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Transcript

Joy Marie Clarkson: Welcome to Another Life, a podcast of Plough magazine. I’m your host, Joy Clarkson, and it is a pleasure to be with you all today. As we’re nearing the end of our conversations about “The Supernatural” issue, it is starting to get properly cold in London. Today, I had on my inner layer of my coat and my scarf, and I was still feeling the chill.

But along with that is a lot of cheerfulness. London is apparently not following the liturgical calendar, so it’s already very Christmassy. But I can’t say that I am complaining too much because London’s grayness does need some sprucing from about November to February. And today, something else that is giving me cheer, and goodwill, and a good mood is that I have the pleasure of having a conversation with two lovely people. I’m very happy to welcome on to the show, Sarah Killam Crosby and Ben Crosby. I stopped myself there suddenly thinking, am I saying your name correctly, Sarah?

Sarah Killam Crosby: It’s [pronounced] Killam, like “kill them,” unfortunately.

Joy Marie Clarkson: OK, good. I don’t know whether I will edit that in or keep that explanation. It’s a good one to remember. But welcome to the show, Sarah and Ben. And it’s such a pleasure to have you.

Sarah Killam Crosby: Thank you. So nice to be with you.

Joy Marie Clarkson: So I always like to start with a little bit of a grounding in where you are and what you’re up to. So tell us physically where you are and how you all spend your days and what you are currently up to in life.

Ben Crosby: We are coming to you right now from our apartment in Montreal, Canada, where there is snow on the ground. So it is feeling rather chilly here too.

Sarah Killam Crosby: Some slush right now. Just in that really ugly, melty stage. So not as magical as I hope it is where you’re at.

Ben Crosby: We’re both PhD students in religious studies at McGill University and both in church history. I am also an Episcopal priest working in a parish in the Anglican Church of Canada while doing my PhD research.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Am I making this up? You must be getting close to the end. Am I right about that?

Ben Crosby: God willing, yes. I am ABD at this point, so I just need to actually write the thing.

Sarah Killam Crosby: Ben is about a year and a half ahead of me, so I’m about to take my major comprehensive exam in three weeks. So yeah, I have a really stressful portion of this year ahead of me.

Joy Marie Clarkson: My goodness. Well, I wish you luck. That is one challenge that the British PhD does not have. But there’s always like a strange nerdy Hermione part of myself that wanted to do it and was a little bit sad that I didn’t get to suffer and have lots of postcards and tell myself various facts. But I’m sure that that seems very quaint to you, and you probably just want to be done with them.

Sarah Killam Crosby: It has been nice to be forced to read a bunch.

Joy Marie Clarkson: It must feel exciting to have a certain mastery over a topic area. Now, I was thinking about this actually before I called you all. Is Montreal a place that is very festive and Christmassy when it comes down to it?

Sarah Killam Crosby: It is, yeah. They have some decent Christmas markets and there’s a couple of outdoor markets that transform [the city]. So yeah, we haven’t quite gotten there yet, but we will pretty soon.

Ben Crosby: Yeah, I have to say, Quebec, there’s a lot going on here in the winter. I think it has to be to make as long a winter as we have here survivable. So there are lots of festivals, and lots of things going on, and Christmas really is a good time here.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I was going to say, I really can’t complain about winters comparing London to Quebec. But I think the difficulty of London is just the grayness. It’s not that cold. And actually, I was rather delighted this morning because there actually was snow today. And sometimes I feel like snow, even though it’s hard in different ways, it adds beauty. And you feel justified in feeling cold and being indoors if it’s snowing – whereas you just feel sad if it’s gray.

Now, it’s a pleasure and this is the first time I’ve ever interviewed a married couple together. So I make no promises about how it will go. But I wanted to start today by talking about your articles for “The Supernatural” issue. And I really enjoyed reading them together. I don’t know if you all did this on purpose, or if you just were living in the same space and so they came to be in this way, but they’re very beautiful compliments to one another. They both center around our around spiritual experiences in the Christian tradition and how we understand them, how to discern what is fake from what is true. And it almost feels like you came from different directions. Sarah, you describe coming from more Pentecostal background and about how important it was to believe that the spirit of God was living and active and moving in the world, and that people could really hear from God. And you thought about that and how do we discern that. And then you talk about your journey to a more liturgical tradition. Whereas Ben talked about his anxiety about not having these big emotional experiences. And his story then climaxes in a surprising and unbidden spiritual experience.

So it sounds like your [interests are] rubbing off on each other was the story I got from that. Before I ask you more about your articles, I wanted to ask: were you both reading or thinking about the Zwickau prophets? (I don’t know if I said that correctly.) It’s in both of your essays, and I didn’t know who they were. So I found that obscure, and I wondered what was going on with the prophets in the Crosby household.

Sarah Killam Crosby: Ben had written a Substack, I think, on the Zwickau Prophets a couple of months before we wrote these pieces. But as I was writing my piece, I was essentially just doing a review of Christian experience with the supernatural and the prophetic. And when you get to the Reformation, this was one of the big cases. And so I didn’t want to pass through that era without saying anything.

