Episode 100

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hey everybody michael gunger here i'm science mike welcome to the hundredth episode of the liturgist podcast [Music] you probably found us on google maybe you are searching about the enneagram or you were searching wondering if god exists at all and were afraid to ask anyone to asked a giant anonymous machine and it sent you to us maybe you were trying to figure out how the church should relate to lgbtq people or you're wrestling with all of the racial tension and animosity that undergirds american politics and society happened somehow you ended up here either through google or on the email recommendation of a friend where maybe neither of you would admit publicly that you're talking about us [Music] the liturgies podcast has been downloaded over 100 million times and this marks our 100th episode this show has a complete and absolutely total focus on you the things you're wrestling with in your life and that means we don't talk a lot about how we got here or where we're going so we thought for this episode it would be helpful to turn back look at the rear view mirror and see how these hundred episodes came to be and why so we can also paint a picture for you about what the next 100 episodes could look like so i was a christian worship leader well i was an atheist christian worship leader and was in a really strange time of my life i just really just very recently to the story i'm about to tell had decided okay i'm done with my calling myself a believer or anything and let it all go and then shortly after that i had come across this book by rob bell what do we talk about when we talk about god i always loved rob bell i went to his church for a while lisa and i went there when when we lived in michigan secretly we went to this church and so he said a lot of the stuff in that book that was really intriguing to me because i i had long ago kind of let go of the traditional theistic lens but why should we and could we talk about god in a way that is still interesting and useful so i read that and i i found it intriguing and i enjoyed it so he came to denver to do a talk on that book we talk about when we talk about god and so i went and enjoyed it and rob invited me to this party afterwards at a friend's house [Music] [Applause] so there's all these pastors there and progressive christians and then there was this weird guy sitting over in the corner why were you there why are you at that party oh rob was doing a book tour yeah he's asked fighting plans i said i should meet him in denver and you were in florida and a bunch of my friends were going to that one too thing yeah yeah so which you were an atheist when you went to that rob bell thing oh yeah total atheist like a year year and a half before i met you i went to that rob thing and had a mystical experience and then just started ripping my life to pieces in response to that so i like went through my religious estrangement period went through kind of a reckoning as i talked publicly about how my beliefs were changing and uh i guess somehow rob just figured you and i should uh as two i mean the atheist deacon and the atheist worship leader that's a natural combo to me [Music] and rob knowing that i'm a bit odd myself i think and kind of knowing what i was going through in my journey just brought me into the room of all these people introduced me hey guys this is michael gunger and he said hey mike what's happening in the brains of people when michael gets up on a stage and sings songs and they lift their hands to a mythical construct in the sky and mike i like that phrasing mike launched into a beautiful brain centered explanation of the worship experience i was you can imagine my delighted laughter because you hear it every week when mike talks about that kind of thing and uh i was immediately like oh man i need to know this guy and so we just kind of laser beamed in at that party when i really got hooked he told me some of his axioms that he had been using to try to make sense of his mystical experience you know he had done all these studies and read all andrew newberg stuff about like how spirituality impacts the brain spiritual practice is really healthy so he wanted that in his life but didn't know how to be honest intellectually so he came up with these axioms god is at least the natural forces that created and sustain the universe as experienced via a psychosocial model in human brains that naturally emerges from innate biases even if that is a comprehensive definition for god the pursuit of this personal subjective experience can provide meaning peace and empathy for others and that electrocuted my body to the point that i put it on my record that i was working on so we became friends uh and then i was getting back in into spiritual practice again and was like looking through the landscape of spiritual materials for myself that i would like to engage in you know like what can i use if i want to pray to god if i want to sing to god if i want to meditate if i want what is there for people like me who can't buy into the blood sacrifice stuff who can't believe that the bible is literally the words of some being out in way outer outer space or something um but still would love to have spiritual practice what could that be and as a guy who had spent my entire life making art towards the end of people experiencing god i thought maybe i could be part of something i think i have some tools in my toolkit that could be of use to that end but i can't do it myself i thought of mike i thought what a weird a sciency which it was at that party apparently that our friend sarah called him science mike and then i picked up on that and started calling him that as well and then as did rob and then everybody and then pete