Hello, friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology in the RAW. I have on the show today my good friend Josh Ryan Butler.

Josh Butler is the author of two incredible books. The Skeletons in God's Closet subtitle is The Mercy of Hell, The Surprise of Judgment, The Hope of Holy War.

That was published in 2014 and also his more recent book The Pursuing God, a reckless, irrational, obsessed love that's dying to bring us home.

He is a beautiful writer, an incredibly thoughtful dude. One of the most well-rounded Christian leaders I've ever met and we met, gosh, when do we meet? Probably seven years ago maybe, and he'd become friends from a distance and have so much respect for this guy.

Our plan for this conversation was there is no plan. The one rule of Fight Club is we don't talk about Fight Club, right?

Yeah, the one rule I told Josh is like, I'm not going to come in with any kind of preconceived agenda in this conversation. He's such a thoughtful dude.

And so I just said, let's just see where the conversation goes. We ended up talking a lot about just ministry in the Arizona context where he's currently pastoring.

He was a pastor at Amago Day Church in Portland for over 15 years and now is in a very different kind of setting and we talked a lot about pastoring through COVID.

A big part of our conversation was on pasturing and just being a lead Christian leader in the context of a lot of political polarization that the whole, you know, partisan polarization in our society and how that's affected disciples of Jesus and how

he has navigated that on the pastoral levels. Super helpful. A few weird facts about Josh that I just found listed on his website. These are things I did not know about Josh, but he publicly lists them. So I'm going to publicly read them.

He once got beat up by a Billy goat. He's been run over via VW van and he ate a dog, but he wants us to not worry because this dog was cooked Josh. I'm still very concerned about eating a cooked dog, but I'm super excited to have you on my podcast again.

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I still do lots of Q&A podcasts. They are just for my patron audience because I, you know, to handle all the questions they send in can be a lot of work, but I want to focus on answering their questions. So if you want to benefit from the all genera Q&A podcast, you got to join the page on community.

The info is in the show notes. So without further ado, let's welcome back to the show that you want it only Joshua Ryan Butler.

Hello friends. Welcome back to another episode of Theology and the Rom here with a good friend of mine, Joshua Ryan Butler. He's so awesome. He needs three names. Josh, thanks so much for being back on the show, man.

Thanks, man. It's been a while. I feel like I've had you on I think at least a couple times, but I think it may have been like two years. But yeah, you know, I described who you are in the intro and I just, I don't know that I'll never forget I told the story before I think last time you're on.

But you were you had wrote the manuscript for your second book the pursuing God. And I'm like, yeah, I did all read it. I'll consider endorsing it or whatever. And I remember reading that on the airplane ride home from an event we were both speaking at.

And I was so discouraged, man, because it was such a beautifully written book so powerful, so theologically rich, so well around us like, I want to write like this. This is so discouraging.

Well, that's amazing to hear because I can say the same with you, man. I feel like you're your inspiration for me to the way that you're approaching theology and making it accessible and really writing just rich theology and accessible prose in a way that's just

fun to read, but it doesn't compromise on like a depth of content and all of you. And it's funny to me that it's awesome. I've had a, I don't know why the last six months, a load of people from our church going like, do you heard theology in the rock? I haven't listened to it. They're just like loving it blown away. I'm like, oh my gosh, it's so awesome. And so now that now they're going to freak out when yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. So you've been inspiring and equipping and helping a lot of our folks go deeper into life with Christ and Bible and everything. So it's awesome. Hey, real quick. I'm going to put some. I'm going to keep recording here, but I'm hearing an echo. Wait, it's gone. No, no, it's not you. I was going to put headphones in, but actually it's, I think it's okay. Sometimes I want to do headphones that like screws up with the mic. So I typically don't use them. So I'll keep them here. I think it's okay now.

Um, so you, you, uh, you know, you passed her to a mogul day church in Portland for a number of years. How many years was I like 15 years or something or 15 years in a mago and loved it, man, I was home.

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