Hi, everyone. This is Curtis, and I am excited to tell you about a new feature of the GoodFaith podcast, and it's called Campfire Stories.

Now, in a great campfire, everyone has the opportunity to share their stories. And so, in Campfire Stories, we want to hear from you.

We want to hear a story about what you are doing along the themes of the GoodFaith podcast, perhaps it's something about how you're living out your relationships with political polarization, how you are trying to reflect the image of God in your institution and organization, or what you're doing with your money, or your vocation, anything that has been sparked by the themes that we've covered here in the GoodFaith podcast is fear game.

It doesn't matter if it's a big story, a small story, or something in between, as long as it's a story about what you are doing in your life.

We're not so much interested in hearing just thoughts, we want to hear stories of doing.

So, we'll put a link in the show notes where you can just click on it and then supply us the basic outlines of your story of doing, of living out the themes of GoodFaith podcast.

And we'll look at it and we may invite you to share that story on a GoodFaith blog, a social media, or perhaps even invite you to come on the GoodFaith show yourself and talk to me and share your story.

Like, how cool would that be? I'd love to hear from you. I'd love to talk with you. So, please consider joining the Campfire by actually joining actively and sharing your story with others gathered around the Campfire.

Thanks.

Welcome to the GoodFaith podcast. I'm David French with Curtis Chang. And to the extent that you can say that a short-lived podcast, at least so far, has a tradition.

We have a tradition of tackling some pretty tough stuff, deconstruction, politics, gosh, you look back at our recent podcast and we've really dived into a lot of things that are weighing heavily on people's hearts.

And this one is going to be no exception because Curtis, I would have to say that if we have a category of emails that we get, a plurality, I would say, have something to do with this question.

And it's a derivation of, should I, when should I decide to leave? In other words, leave a church, leave a friendship, distance myself from a family member, or how should I decide to stay, or when should I decide to stay?

In other words, I'm in deep distress at my church, should I stay? I'm in deep distress in a relationship, should I maintain it? And we get this question all the time and it's not at all surprising because we're living in a time of profound animosity, profound.

And this is something that you see it anecdotally, and you see it in the data. And the data says that people on different sides of the right left is five, they don't just disagree with each other, they really, really dislike each other.

And so we're going to break this down into two components. One is, why stay and why leave? Because I think different people have different kinds of inclination. So just in transparency, here's my inclination, I'm a stayer.

Okay, I have never left a church in my life. When I move to a new town, I find a new church, usually within two to three weeks, and never go anywhere else. And just ride it out, man. I don't like church shopping, I don't like consumer mentalities surrounding church, I believe in investing in institutions and investing in people and staying and trying to work through the ups and downs.

So I'm a stayer. And so you have to convince me to leave, but a lot of other people have a different inclination. They're more inclined to, as we said, in the military pop smoke and head out pop smoke call for the chopper to come in and get them and head out.

And so let's just start with the why stay side of this and the face of conflict. And so Curtis, you know, this is something I know you've thought a lot about. And why don't we kind of start with some examples of kinds of questions that you've gotten that I've gotten.

And so what are some of the scenarios that that have been run by you?

Well, David, I feel like we should first maybe make this almost a regular segment on this podcast because we do get so many inquiries with people in a lot of pain around this.

I mean, maybe we could start the segment with a theme song like the, you know, that song from the clash. Should I should I stay or should I go? That should be our theme song for this segment, because it is the question, like you said, that's so many are asking.

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