holmes and it was done and it was done and mike mccarthy faded into the sea of history so i called mike i was like mike you got a second where were you you're like in a meeting or something in a conference room we called the west wing which is up in the executive suite of our building yeah and i saw you on caller id and i said hey sorry it's a client i got to take this they walked out wow and walked down the stairwell and did what i usually did pace the parking lot out behind our building that also happened for client calls by the way that wasn't unique to you but what did i say i'm asking because i have no idea i mean if you combine our episodic memories together you are still probably a deficient person that's true okay but you remember that i i didn't know you were in a meeting i remember a few weeks ago i remember that and then i remember you saying you had an idea to the effect of you wanted to create the the thing you led with was art is usually so intermingled with the identity of a creator yeah and like you had this like i like what an idealized art that is about spirituality be removed from the identity of a creator it's like fascinating treatise okay but then where he got me he's like what if we made art for people an experience for people that didn't require any specific belief whatsoever it's like what would a what would a what would a worship experience for an atheist look like and i had been obsessed with tonya lerman who was an anthropologist when she was studying prayer one of the ways she studied prayer was to like use garage band to make meditations that had some music with them and some guidance and then they would give people ipods preloaded with these things and then with the control group next thing you know you've got to study it's like okay so we see the outcomes of all this research related to meditation and prayer but nobody's everybody's designing spiritual experiences out of a tradition well what if we just like we kept the things from the traditions that were validated by evidence and tossed everything else out and just like sat down and engineered spiritual experiences for people which was my response to you and you got really excited and then there was the liturgists [Music] what you're listening to is the very first thing the liturgists ever recorded it's called vapor a meditation most scientists estimate that the universe is 13.77 billion years old and that the earth is 4.54 billion years old while human beings have only been on earth for less than 200 000 years to put those numbers in perspective if you stretched out your arms and your entire wingspan was representative of earth's geological history and then you took a nail file and took just a little bit of the edge off of your fingernail you would have just wiped out all human history [Music] liturgy work of the people part of that work is art created to shift our gaze toward god another part is gathering to worship together but there may be no work of the people more powerful than prayer did you know that scientists have studied prayer you may be surprised at what they found people who pray for 30 minutes every day have lower blood pressure reduced stress i remember when we made this first ep vapor and i didn't quite know what to expect if anybody would listen to it but i loved it even though it was wildly unsuccessful we decided to keep making him you have your breath rob bell was kind enough to record one with us the exhale the inhale this life force that gently and quietly and unassumingly surges through you in and out [Music] and doubt will pull you out to sea like a riptide or hold your head under as you drown this one is called saturday recorded by our beloved friend rachel held evans triggered by an image a question something the pastor said something that doesn't add up the unlikelihood of it all the too good to be true there are questions that wait in the shadows doubts that lurk until we shut the lights off [Music] we spent a ton of money and time on these things which you still can listen to by the way wherever you listen to your music but we are making one of these liturgies every month and just bleeding money very few people listened or cared and we realized that most people didn't seem to be seeking a highly nuanced spiritual experience recorded in the form of an ep that was accessible for people without beliefs so we thought what should we do we really loved the ideas we loved our mission and what we were setting out to do so the thought came maybe we should start a podcast in order to give a little bit more depth and nuance to what we were trying to do with these liturgies so season one starts out with you picking up the guitar oh yeah and asking people which chords are more creative what's a more creative chord here's a chord there's a g chord is that a more creative chord is this a more creative chord welcome to the liturgist podcast i'm michael gunger i'm science mike and i'm lisa pano that was the genesis of the liturgical spirit in the garage right yes denver and then and we figured out like well it shouldn't just be two guys hosting this podcast oh that's right right so then we called the original third co-host of the liturgist podcast who's still technically never been fired tech yeah not just technically in truth lisa pano lisopano hello hey alyssa hey what's going on so uh guess what we've made it all the way to 100 episodes and you thank you for being a host for a hundred episodes of the liturgist podcast oh my gosh i feel like i'm winning in a war oh my god it's happening i am honored i am honored i feel so blessed oh my gosh you guys i was in episodes and i haven't listened i would have only listened to two so 98 of them i was ever going to catch up well you've been a host on the entire uh the entire time so we