I had other cases that I’d gone into, that then got cut for time or for space, of course. But yeah, that was one of the major ones that it felt important to nod to because it is such an interesting [question]: what do you do with [these spiritual experiences and prophecies]? Anabaptist and others really wanted to say that what they were doing was legitimate. And then you had people like Luther who, although oddly in other aspects, was open to prophecies, but in terms of the Zwickau prophets, he had very specific objections to what they were doing and the nature of that.

I went into it more initially because his objections, I think, are quite pertinent to pitfalls that we can still encounter when we think about the prophetic or the supernatural.

Ben Crosby: I think historically, as Sarah was saying, it’s this interesting moment where Luther’s concern with – there’s a suspicion of hostility towards – the Zwickau prophets, along with his former friend Andreas Bodenstein von Karlstadt, marks this transformation, I think, in early Protestant ideas toward spiritual experience, toward what you might call mysticism, where you see, as Sarah was saying, the Anabaptist tradition going one way that is often very open and excited about these things, and then what becomes mainstream Protestantism that is, at least on paper, more hostile – although I think the actual history is a little more complex than that. As obscure as these guys were, I think the conflict between them and Luther is one that continues to inflect contemporary Protestantism to this day.

Joy Marie Clarkson: It reminds me a little bit – obviously, this is a very different era, but – of Joachim of Fiore, who is to us now marginal figure, right? He’s not necessarily someone that you hear talked about a lot in churches. Joachim was, of course, this mystical prophet. My main way of learning about him was as this weird guy who, I think, prophesied the end of the world.

But was very influential on the Franciscans, and in that way, very influential on what unfolded in theology for about 200 years after him. And so it’s interesting looking back on Christian history to see how these figures that we might think of as wacky or difficult to understand end up, as you said, revealing something about different directions of traditions, and also just playing an important role in the ethos of a particular time. For the uninitiated, because I’m still uninitiated about this, who were these prophets and what were they doing? And then I will actually ask you about your pieces. Sorry, I just got hung up on this. I was curious about it.

Ben Crosby: Yes, there’s a group of people – I think three; is that right? – that came from the town of Zwickau to Wittenberg, not very far away, and claimed that they had this spiritual authority that rested directly on this mystical experience of the Holy Spirit, rather than any authorization by the Church. And that in and of itself was enough to worry the leaders of this nascent Protestant church in Wittenberg. So they came, they said they had these heavenly visions, and that people should follow them because they were directly appointed by God. And then when this happens, Luther is actually in hiding in Wartburg Castle. So, his friend Philip Melanchthon is sending these anxious letters to Luther asking: What should I do about these guys? And that’s the moment that began my piece in this Plough issue. Anything to add?

Sarah Killam Crosby: I think you lay out really well Luther’s objection. Those who know Luther know that this is a theme – it’s all about the theology of glory versus the theology of the cross. And so one of his primary concerns is that it is this theology of glory that doesn’t have anything to say about suffering, doesn’t really have anything to say about the cross shaped form of Christian life. And that’s maybe what Luther finds most concerning about what’s happening.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That is very fascinating. And as you say, you can still see inflections of that today in certain forms of more prophetic moods, perhaps, of Christianity. Let’s talk just a bit about your pieces. I would love to hear just your sense of why you wrote what you wrote, and why it was important to you. Do you want to start, Sarah?

Sarah Killam Crosby: So coming from a Pentecostal background, I was surrounded, as I allude to in the piece, by this assumption that God speaks through the Holy Spirit, that God acts, not just in Scripture and the events of salvation history, but still very much is present in the world today, and that we should be attentive to that and listening to that. And I was fortunate that I was mostly formed in a context where there was a real attentiveness to [the knowledge that] we can’t just say whatever we want; the spirit isn’t then endorsing every idea or proclamation that we want to make; we have to listen, and we have to weigh that against scripture, and we have to ensure that what we’re saying doesn’t contradict scripture; and at its best, the prophetic is really meant to encourage the church and to supplement what is happening in scripture, but never to replace it or go beyond it.

Now that I’m in the main line, I find just a surprise, often, when I talk to people that I still believe this, that this is a position that’s possible to hold for Anglicans or for people in our church circles. And I just find a different posture when we’re talking about the supernatural or the works of the spirit. And it’s often one of skepticism, and it’s often one of resistance even. With exceptions, of course: there are Anglicans like Sarah Coakley, who I mentioned in the piece, who have done wonderful work on the gifts of the spirit and the supernatural, and how those actually do and can exist within Anglican spaces. But I wanted to address this question, especially now that in our culture, we’re seeing so many examples, in the US and in other places, of prophecies that are so obviously fraudulent, and that are given for a very specific political purpose, or that are given to extort money or things like that.

So there’s rightly a lot of skepticism to this, but I wanted to [point out that] there’s another possibility, and that other possibility is actually one that church history really attests to, that so many people before us have believed since the early church, that has been a really important part of our faith, and it was just self-evident to them that this was so. And I really wanted to talk about that from the setting that I’m now and from the perspective of someone who grew up with this framework.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think you were trying to thread a needle of, as you said, casting appropriate suspicion… I don’t actually even think it’s suspicion. I think it’s discernment, right? It’s the ability to discern if some spiritual experience or God working (and really, it’s not God’s working that’s being wielded, but false descriptions as though God is working) is being wielded for personal gain or political change, versus just the fact that God does seem to work in bizarre ways sometimes in our lives, and that this is something that has happened to Christians throughout the centuries and that happens to people very often when they’re not desiring it. Because God is still good, and God is still working.

