foreign [Music] podcast with my friend Dr Kirk Thompson my friend pepper Sweeney we are here to discover and explore what it means to be truly known and we are uh we are here uh season seven of the being known podcast and you know I can't even how how do we get to season seven I don't know how do we get here I don't know but I can tell you this I uh in the in the uh it has been so humbling to uh go places sorry Amy just sent a text that just nearly had me falling out of my chair okay but I'm gonna keep going and I just because I want to say because I want to say that uh uh every place that I go uh uh the the podcast is is the Leading Edge of the work that I'm doing and this is this is the this is a medium that people are accessing and they're able to you know quickly pass it on to other people it's it's different to say hey you should buy that book and you know whatever but the the ease of access of this and I think one of the other things that um uh that's and this is germane to our conversation today and this series uh the main thing that people highlight is they they talk about the relations our relationship yours mine Amy together that uh really brings life to um the material that we're talking about and so I just I just want to say that like I two years ago I never would have dreamed that we would be in this place like launching our seventh season I wouldn't have dreamed that we would have I don't know how many downloads we now have how many roughly the last I checked it was 1.8 million [Laughter] I mean I I like like who knew like I I yeah I mean honestly when we started I think I said Amy you know if we get like 400 people to listen that that'll be that'll be awesome I mean awesome really 1.8 million yeah it's just yeah so I I'm just um yeah it's just it continues to be humbling and we want to continue to Steward this and we're grateful for our audience for your listeners uh you all who are out there who are who are taking in this material and are encouraging us and um giving us hope and energy to continue to do this work so thank you so much for our listeners as well yeah indeed you know we are this season is is um is going to be about confessional communities which we talk a lot about on the being known podcast and so the title of this season is confessional communities practicing for heaven and like you said Kurt you know I think so much of what is happening here on this podcast you know you're teaching a certain um you're teaching a certain subject but we're living that subject at the same time yeah it's it's um it's really I was thinking about it this morning it's it's just a mirror of the lessons that's happening in real life in real time yeah and that's that's very cool so today's episode is uh confessional communities forming outposts of beauty and goodness yeah well I I I think for uh we we've said this is going to be a mini series uh yes and so it's not it's not going to be as uh they're not probably not have as many uh episodes in the series and our episodes themselves will be not quite as long um so people won't have to put up with my yammering first well you want to be burdened with this for for as much time but we would just say that uh we're we really uh feel compelled to uh offer this series on confessional communities there's been so many questions and requests about it and so we want to provide our uh listeners with a more detailed kind of a deep dive into this process at the same time uh we just reflect that uh for uh for kind of continuing to immerse ourselves in it this is material that we cover in the soul of Desire the last two or three chapters are really kind of where most of this sits and so if you know for uh just a slower Pace reflection and reading about it that's where you can find information about that there and the other thing I want to highlight from the beginning is that uh in this uh series we're not explicitly giving you uh an experience we're not giving you an experience of being in a confessional Community out you know for for our listeners in in these these are not a substitute for that right um we want though to highlight a lot of what happens in these and I think one thing I would invite us to consider is uh you know what you said earlier pepper that people have um talked about our relationship and it's been fruitful for me as well I mean that's what I mean this relationship that we have is uh so much of what the energy the energy that helps me even continue to do this um and and so I want listeners to be curious about and even pay attention to the Dynamics that they hear like in our relationship you know in our conversation knows that what we're really trying to provide is uh real-time example of that in some way shape or form um at the same time there are at least two other opportunities as you know one of the most common questions that we have is like well where can I find one where can I get into one where can I buy this right and there are two opportunities that we want to highlight um one is through the center for being known and that is this non-profit that we organized a number of years ago that one of its offerings now is a conference that is going to be held in October and our third one is going to be coming up this October the last uh Friday in October at the same time it also offers uh training in confessional communities and we now have our second cohort that has started with that we have 18 groups there are almost 200 people that are involved in these groups um and so that's a way for uh you to have