Welcome to the Good Faith Podcast. I'm your host, Curtis Chang. And the Good Faith Podcast

is a production of redeeming babble. And it's where friends who follow Jesus help each

other make sense of the world. And the topic that we're going to try to make sense of is when faith

and power mix. And before we bring on my guest, I want to talk a little bit about why I wanted to

talk about this topic of when faith and power mix. And the reason is because we are, I believe, in the

midst of a multi-year reckoning in the American church of the abuse of power. And we see this on

multiple levels. There's just the general, if you will, abuse of power in institutions. Think,

for example, of the recent revelations coming out from Hillsong. We are in a multi-year now reckoning,

I think, in terms of the evangelical version of the Me Too movement, where we have seen the revelations

and the reckoning of patterns of abuse of power directed towards women. Look just, for example,

at the report from the Southern Baptist Convention on how it handled reports of sexual abuse.

We are in a multi-year, or multi-decade, I don't know how far this goes back, of an incomplete

reckoning of the abuse of power directed at people of color, especially African Americans. We're

in the three-year anniversary of the George Floyd murder that showed just how far we still have to go

in reckoning with that kind of abuse of power. And we're heading into 2024. We're going to see,

undoubtedly, once again, the toxic ways in which the pursuit of political power by American evangelicals

results in very corrosive effects on the faith. So all of that, I think, can lead us as followers of

Jesus to be almost allergic to power and the wielding of power. That we think the problem, we can

be tempted to think that the power, the problem is with power itself. And so we shouldn't mix

faith and power. Those two should not touch. I actually see this in a lot of the emails I get from

listeners. And interestingly, in a lot of conversations I have with young people that they see

this pattern of the abuse of power and they feel like we just shouldn't have power as Christians

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