One of the phrases that stood out to me that you used is you said that there are plenty of scoundrels. I think scoundrel was the word that you used. So I was going to ask you, what are some of those? If we want to affirm that the spirit is still working in the world and speaking to us and that miraculous things sometimes happen, but also that there are scoundrels, what are tools of discernment for being aware of when something like spiritual experience is by being manipulated for various purposes?

Sarah Killam Crosby: There are a couple that I alluded to or that I talked about in the piece. One is that it’s not going to contradict scripture; it is not going to contradict Orthodox theology. Of course, we can run into difficulties there because we can have Pentecostals who say, “Well, I don’t see any problem with this. This is Orthodox in my view.” And then other Christians who would disagree.

But I think part of that is it being worked out within Christian community, it being worked out within a framework of listening to the church, listening to the witness of the church historically, listening to the other believers who are in our lives, and really constantly trying to bring it back to scripture. I think another thing that I mentioned is the idea that prophecy or that the supernatural would hold up one political figure or one spiritual figure and say that we should then put our allegiance behind this person is an idea that even in church history is already getting roundly critiqued. This isn’t a new thing that people try to do with the prophetic, and it’s something that the church has always had a caution against, not even in regard to the prophetic. In the lead up to or the early embrace of Nazism in Germany, Karl Barth looked at that and said: the Holy Spirit doesn’t need movements; the Holy Spirit doesn’t need us to throw all of our weight behind one figure, behind one party. And there’s a real danger when we approach a political movement and say this and only this is what God is doing. So I think that’s another caution that church history really helps us to be attentive to. And when it comes to what it will ask of us, the idea that the power of God, that these signs and wonders, it will not be for the purpose of extorting something from us. It will not be for the purpose of enriching one person or one movement. But also, sometimes it will ask of us – God will ask of us through the Spirit – things that are difficult, things that require our obedience, things that push on us or press us. And I think as I’ve looked at the lives of friends, my own life in ways that we have believed that we’ve heard from the spirit, it’s not always going to be flattering us or helping us to believe that whatever we’ve already decided to do is the right thing, but sometimes it is going to push on us a little bit.

Joy Marie Clarkson: It will be costly. Thank you. That’s really helpful. And we’ll get to this later, but I do think that it is worth affirming the ongoing work of the Spirit in the world, both because it’s true, but also because we comport ourselves in a different way in the world when we believe that God is both listening and speaking to us, and that we can be a part of the ongoing work of God in the world.

Ben, I really related to your article. You begin by speaking about the anxiety that you had that you needed to have these positive spiritual experiences to be a Christian, and that there was something maybe going wrong with you if you didn’t have these positive spiritual experiences. And this is maybe a slightly different inflection of that worry. But I think I had that a lot in university, this anxiety that if I didn’t – I don’t know exactly what I meant by this, but – if I wasn’t feeling like a Christian, if I wasn’t resonating with what I was believing, that something was wrong. And I think partially, it was growing up in a very belief heavy world where what was important about being a Christian was sitting and thinking about various true things about God, and affirming them in your mind, and then feeling something about them. And that may sound very obscure, but I think a lot of people have had that experience. Of course I still have beliefs and think about them, but something that was very important for me – and this is something that you talked about and I’d love to hear more about – was actually encountering the sacraments and realizing that this was where I met God, because God was faithful to show up in the sacraments, and that it didn’t have anything to do with the amount of emotion I could generate or not generate, but that there was this gift of God that held me and nourished me without regard to my own emotional state. So that’s more just me reacting to your article, but I’d love to hear more about why you cared about writing this essay.

Ben Crosby: I think you’ve put it very well. What you said really resonates with me. It’s often a truism that for good or ill preachers are often preaching to themselves and saying the things they really need to hear. And in this case, perhaps I was writing a version of something that around twelve or thirteen would have been really helpful for me. I grew up Lutheran, but in this kind evangelically inflected version of it, where, as you were saying, I had, without ever really being explicitly taught it by anyone, just absorbed this idea that a real Christianity or a real relationship with God involved some non-rational, non-intellectual, casual, positive, spiritual experience, right? The version of prayer as “casual conversation with your pal Jesus” thing. And that really works for some people, and I’m not knocking it as such, but I didn’t have that, right? I didn’t. And it was something that was deeply troubling for me off and on that I’d see other people narrating these experiences of God that seemed really nice, and that I just didn’t have, and that was really challenging. And so, for me the idea with the sacraments, with the Word as well, that God has promised to meet us there in a way that does not depend on any capacity on our side to apprehend Him, was super helpful for me. For me, reading Lutheran sacramental theology was quite important as a way of getting this. But obviously lots of Christians say something like this in one way or another – this idea that what’s important is less any spiritual aptitude or capacity that I have and more the good promises of a gracious and loving God helped deflate the anxiety. And in its own way, by taking the pressure off, it made it more possible for me to have spiritual experiences around communion, and around things like that. And so this could have been a very simple piece saying that we don’t look for divine presence or experience of God outside of the Word and the sacraments, in a very good Protestant, and maybe even cessationist, way – except for the fact that then I have this experience that I narrate in the piece a couple of years ago where very much to my surprise, I found myself praying in tongues, not something that I expected to be happening.