an opportunity for supervision and then the other offering is through the private practice that I'm part of called new story Behavioral Health and there we give an even uh more immersive experience it's an immersion training it's two and a half day training uh and it's for a smaller group of people it's for about 25 folks or so and we are moving to doing that particularly for clinicians in the com in the next offering that we have it'll be coming up this fall that date will be announced here very soon so those two offerings in Center for being known and new story Behavioral Health um and of course if you have questions you can ask about how together I I would say you know you can go to uh the cbk.org that's the for that and or news story Behavioral Health they both have websites that you can like we'll have those Linked In the show notes as well so um you can just go there and click on it and I'll take you right to you where you need to be yeah so in today's episode um I want to just um do a bit of a broad overview about like what are we talking about here yeah when we when we talk about confessional communities what are we talking about um and uh as as is our custom we we say that uh that this process of being known is one that takes place with our understanding that we live in the context of the biblical narrative like we're living in the story of the Bible That's What We Believe now not everybody in the world thinks they're living in that story and we would say that what we're trying to do in confessional communities is to recap is to redo is to start what we read about in the first two pages of the Bible Genesis 1 and 2 that God is a creator of beauty and goodness and that even when things go wrong he intends to finish what he starts even if he has to keep starting over and over and over and like dude I think about my own life like how many times do I think to myself like when is God going to be done with this project with me like he's like it's like like the guys are the construction guys that just never leave you never leave I keep doing the work gotta keep trying here they come again all right yeah it's like I'm thinking if I'm God I'm thinking like gosh like how many okay let's see okay we're gonna try this again with Kurt to see if he can get it like it's like Abraham like I got lots of tries with this dude right right and so even though uh even though we live in a world of trauma and Carnage and all the things uh God is not giving up on his project and what he's really doing is leading us we would say this renewed Eden uh when we listen to the guys at the Bible project which we highlight on occasion here they they talk about this this notion Tim Mackey likes to talk about this notion that you know Eden was a place and within Eden there was a garden and so you've got the Wilderness you've got Eden and then you've got the garden these three things and the garden was on a mount the garden was on a hill and this notion that if you read throughout the text of the Bible like it's it is a it is an elevated space it is it is a garden on a hill it is to be a place where people lift their eyes it is a place where people are going to go to create Beauty and goodness and when that didn't go well when that project didn't go well then you you get to the next Mount which was Ararat and everything our listeners like excuse me what what so this is where Noah as this is where the ark comes to rest and then from you have Mariah and what's what's for this is where this is the mountain that Abraham climbs to sacrifice the potential sacrifice of his only son and from there you go to Horeb which is where Moses meets God in the burning bush and then you go to the Mount of Sinai where God meets Moses and then you have a tabernacle and then you have Jerusalem right the Tabernacle this tent but then you have Solomon's Temple but then you have Mount Tabor this is the Transfiguration Jesus Peter James and John Jesus Moses Elijah and then you have the Mount of Olives which is where you know the New Testament text would suggest from where Jesus ascends the Ascension this notion that God has a vision for creating a community that is a that is it is a mount it is it is a thing to which we lift up our eyes where where he is going to create Beauty and goodness in the world and it is throughout the scriptures it's through the through the whole Ark and that these significant mountains in the biblical narrative are important events that take place and this is what we want to be about in these confessional communities we're practicing for the New Jerusalem that's coming and this whole notion that also sits with another assumption and that is that like I long for a world of goodness and beauty and my challenge is that I I often I like I feel like oh I'll decide what that should look like and I'm gonna go make it happen on my own Kurt's gonna do it dude I like that doesn't work out for you oh dude I mean I mean this is a thing right I mean like like look at this look at this podcast this podcast is a feature of like I don't do this without you and Amy like it like it it just doesn't happen like you all come for me like and I think about I think about you know we've we've talked about this before here the number of times when uh Amy has and when you have come for me when I've been in places that have just not been very pretty and you think ah you think if you're Abraham and you've got the knife ready to go and it can't be a very pretty place for him yeah and God comes for him and you think of