artsy. And Jen actually does know my wife. And that is not my wife at all.

And if I were to describe my wife in improper ways in front of somebody who's a good friend of mine. She's blonde and super peppy and tall. Yeah.

All right. And so in our relationship with God, we want to say precision matters because our relationship with Him matters. Anybody that we love, we want to be growing in our relationship with them, our knowledge of them and our understanding of them. I'm married to Macy now for 16 years and I know her better now than I did 16 years ago.

And Lord willing, we'll know her even in deeper ways 16 years from now. And so theology matters because God matters and because we love Him, we want to know Him. We want to be in a relationship with Him.

And so to suggest, I don't really need to know these things about God, suggests that you don't believe a deep relationship with God is essential to the Christian faith. Well, I'm looking at you two. You have seven kids between the two of you. With grandkids. Well, you did that math. That's pretty good.

I had to add real quick on that. With grandkids as well. To take that extra one for a second. Talk to the parents whose kids are going through so much in terms of cultural discipleship. Why is it important for them? Like, I'm thinking, you know, they're like, hey, guys, I don't have time for this. Do you know what my life is like?

I'm working, trying to do all these things. Talk to them of why it's important for them to know this. For the families, for the parents. Yeah. Based on what's happening in our culture. I think it's important for us just to be really clear, you can't not be a disciple of something. There it is. Everybody's being discipled. You're being discipled perhaps by an ideology or by culture, by sports. TikTok. Or TikTok. Yeah, whatever you're consuming.

Twitter, big time. Whatever you're consuming, you're being shaped and formed by. So one of the first things I think that's good for parents to know is you yourselves and your kids or your grandkids are being discipled. So the question is, what are you being discipled by? And then you think about if you have six and a half days of the week that you're discipled by things that are not theologically informed. And then you have maybe half a day at most where you're sitting and passively receiving teaching rather than being in a dialogic space.

What is the likelihood that you will be more formed by that half of a day than you will by the rest of the days of the week that you are elsewhere? And so I know the cycle on this. You know, I know that when you have small children, you have frequency of times to have these conversations, but not a lot of depth. And then I know that as they get older, those lines kind of crisscross and you end up having fewer times where you're talking about things, but the opportunity for greater depth. And so even parents with small children can start having good conversations around good categories that are pointing toward how those conversations are going to go when their kids are older. Not only that, but your children want to be able to look to you and know, OK, my parents have thought about this and whatever the counterargument is for what I'm hearing at the lunch table, they can help me think through it. Not in a like a the culture is terrible and I hate everybody at the lunch table kind of way, but in a hey, yeah, we're aliens and strangers.

And here's why you feel different when you're in those conversations than the other kids do. And so, you know, I do think that parents will often intuitively think, oh, I need my kids to know what's in the Bible. But once you put the word theology on it, I think a lot of us think, oh, well, I don't need to know theology, I just need to know the Bible.

And so one of the things that I think we would like to message, not just to people who are thinking how to do this in their families, but just for Christians in general, is that theology is basically a way of thinking in an organized manner about what the Bible says. It's not adding to the Bible. It's not different than the Bible. It's basically almost like SparkNotes. Is that terrible to say that? I probably wouldn't say that.

But I understand what you're saying. One of the examples that you used is it's kind of like an organizing system, like a file system for how the Bible is taken. So one of the things that we tried to do in the book is show that theology is really about asking and answering the questions the Bible invites us to ask and answer. Things like who is God? The Bible speaks to that and we should categorize how the Bible talks about that.

Or what is he like, his attributes? Or who are we? What does it mean to be an image bearer? It's hard to imagine a more fundamental question for our society today about what it means to be created in God's image. And also to answer the question, what's gone wrong with the world?

We all know that there's a fundamental sense of brokenness. How do we categorize the way the Bible talks about this? Or what is God doing in the world? How is he making things right?

What's the church? And maybe one of the most fundamental questions is where is all of this going? Because if we're left to just say, well, we don't know where world history is going, that's pretty hopeless. But the Bible actually tells us the world is going somewhere and God is providentially ordering all of world history towards the kingdom of God and the worship of Jesus forever.

And that's really good news for Christians. So questions help us categorize ways of thinking that the Bible gives answers to. Yeah. And actually, as you were saying, AGT, I was thinking there's listeners going, can you answer some of those right now? You know, because I know you walked through several chapters. Jen's got the spark notes. Yeah, spark notes.

You got the spark notes. Yeah, apparently I should have stuck with the illustration I gave in the book. No, but I mean, just a really practical example of how in a family setting, a parent who understands these important questions and understands not just the questions, but the order in which we think through them matters as well. It's going to change the way that you think about your children. You know, we mentioned that in that Great Commission comment that perhaps we have been more concerned about making converts than we have disciples. Well, I know a lot of Christian parents who are very concerned about making converts of their children and are perhaps thinking they shouldn't make disciples until their child is a convert. And when your primary focus is making a convert, you're going to start in the wrong place with theology. You're going to start with the doctrine of sin. When your primary concern is making a disciple, you're going to start with who God is and who we are. You're going to start with the doctrine of God and the doctrine of humanity. Where the Bible starts. Where the Bible starts, that's right. That's good.

And so, again, these are important ideas and they're important in the way that they're, in the order in which they're presented. I have heard someone say the only thing worse than a child who's never heard the gospel is a child who never wants to hear it again. And I think that sometimes we major in the conversion moment and forget that if we had built out the framework of the beautiful vision of what it means to be a follower of God, then when the moment comes for that conversation to happen, a child is ready to receive it in a way they wouldn't otherwise be. Wow, I don't even know how to respond to that. It's just so scary but also beautiful at the same time. God is in control. He's sovereign. He knows what he's doing. He knows what he's doing with your kids, with my kids.

But at the same time, have I started in the wrong place with my kids? I don't know. I need more. I need to hear more from Jen Wilkin and JT English.

I'm Shelby Abbott and you've been listening to Dave and Ann Wilson on Family Life Today. Man, this is such an enlightening and kind of crazy conversation. I love what they're talking about here because theology can be so intimidating.

But it really doesn't have to be. Whether your conversations about theology have felt out of reach or kind of over your head or irrelevant, I want you to consider Jen and JT's book, You Are a Theologian. And the subtitle is An Invitation to Know and Love God Well. Now earlier this week, Sissy Goff was here talking about eating disorders, body image, and mental health in children. And Sissy Goff has written a book called The Worry-Free Parent, Living in Confidence So Your Kids Can Too. This is really a practical guide for parents who are struggling with issues of anxiety or mental health with their children.

She goes after that and gives you a lot of practical advice and helpful tips on creating a worry-free family environment. This book is going to be our gift to you today when you give. You can get your copy now with any donation by going online to familylifetoday.com, clicking on the donate now button at the top of the page. Or you can give us a call with your donation at 800-358-6329. Again, that number is 800, F as in family, L as in life, and then the word today. And feel free to drop us a donation in the mail if you'd like.

Our mailing address is Family Life, 100 Lakehart Drive, Orlando, Florida, 32832. Now, I wanted more and maybe you want more, and so tomorrow we're going to give you more. How do you teach theology to your families and highlight the significance of creating a culture of curiosity and openness in the home? Well, Jen Wilkin and JT English are going to be back in the studio with David Ann Wilson to talk about just that. We hope you'll join us. On behalf of David Ann Wilson, I'm Shelby Abbott. We'll see you back next time for another edition of Family Life Today. Family Life Today is a donor-supported production of Family Life, a crew ministry helping you pursue the relationships that matter most.