I think encountering and getting to really know Sarah, and being introduced to the Pentecostal tradition through her, made me open to the possibility in the abstract for other people. And I even got to a point where I would say: “God, you want this to happen, this would be cool, I think. Have at it.” That’s a dangerous thing to pray it turns out, because sometimes God will just say: “OK, here you are. Here’s what you asked for.” And I think what I was trying in the end to convey with this piece is perhaps not so different although coming from a different place, as you said, with what Sarah did – that on one hand it diminishes the anxiety produced by making certain forms of spiritual experience normative for true Christianity, while also pushing back against what Sarah was talking about earlier: this hyper-educated, hyper-intellectual mainline Protestant – well not just Protestant, but especially Protestant – suspicion of any of this stuff. [And I realized that] God really does want to draw all of us, our affect and our imagination as well, to himself, and that a realization that we don’t need to place our trust in our experiences of divine nearness or goodness doesn’t mean that we have to say that they don’t exist. In fact, we really shouldn’t say that, because it’s hard to make sense of Christianity without them.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Absolutely. You’re both great needle threaders. (Is that what I want to say? I think it is.) But it managed to walk that line without saying nothing, if that makes sense. Because you could be seeing “both sides” which is saying nothing. But I think that was really a judicious way to describe this line between the sense – and I think to me it boils down to the sense – of spiritual experiences, if you want to call them that, as being something that are gifts from God and not a proof of one’s Christianity or extra holiness, but something that God gives to us in the sacrament and he also continues to speak and work in the world, and when we’re open to that, we can experience that. And I do think there’s something important, as you said, about getting over the embarrassment that can sometimes exist in certain worlds about that idea or resistance to it.

I also want to say, as an aside, that something I appreciated and enjoyed about both your articles and about both of you as writers and thinkers is you’re both so unapologetically Protestant, which I know may sound funny. Obviously, there’s a lot of people who are not Roman Catholic, who are not Greek Orthodox, but often with people who are quite interested in church history, there’s almost the sense of embarrassment of still being a Protestant, as though somehow, it’s the less judicious choice. I really appreciate how you both show that there are many good reasons to be Protestant, and they are good theological and historical reasons, one might even say. So that’s just an aside, but I enjoyed that about both of your work. That one’s for free and not related to anything particular in this conversation.

There are so many more things that we could talk about with these two articles, but I think really the best thing would be for people to go and read them. And so now I want to transition to two other things that don’t have anything to do with your articles, but that to me have something to do with the theme of this podcast, which is: Another Life is Possible. I want to ask you about two things and they’re very specific another life is possible. So, one: it is possible for the church to grow (So, this is topic one in brackets.) And topic two: it is possible for marriage to be lovely. And I think this is something that both of you speak to well in your lives and in your presence online, which is where I first encountered you both.

But let’s start actually with the idea that churches can grow. Now, this may seem like an obvious thing, but we are in different branches of a part of the Church of England. And the idea that churches can grow, for some bizarre reason, in many branches of the Church of England, is an impossibility. There’s a sense that gradually religion is declining, and so our denominations are getting smaller and smaller. And Ben, you can speak to this more because you’re more institutionally integrated. And in some regions, there’s almost an acceptance of this and a palliative care approach. Could you say a little bit about that? And then we can think more about whether it’s possible that churches can grow, and what makes churches grow, and all that jazz.

Ben Crosby: I think that’s exactly right. There’s a sense that growth is impossible because of these broad movements of secularization, and there is sometimes even a sense that growth is bad, because the only way that churches do manage to grow is by selling out the gospel in some way or another.

Sarah Killam Crosby: For instance, buying a smoke machine and the like.

Ben Crosby: Exactly. Looking down on those churches that even in places like Canada are growing as somehow problematic politically, theologically, or in the way they worship, and thus, absolutely discountable. And I think as a result you have this sense from people that we’re basically just here to provide pastoral care for whatever set of people, for whatever strange reason, find themselves connected to the Christian story. And then those people will die, and the churches will be turned into condos. And “that is what it is” is the vibe you get in some corners of the church.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Yeah, I had quite an acute experience of this recently, where I saw this Rightmove – which is like the UK Zillow – and it was advertising this beautiful, medieval church that had been split up into four condos. And it was just quite horrifying.

I wonder, do you think this has anything to do actually with your articles, with this lack of belief that, in fact, perhaps the reason that some people come to church is because God exists and is living and active in the world, and that, in fact, if you believed that was the case, then you might comport your church and your evangelism in a different way? Do you think there’s something there?

Sarah Killam Crosby: I think we both really do. I think one thing that I’ve been surprised to encounter in some of the church circles that I’m in now is a real embarrassment to say that Christianity is true, and that if it’s true, it should impact the way we live, and that it should be something that we tell other people about. And it’s almost like: “This is my private religion and it’s fine for me and my church to decide to do this, but we shouldn’t act like that has any bearing on the world.” I think it’s the posture that God has intervened in our world through the person of Jesus Christ. And not only that, but Jesus calls us now, Jesus wants to invite us into union with him, and that this is true, and this is real, and this matters. I think if you have that posture, it does completely change the way that you think about something like church growth because if it’s true, then you want to invite other people into that.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Ben, you look like you’re having thoughts, or I could just be imagining that.