Golgotha a mount on a hill outside of Jerusalem you you know most people would look and say well God didn't come for Jesus like after six hours the dude is dead but Jesus doesn't raise himself from the dead God raises Jesus from the dead confessional communities are places where we come so that other people become the voice and the hands and bodies of God to raise the parts of our our life from the dead that are dead and that transformation it just if that's going to happen it requires other people to be in our lives as we make choices to follow Jesus like I can't I can't we'll we'll get to this a little bit more when we talk about mirror neurons and mimicking Behavior but we need others to come to find us like my salvation requires me to be an agent I have to make the decision but I can't get it done on my own it's not possible for my brain to do it it's not possible for my body to do it and confessional communities become a place it becomes yet one more of these uh new Edens it's a representation we are practicing for the thing that is really coming and part of how we get that done and we'll be exploring this over the time that we're the other part of how we get that done we talk about different languages that we have to practice different things that are all converging in this space the space itself we'll talk about a little more detail on our coming episodes but the first thing is we we just emphasize that it's the biblical narrative that is the foundation and it's not just the text it's not just the Bible but it's the person behind that text and as we've said in previous uh series that we're we're kind of like who we are paying attention to what we learn again from the guys the Bible project we're talking about God human text that is ancient Jewish Messianic meditative wisdom literature and all of those words are important because we really do believe that what we do in the confessional Community is a mirrored image of what every single one of those words represent as far as the Bible itself is concerned so being immersed in the text of the scriptures is a like critically important part of this because we're being formed interpersonal neurobiology that's another element of this we've talked an awful lot about that over the course of our series together the nine domains of integration we'll talk a little bit more about that so we're really looking at the material world right so the biblical narrative the material world group Psychotherapy processes and Dynamics we like to say that that's this is the third piece of this that things happen in the room where it happens right to steal a line yeah right and we are people who are very heady and we like to live in our heads uh but the moment that we start to bring all that into real time and space and name things that are happening in the room right now in real time in space that's where things begin to change we discover that there are lots of layers of reality in human relational interactions uh you know I'm sitting here in the room with you and I'm thinking about something else and you might not you you might not know that but if you say Kurt what are you thinking now I bring my full self into the room and that's when things begin to change but I'm not going to be doing that if somebody's not paying attention to the fact that multiple layers of relational Dynamics are taking place at the same time not unlike an orchestra and we'll talk more about that as well that this is a complex system this is all part of the group Psychotherapy dynamics that things happen in the room there's multiple layers of those relational interactions that it's a complex system but it has simple energy sources and by that we are people we say that we are people who have great longing we are people who have great grief we are people who long to be people of Joy but we are prevented from that by virtue of our fear and our shame we talk about how life is actually very simple and excruciatingly difficult but it's not difficult because it's complicated it's difficult because of how much fear and how much shame we carry with us hmm and so one of the things that we really then want to try to do or become we want to become people who are multilingual we want to talk in all these different you know all these different dialects that we've just listed from the biblical narrative to Neuroscience to group Psychotherapy work all these things are in play as part of how we are being formed and we'd say that Lang so the different languages that we're going to learn and and this is part of what we learn in these conventional communities and we say that language is a function of culture like language represents culture and so we are going to learn we live in a culture the culture that we typically operate in is a culture that uh helps us practice not being very wise it helps us practice being distracted it helps us practice paying only attention to myself it Narrows my scope of a two-minute awareness of the world this is going to be a process that learns multiple different languages so that we can see things that we couldn't even imagine seeing before and so there were we become aware that of all these things that are happening and that not only that but we're not just going to notice things that happen in the confessional Community we come to recognize that everything that happens in that confessional Community is happening at Safeway it's happening in the bedroom it's happening in the kitchen it's happening in the boardroom it's happening in church worship