just appreciate your we appreciate your contribution to the work of the liturgists i really i really feel like i contributed a lot and i really am so glad that i'm finally getting the recognition i deserve thank you all right i was recording i was recording this call just so you know oh my god don't tell me it's after it's done it's my sister by the way i was in town in denver and we decided to record some episodes while i was there and i think we we did the first two which was creativity about the chords and then genesis and evolution yeah that was hot button right there hot button because a couple of things happened around the time of our first episode that had nothing to do with creativity one i was a guest on pete holmes you made it weird podcast and so a bunch of pete holmes that was right then wow we're like what's go what's the litter just what okay well i like pete holmes i'll check this out so a bunch of non-religious people listening to the podcast at the same time that uh ken ham and the folks at answers in genesis decided that you were public enemy number one i remember my favorite phrase of that point of our work was the liturgists represent a greater danger to the faith than atheism yeah yes and so this like massive controversy swirling around our episode called creativity led us then to uh say in no uncertain terms where we thought the science on creation left yeah and it was like super controversial like i can't believe i mean imagine if we imagine if we release genesis and evolution now we're like hey god didn't create people out of dirt it would be a yawn no it would be like so yeah but back then big deal oh my gosh yeah so then we got pete ends for the bible episode who would have been the first guest on the liturgist podcast wow yeah so peters was our first guest the first time we had to figure out how to record someone remotely on the podcast and that started this arc like of a blend of religious and non-religious people talking always about something at least a portion of them found deeply controversial well the other person was like i don't even understand the conflict here um and that started like helping us find our audience and find it like a lot quicker than we expected to i remember i got emails from our our host at the time like hey this unlimited plan isn't that unlimited what are you doing wow because there were so many downloads coming in and then people had trouble they were getting errors in itunes because it's just nobody set up a server for us to get wow that many downloads all at once i i wasn't exactly a star in the evangelical church in tallahassee at that point yeah so i didn't have a whole lot to lose you're still a southern baptist in that first season i was yeah but i wasn't like teaching sunday school by that point i'd step down from like any leadership capacity so what was happening for me was this like dream come true i can help people who feel estranged from their communities right like you know like axioms when i figured out you did that blog post and all these people were emailing i was like oh this is not just tallahassee people and so like the better the litter just did uh it seemed like the fuel powering the liturgists was the gunger brand just being lit on fire and destroyed and i was working for an ad agency i mean i didn't care if we made any money at this but all of your income came from music and christian music and the liturgies podcast was getting really successful and so like my secret nefarious goal of helping people who felt spiritually estranged was being satisfied but at the cost of your entire professional life and we didn't have any idea how the liturgist was ever going to give us an income and we had no clue i remember we had a meeting with like a a manager to talk about like should we start making records and you y'all explained the record model to me and i was like that's a terrible business no why would anyone ever do that and uh i was like that's a lot of capital up front for potentially almost no upside like that explain the business to me so welcome to the music industry uh so that didn't go so i had like in that first season this like fear of what it was going to do to you at the same time i was spending like two and a half to three hours a day reading and replying to emails geez some people i'd never met um because very quickly as early as genesis and evolution and the episode on the bible and then of course we did spiral dynamics season one and so that had a lot of like heady questions then when we dropped lost and found what kinds of emails i was getting from people oh man they were heartbreaking because it just seemed like it didn't seem like it was literally thousands of people a month telling me gosh i go to church i don't believe any of this stuff and i'm afraid to tell my spouse or my parents or my kids or and this was so common i'm a pastor yeah i'm in charge of a church i don't believe any of this stuff anymore and i don't know what to do and i loved seeing that we had created this podcast as a side hustle on our side hustle yeah that like created the space for people to name this thing that before that moment they didn't have the courage to name [Music] lost and found were these episodes that spoke permission for me to let go of the god who i had believed in for so long to hear mike mccarth's story to hear the words from vishnu it was like this final step of saying it's okay to move forward in this and it was such an amazing freedom [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourself or feeling connected to the people that we love better betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through betterhelp you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions betterhelp has licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better