Ben Crosby: I think that’s all exactly right. To try to be maximally charitable to some of my colleagues here, it is doubtless hard to spend your life either belonging to or ministering in a declining church. And it’s a reasonable – I understand psychologically why you might work yourself to a position where “this thing that is happening that I don’t feel like I can change is good actually.” It’s easier than feeling like you are constantly kicking against the pricks. But as Sarah says, if we really believe in a God who raises the dead, not just as a nice metaphor for the transition from Winter into Spring, or the possibility of good things coming out of bad, but that the tomb really was empty and that this changes everything for us too, then even as we lament the challenges of church life in this current moment and raise that up to God with whatever mix of like sorrow and frustration that we’re feeling sometimes... If this thing is true, true for everyone, not just a private truth, then it has to change everything about lives, and it takes off the table any idea that church growth is impossible, because if God can raise the dead, he can bring more people to our churches.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think the thing that a lot of people object to is the idea that one might want one’s church to grow, right? And that I don’t understand. Where does that come from?

Sarah Killam Crosby: I once heard someone say in a church group that I was in; someone made an offhanded comment that sometimes evangelical churches don’t have money, and so they go out and invite more people to the church. And the way that it was framed was that all churches who invite people in want more money, and they want their building to grow, and they want more material presence. And absolutely there are churches that have that motivation. There are churches that are doing that. There are televangelists and others who are really are trying to milk this thing for as much money as they can get from it. But also – I have deep disagreements now with Pentecostals, with Evangelicals, with the tradition that I came from, but – there are many of them, including people that I know really well, who really, really, really actually have this mindset: they believe that it’s true; they believe that it’s good news, and so they just want to tell other people that it is true, and that it is good news. That’s at least one mindset that is maybe assumed or that’s there, that the only reason to do this would be to build a mega church that takes people’s money, and that there can be no other legitimate reason to want the church to grow.

Ben Crosby: Maybe this is a dangerous psychologization, but I think this is true. There’s a couple of things going on. Especially in a church that is made up of increasing numbers of refugees and exiles from other traditions and especially from various forms of evangelical Christianity, there’s this way in which anything that is associated too much with evangelicalism is therefore bad and to be rejected, right? So, evangelicals love talking about growth, therefore it must be bad, and we must reject it. And I also think that something that is hard for a lot of people – and perhaps in this case, especially for those people who aren’t actually newcomers to the tradition but have been there a long time – is that now we can’t take advantage of broad cultural pressures to bring people to church. Being a church that grows actually requires the church to change and the people in it to change. And that doesn’t mean throwing out your organs and bringing in guitars, but it does mean at the very least something that’s much harder than that, which is people going out and talking to their unchurched friends and neighbors about why they should maybe go to church. And I think that’s really scary. It is. It’s not a super easy thing to do. And I think it is often easier to pooh-pooh any aspiration for growth, in the way that Sarah talked about, than admit that growth is possible, but will require a challenging transformation.

Joy Marie Clarkson: You’ve at least tweeted about… (Really, I shouldn’t be asking people about things that they’ve tweeted about. However, it is public forum.) You’ve spoken about how the church that you’re working at is growing to some degree. Obviously underpinning it all is hopefully the work of the Holy Spirit. But aside from that general sense of God is drawing people, do you think there’s anything that your church does that makes it easier to draw people?

Ben Crosby: To be perfectly honest, what we’re doing is not fancy, and frankly, there’s a lot more that we could be doing that we’re not at this point. But I think it comes down to preaching like we believe it, because we actually do, having a lot of opportunities for people to plug into the community that aren’t just Sunday morning worship, having other ways for people to get to know each other. It’s great having new Christians; it’s wonderful in so many ways. And often I have found that they have far fewer hangups about inviting others to come check us out than those of us who grew up in the church do. And so, they have become, in some cases to their own surprise, some of our greatest evangelists just saying: “Look, I found life here in this amazing way. Come check it out.” So those are all really good. We’re working on growing. And this is something that I’ve talked about with other clergy that I know is really helpful: really good visitor follow-up, having a visitor card that people can sign and then making sure that a clergy person is reaching out to them, inviting them to coffee, seeing what’s up. But we’re not doing anything amazing. It’s solid preaching, reverent worship. We’re friendly. We invite people to things, and we have seen, not dramatic, but modest and real growth. Would you add anything, Sarah?