Services it's happening everywhere what's different about confessional communities is that here we are explicit about it we're just we're just going to be honest about what's actually happening and we're not going to pretend that we're something other than Who We Are the mission of these confessional communities is that we become formed into the image of the king and so it's a formational process we are formed we don't form ourselves we participate we have agency as we said before but we are not by ourselves ultimately the masters of the process we are being formed by the community that we are embedded in and that's going to be true no matter what so the real question becomes what is the community in which you're embedded is it your Facebook community because I'll tell you if that's the case like dude we could go on and on about the trouble that's going to cause um real briefly we've got two texts that are going to be examples of like how how this kind of happens for us just to get us started and again this is to get us started to help us start to percolate and be curious about like how we're using the biblical narrative and how that applies the first is Luke 24 many of you are familiar with this story there's these two guys that are walking to Emmaus and they come up on this third dude they don't know who he is and he starts talking to them about what the events were in Jerusalem this is that you know this is the Sunday of the purported they've heard rumors that this Jesus that they followed had been you know he'd been crucified Resurrected and this dude is walking with him and you know he's talking about the scriptures and so forth and they're like oh this is really interesting in these he has to go on and they invited him in for dinner and he breaks the bread and gives thanks and the moment that he does their eyes are opened and at that moment he also disappears it's important for us to pay attention to this that he had been talking to them for their entire walk but things didn't happen for them until the bread was broken it's important for us to pay attention to then we get to John 20. Thomas who had not seen Jesus with the rest of the gang at his first appearance is in the room where Jesus appears again and many of you may know this story that Thomas is invited by Jesus look look at my wounds and we come to find that you know Thomas didn't just need to believe that Jesus was alive Thomas actually also first needed to believe that Jesus was dead uh he wasn't there they all they all took off they all took off like who knows what happened to him it's not until Thomas sees Jesus wounds as Thomas believes it's not just that he sees him alive he sees the evidence that he was dead yeah and we're going to come to find out that our transformation and our coming to life is as much about our wounds as it is about our strengths belief only changes when first there is a change in the material world until I can reveal to you in real time in space in the room with you what is true about my life I'm not going to make changes it's not going to be enough for me just to hear a sermon I'm gonna have to have some kind of material interaction with other people before my belief begins to change and this change takes place in the context of community so for today we've got a couple of things one is an artistic offering and that is uh the uh Renaissance painter carvaggio has a painting of Thomas that invited our listeners I'm looking at it right now it's uh dude yeah yeah I mean I you know I I would invite people to you know you can find us online very easily and it's you know may not may not replace standing in front of it but it's but you know it's it's a pretty Crystal Clear representation of what that painting is and the light and the whole thing it's just absolutely gorgeous but I would invite them to sit in front of this for a while yeah and see how it affects you yeah and yeah I think I think for me I I came to recognize that uh Thomas needed both his brothers and he needed Jesus for Thomas to believe for Thomas to be transformed and he needed to be able to have an encounter with his wounds and uh yeah I love that in the painting um Jesus has got his hand and he's guiding Thomas's hand actually into the womb dudes like yeah oh yeah ah yeah right to the very wound Jesus is going to go with him like physically go with him yeah yep and and we have an application for this week yeah we do um so we we've been we've you know been hinting at this notion that uh we you know these confessional communities are really about doing embodied work uh it's not working our head off on isolation by ourselves it's embodied work that we do together and so today uh just I want to invite us to a begin to practice making observations and and we've talked about the different the the shorthand for what our our minds do that we sense we image we feel we think and we behave that's sift B acronym just want to invite you to reflect on those things when you sense yourself sensing Imaging feeling thinking and behaving and one of those things when you notice them do you recognize oh I keep these things to myself I'm not sharing this with anybody else and again this is not a critique this is not to say oh you should be sharing let's just say oh start to take an inventory of how much of your mental life happens in the privacy of your own mind and is not really ever given access other people aren't given access such that it can be transformed and so part of how we can begin to open ourselves to transformation