Sarah Killam Crosby: A friend of ours who does a lot of church growth stats within the Episcopal Church, he’ll talk about just having a clear website: having a website that you can visit where the church’s location and service times are prominently displayed. Having traveled a lot for research over the past couple of years, I have found that this is not something that a lot of churches have. I can’t believe the number of times that I’m visiting a city, I’m looking up the church near me trying to figure out when I can attend this church, and I have to click through so many different things. And sometimes it’s a document that’s not even on the website that’s very infrequently updated. It shouldn’t be difficult for people to come to the church and know when they can come. Or even to approach it, and on Sundays the doors are always locked, and you can’t find the entrance. It’s things like this that I see as I’m traveling, and I’m a person who is here and wanting to attend your church, and you’re almost making it impossible for me to know how to do so.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I think that’s not insignificant. One thing recently that I was thinking about that may seem superfluous, but I don’t think it is: My church the other day at the service was handing out these little cards with the service times for Christmas and Christmas Eve and the different options. And taking one I thought, this must be just a waste of money; it was quite beautifully designed. But then on the tube ride home, my husband and I were looking at it and discussing which ones we’d go to. And a guy sitting next to me on the tube said, “What is that? Is that a tourist thing for London?” And we said, “No, actually, it’s our church’s list of Christmas activities.” And he asked, “Are you religious?” And I said, “yes.” I’m usually pretty shy. But long story short is we ended up giving this guy this little card because he thought it was pretty, and it looked like a nice Christmas thing. And who knows if he will actually go. But it was something as simple as making it clear when the things were happening, and it looking welcoming. And I think even something as small as that can be something that can draw people, and it’s really just being hospitable and welcoming. And as you were saying, yes, this Christian thing is a bit wild: to believe that God is truly redeeming the world and drawing the world to himself; but if you do believe it, then you might as well act like it.

Sarah Killam Crosby: I had a very funny story that was like that. We have to take languages for our PhD programs. I was taking German at McGill, which is pretty much all undergrads. And an undergraduate student in my class heard me talking to another student who knows that I go to church, knows that I’m married to a priest. And he turned around and just out of nowhere went, “I’m a Calvinist, but not the homophobic kind.” And I said, “I’m a Calvinist, but not the homophobic kind.” And he ended up coming to the church and getting baptized just because he heard me talking in the corner of a German classroom.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Wow, there you go. There’s some good Christian testimony for you. Way far back in my youth, this lovely woman named Phyllis, who just died this year, actually, would do a Bible study with five girls every year, and I did it when I was sixteen. And we read through Mark together, we talked about what it meant to be a Christian, and she talked about what it meant to share your faith with other people. And I found that quite daunting, but she said to me something that I will always remember; she read the passage where it says, “No one comes to the Father except if they’re drawn.” And think having that confidence that God is still drawing people in the world, so you don’t have to be some perfect evangelist. Sometimes it just means being in your German class and saying you’re a Calvinist, but not the homophobic kind.

Ben Crosby: There’s a quote that’s attributed to former Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple. It could be one of these apocryphal quotes; I don’t want to hang my hat on it, but he supposedly said, “When I pray coincidences happen; when I don’t, they don’t.” And that’s been true for me. I have found myself praying to God regularly: “Help me find people that I can share the gospel with, that I can invite to church.” And what do you know? That happens sometimes. You’ll just have people very randomly meeting you and wanting to talk about church or wanting to talk about Jesus. And like you said, it’s so clearly nothing I’m doing at all. It is entirely something the spirit is doing. And I am just an instrument being used for one particular step along the way. And that’s really cool.

Joy Marie Clarkson: It is. I can talk to you guys for hours, but I shouldn’t talk to you all for hours. So I’m going to bring you to my last “Another Life is Possible” question. And perhaps to some people, this will sound strange or something that they can’t relate to. But I want to talk about is the idea that marriage can be lovely. And the reason that I say this is… Oddly I grew up in a church where marriage was lauded as a very important thing, and it could be a good calling. But there was just this overwhelming sense and contradictory sense that marriage was also really hard, and it was talked about as a cross. And I’m not saying that it can’t be, but it had this just overwhelmingly negative valence to the extent that when I was getting married, and we were doing “marriage preparation,” I don’t know if this is true in Canada as well, but in the UK, it’s called marriage preparation, not premarital counseling. Premarital counseling has quite a negative valence to it. It sounds like you’re already in trouble. But anyway, when I was doing marriage prep, I had this fear, almost… I really loved my fiancé, and aside from that, I just found life very easy with him. But I had this feeling that somehow as soon as we got married, everything would be very difficult because that was the narration. And I was delighted to discover that that was not the case and that thus far marriage has been, amongst many other things, just really fun. It’s really lovely: a source of grace and support and happiness and ease. So anyway, so I’m monologuing, but this is something I’ve seen you share about, Sarah, and I would just love your perspective on whether this is something that you think is indeed another life that is possible and where some of those negative messages come from.

Sarah Killam Crosby: In my case, because I come from an evangelical Pentecostal background, I knew a lot of people who married really young. I’m the oldest of four siblings and all three of my younger siblings got married at the age of twenty-one – very young marriages. And so I was constantly hearing “The first year of marriage is so hard; marriage is so difficult, but it’s good because it’s for your sanctification.” And even coming to the main line, I still hear marriage talked about in this way quite often: marriage is hard, but it’s good. It’s a hard thing, but it’s a good thing. And I had a similar experience where I knew one person who went to undergrad with me, and he and his wife were slightly older students, late twenties as opposed to early twenties, when they got married, which in my circle was older. But after the first year of marriage, I remember him publicly saying, “I’ve been told all my life that the first year of marriage is so difficult and our first year was so easy.” And then of course, so many people responded by saying, “Wait till you’re five, wait till you’re seven, wait till you’re ten. Of course it’s fine now, but it’s going to get really, really hard.” So it was such a delight at year ten to see him come back and go, “No guys, it’s still really good, and it’s been easy. Life circumstances have been hard, but marriage itself has been pretty easy.”

So going into marriage, I had the same thing as you where I thought, “I think it’s going to be good. I think I’ve chosen well.” We got married in our thirties as opposed to our twenties. So, I think we were both more mature. We’d worked out a lot of our issues that a lot of people have when they live together at a young age. So, I was expecting it to be good, but then same thing a year in and now about three and a half years, I’ve just thought, “It’s just been so easy. It’s been such great.” We’ve had a lot of difficult things happen externally, but we’ve just really found each other to be a really safe place and a source of compassion, and help, and God’s grace to each other.

Ben Crosby: That’s really well said. Coming from a slightly different background, I don’t think I had quite the same [emphasis on] marriage as the hardest thing, but also the best thing ever. But before marriage, I certainly would have thought of the primary theological meaning in some ways, or at least the way what marriage as this means of you growing in Christian virtue, that you’re rubbing off your sharp edges on each other like rocks in a tumbler, that you are being sanctified by doing this hard and challenging thing together. And certainly, I do think that marriage does sanctify or can sanctify by God’s grace and that there is a way in which it does function as a school of learning to practice love and then care for the other every day. But I think for me, a couple years in, the primary theological meaning of it for me has been that in Sarah’s love for me I see an image of God’s love for me. I just have this clear sense of marriage as icon for the unmerited grace and goodness of God, which was not what I was expecting necessarily, but it’s been really lovely to find that.

Sarah Killam Crosby: What’s so interesting is I think Cranmer knew this. The amazing thing about the Book of Common Prayer is that Cranmer is the first person who puts, in addition to procreation of children, avoiding sin, (you know the exact phrase better than I do), but the companionship, the love, the support that the one person should have for the other person, both in adversity and in good times. I should know this exact quote. But there are beautiful examples too in history of people who knew this were very aware that like this when God says it’s not good for humans to be alone, this is what he means, that there’s this mutuality and love and grace that you get through communion with one another, and that you especially get through marriage.

Ben Crosby: “Marriage was ordained,” Cranmer wrote, “for the mutual society, help, and comfort that one ought to have of the other, both in prosperity and adversity.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I love the book on prayer liturgy for marriage. It’s one of the most beautiful things to me written in the English language, and it’s so simple and so true. I have in front of me a very old version. I don’t know why. That was first thing that came up when I Googled, but: “An honorable state instituted by God in paradise in the times of man’s innocence, signifying to us the mystical union between Christ and his church.” When we got married, we actually had to get a special dispensation to use that liturgy because we were in Scotland, and so there were other liturgies. But I said, no, I want the old bit because it’s just so meaningful.

So the reason I ask this is to me it’s important to know that there can be really happy and easy marriages. I don’t think that should make people who have struggled or have found it difficult for various reasons feel bad. Life is hard, and it’s hard to be a human being, and we come into marriage with all kinds of difficulties and scars. And for that reason, obviously, marriage can be a place of real pain. But I think it was important for me to begin to have the inkling that marriage could be really good and happy and easy for two reasons. One is that I think if your mindset is that marriage can be a good, happy, companionable blessing in life, you will date in a different way. I think that sometimes that narrative around marriage being difficult can actually keep people together for a long time in dating who maybe just aren’t compatible, and they’re experiencing friction and frustration because they have different personalities. And obviously we work that out, and we figure it out. If you’re married, you figure it out and you work with what you have. But I think having in mind that what you want to look for in a partner is a companionable, happy, easy partner is actually really important. And if you don’t have that possibility that marriage can be this good and easy thing, then you might accept or tolerate or even see it as good, things that maybe aren’t good in a relationship.

Ben Crosby: I think that’s really true. We both had versions of this in our life where it becomes seen as, “I’m so brave doing this really hard thing and sticking it out.” And maybe in some cases, as you say, especially if you are married, that is something that you are called to do. But especially if in a dating relationship, maybe that’s actually just a sign that you shouldn’t be together.

Sarah Killam Crosby: And in marriage as well, if you’re experiencing a form of abuse, it can also become this script that allows you to put up with your marriage vows being broken and you being treated in a way that God would not want you to be treated. But I think that’s completely true that it does cause you to look for a partner in a different way. Both of us, because we dated other people before we met – we met, as I was saying, when I was thirty, and you were twenty-nine. But because of that, we were both looking really carefully and trying to suss out “Is this a person who can be a companion in this way to me?” And also, we’re both egalitarians. That was really important for us. It was very important, because I am a former pastor, that I married someone who respected that, who understood that, who thought that was a really good thing, who respected my intellect. And because of that, we’ve been such good partners for each other because we have this real admiration for each other. And that really colors our interactions and the way that we live together.

Ben Crosby: If this is going to get Plough into trouble, you can cut it if you like. But it breaks my heart to see people lay burdens on themselves of particular roles they have to play in marriage, a particular way their marriage has to look, that I don’t think Jesus lays on them. I think it makes things a lot harder for people in ways that it really doesn’t have to. And that’s really sad.

Sarah Killam Crosby: In evangelical circles there’s this idea that need a head of the home because if you get into a disagreement, someone has to break the tie.

Joy Clarkson: Great news! There’s Jesus!