is just beginning to be curious about oh up until now what part of me have I been working really hard to keep from being transformed without even knowing that that's what I'm doing and then beginning next at our in our next episode we'll be talking in some more detail about what do we begin to do with all those parts of us that we have been conveniently keeping hidden from everyone else instead of coming into the room where Jesus wants to take our hand and go with us into the woods hmm that's beautiful Kurt yeah yeah all right that's a little taste of what's to come in this uh mini season that we're doing here I hope you all are enjoying as much as I am and I would love to invite you to stick around if you're watching us on YouTube for Amy to join us here Kurt I love you thank you right on brother foreign hey guys ah I'm excited about this season and oh my gosh it goes quick it does yeah I could I could feel the the time difference yeah I could feel the Taskmaster getting after us I felt like I was like okay yeah go go that 20 minute one I sent earlier I know I know but I just I looked down at the beginning like oh my gosh she's serious like you've got 20 minutes um two things hit me and they're similar and one of them was Kurt when you said these confessional communities will we will be formed by these confessional communities and then but then you we will be formed by any community right and so no matter what right we're being formed so it's not like okay the confessional communities we can choose that and we can choose that but we're choosing no matter what we're choosing how we will be informed that's right or be formed yeah right and then the other thing which is also this I thought this I thought about this this morning as I was thinking about the episode is that like this is hard work it is Risky Business it is scary because we're being vulnerable but a friend of mine said but it is she said it's the right hard work meaning this is the life-giving work this is because we work hard no matter what we're working hard it's hard work and we get to choose which work we do I was thinking about um the the idea of when you were talking about culture and how you know the outside culture is forming us all the time and so it's it's it's actually creating a culture though right I mean this culture where all of this can happen that's right um yeah and that's what to me that's what this episode was introducing was was the ingredients to what that culture can be in the confessional Community that's right right yeah I mean I I am uh Andy Crouch has you know one of one of the first books that he might have been the first book that he wrote uh that put him on the map Maybe um uh called culture making and uh nobody that I know of in the Christian Community uh is you know better equipped I think right now than Andy to speak into so many different things that our world is encountering and you know one of the one of the beautiful things that he talks about is that you know our we are we are not called to somehow transform the culture around us it's not my job to go into the world and and fix the world uh what I am called to do is to create a world I'm called to not transform not change culture but to make culture I am called to create a way of being we are planting new Edens we're planting new Gardens new Gardens in Edens as we are we we are just the next extension of these different mountains that are placed significantly over the course of the Arc of the biblical narrative and uh for me for any single human being to live effectively in the world I need to know that I am going out into the world to live with the heft of whatever culture is that's behind me and around me and most of the culture that is outside of the Garden of Eden is a culture of devouring it's a culture of taking it's a culture of disintegration and so if that's the culture that I'm going to like expect to support me like I'm a dead man uh but when we are creating these kinds of cultures in the confessional community that we're trying to create uh you know it's like I I take the two of you with me I think the two of you with me and um it it it makes profound differences in the moments in in the small moments in which I choose to hold my tongue and said I'm not holding my tongue in which I choose to be curious instead of condemning I mean there's like you know dozens of moments every day where because I imagine pepper and Amy being with me and you all I know that you have others as well like we have other parts of our community because of that I can pause and wait to receive from the tree of life rather than taking from the Tree of the knowledge of Good and Evil dozens and dozens of times every day and that's I mean I get to live my life more fruitfully because you guys are in it because I'm being formed by you by the presence that you bring to me well and I and I love the application that the starting point is be curious about what you're withholding or holding back on yeah yeah this was a really good start yeah it was I'm excited yeah all right well we will see you guys next week all right work right on [Music] produced by Kurt Thompson pepper Sweeney and myself Amy Chella audio production and editing is by Kate and Simons video production and editing is done by Mark Gould if you'd like to connect with us you can find us on social media at being known pod if you like this podcast tell a friend if you love this podcast tell everyone you know and please like rate and review wherever you listen be well be now