Sarah Killam Crosby: There’s Jesus! And a friend of ours was saying “My husband and I have been married for nine years. We’ve never had a situation that actually required a tie being broken.” Of course, from time to time, we have disagreements. But if you trust in the presence of the Holy Spirit, if you trust in the grace of God in your relationship, and also just admire the person that you’re married to, it becomes so much easier to work through those things because you’re not approaching it as if there has to be a winner. You’re approaching it like, “OK, if this person sees something, and I respect and admire their opinion and know that they are listening to God and know that they have these reservations for a reason, of course, I’m going to want to talk through this and come to an agreement. I’m not just going to want to of ride roughshod over them and undercut them, but we’re doing this together and God has given us this gift in each other.”

Joy Marie Clarkson: It’s hard for me to imagine a world in which I fundamentally disagree with my husband about something, and he just went, “Well, I break the tie, and I’m going to do it.” It’s so alien to our relationship that it’s hard to even conceive of. But the more positive thing, and I’m curious if you guys agree, but I think that the other reason it is important to know that there are happy marriages and easy marriages is because a lot of people are really afraid of marriage, oftentimes for good reason, for very good reason. And I had a friend of mine right before she got engaged, she said, “I look around me, and all I have seen are unhappy marriages. And I love this person, and we feel called to the same things, and we share a religious outlook. But it’s hard for me to imagine a marriage that is peaceable and fruitful and mutually encouraging.” And the reason I think it’s good to know that there are happy marriages, that that is a life that is possible, is partially because I don’t want people to miss out on the gift if it is there for them. And I think it is such a powerful fear. And as the liturgy says, it is not to be taken in hand unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly. It is something to take quite seriously. But at the same time, I want there to be hope or possibility that there’s such a thing as a gift of marriage.

Ben Crosby: That’s right. And in a world in which marriage rates are going down, and many people are very worried about that for some combination of reasons – and I’m going to sound very Protestant again – but maybe gospel [rather than] law is a better way to motivate. Saying this is this duty that you just have to do is probably not really going to work. But I was blessed to have parents who really did have an incredibly happy marriage, which helped me see from the beginning that this can actually be a gracious and beautiful and lovely thing, not just something one has to do for the stability of society and propagation of the species.

Sarah Killam Crosby: The thing that I’ve come to realize about marriage, being married, is that just like with the gospel, it’s love that changes you. You can’t get there by your efforts. You can’t get there by talking yourself into it. But actually, the thing that changes us as human beings is encountering love. Some of the most beautiful moments in our marriage were moments when one or the other of us was really down on ourselves, angry with ourselves, upset about a mistake that we’d made, and the other person in that moment showed unconditional grace. It’s a really beautiful thing to have somebody who does that for you.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I couldn’t agree more. It makes me think of this very weird trippy song by Sunny Moon. And if you’ve never heard it, go listen to it after this, but it’s called “Just Before Dawn.” And it’s eerie. But the chorus is “Any night / You should have someone to hold / Tell you that you did OK / When your mind’s against you.” And there’s something that is quite simple but essential to me about that; it’s one of the gifts that marriage has been to me is to have somebody. One of the other lines is, “Who will tell me when my day is through / How I close my eyes / When I’ve done enough.” And there is this gift of having someone there who loves you completely, who can tell you that you’ve done enough, and who can speak words of life over you when your mind is against you.

Well, this has been such a wonderful conversation, and I feel like we could keep on going, but we have lives and things to do. So, I will end with the question I like to ask all of our guests, which is: What is one thing – and it could be an image, a person, a practice, anything – that reminds you that another life is possible?

Ben Crosby: That’s such a good question. I think for me, one thing that does this regularly is praying the daily office, the services of morning and evening prayer, this time of being steeped in psalmody and scripture and prayer. I think it’s a way for me to enter, a couple of times a day in a very intentional way, into what Karl Barth calls the strange new world of the Bible, a chance to be reminded that the story of the world is one that is about the abundant love of a God who is acting in the world to redeem and save and bring healing and peace and salvation. I can’t recommend that highly enough.

Joy Marie Clarkson: That was put very beautifully. And also, I’d like you to know that you’re in good company because Regis Professor Andrew Davison also said the same thing. But not in the same words and with the same passion. Sarah, how about you?

Sarah Killam Crosby: Yes, I think yes, I’m looking at it across from me right now. My favorite piece of religious art is the altar piece in Ghent by Van Eyck that has the lamb that’s on the altar with the blood coming out of it. It’s the slain lamb that’s raining. And in my research, this idea is what I what I look at: the idea of the atonement and that both in the greatest humiliation and the death of Christ, paradoxically, we find glorification and joy and new life. So that’s an idea that I’m thinking about all the time, day in and day out. But it never gets old, and it never stops amazing me that God has entered into our world and taken on human flesh and the person of Jesus Christ, and that because of his death and resurrection, we get to live a totally different life.

Joy Marie Clarkson: Amen. As a not deep addition to that, isn’t the Ghent altarpiece the one with the sheep with the really intense eyes?

Sarah Killam Crosby: Yes.

Joy Marie Clarkson: I’m hoping someday to see that in person now that Belgium is only a train ride away from London. I have a desire to go and see it at some point. Well, thank you both so much for joining us. This was so lovely. I hope people will go and read your articles, but thank you so much for joining us.