health that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-com slash liturgists it's so weird to think how different the landscape felt at that point like the cultural landscape even like this is pre-trump this is the culture's been through a lot in the last in the last decade uh five five years ago it feels like a long time ago when you think about where the cultural conversation was at especially within religion well i think one thing we did well especially early was transcend something that was polarized yeah and there was the room and the space to do that then people actually celebrated it i mean so one thing i've always been passionate about in the liturgists is creating media that changes people's minds but we don't have a prescribed place for their mind to be changed to [Laughter] like we try to equip people to change their own minds on something yeah in a way that we may or may not agree with at all and that was a lot easier in 2014 than it is today i mean that doesn't change the fact that there was like so much white knuckle tear when we got to uh episode 20. ooh lgbt yeah which by the way oh my gosh one i'm always amazed and grateful for how many people i meet who said that either changed their theology or helped them come out and those are those are very large numbers of people in both of those groups but i went back and listened to it man problematic more powerful what would he mean both powerful and problematic especially me like i like conflated wildly sexual orientation and gender because i was i didn't have a critical lens of social theory to back it up with i was just like biology yeah you know what i mean so i was i didn't consider at that point human sexuality is any way special or distinct compared to anything else that the animal kingdom and so i would just like literally conflate sexes and biological sex gender identity and sexual orientation constantly i wish i could do that over again but uh seeing how i mean i've literally met people let me go farther i meet people every month who went from evangelical to out of the closet and in a same-sex marriage and that journey began with that episode [Music] hi my name is sydney king and i'm calling from spokane washington i started listening to the liturgists in 2015 it completely changed my world i was already questioning what i'd heard my whole life about christianity and the hatred i had seen in the church towards marginalized communities there's so many episodes that mean so much to me but the episode that completely changed my life was the lgbtq episode at the time i didn't realize i was gay but listening to the stories of what people had gone through absolutely changed me i saw that true love is something completely different from what i had been taught love was i sat in my car and i cried while listening to the voices of people who had been harmed so much by an organization i was actively involved in i left the baptist church that i was attending and i can no longer be silent when i see the oppression of others [Music] over the last four years i've listened to the lgbtq episode five times the first time i thought about how i disagreed with you and how disappointed i was in michael the second time i simply sat there and silently listened the third time i cried the fourth time i cried and even laughed at how concerned about the fundamentalists you guys sounded the fifth time i listened to it with my wife we have five kids and today there are five more young kids on this earth who can grow up to become whoever they are knowing that their mom and dad will love affirm and celebrate with them no matter what one of the other things that we learned and we're learning as some of the episodes like episode 20 lgbtq and then we did race in america black and white and we realized we were starting to get into topics that we weren't and couldn't be the experts on [Laughter] we started with like right in our wheelhouse right yes we started with if if people would have us as their interviewees uh these are the topics they should interview us about um but then as we kept moving through topics we realized like we can't be the only voices on this topic if we're going to have any hope of doing this topic justice so there was that element of it and then there was also the element at the same time with seeing how these episodes were impacting people's lives and how the podcast was becoming more than it was certainly more than subtext for our liturgies at that point it was actually like yeah liturgies just stopped yeah they stopped but it was this like and it wasn't even just content it was it was starting to be a sort of community it was starting to be a sort of place for people to feel safe to to belong within and and through all of that we're like what how do we how do we meet these people where they're at and that's again why we started it wasn't for the podcast or even for the liturgies it was i feel alone in wanting to practice spirituality how can i not be that's so that's what yeah started it so now there's all these people feeling the exact same thing and now they have at least a little bit of a release valve to be able to listen to a podcast and not feel totally alone in their thoughts and hear other people telling stories and hear other people wrestling through some of the same things they are to have their minds expanded their hearts opened but we're social primates like we want to do this with each other we want to belong we want to connect and so we we thought how can we have these topics be something more than just thoughts and actually be with each other and so we started the first gatherings and they were called belong at the beginning that was such a good name it wasn't it got stolen by some people that we love and respect [Laughter] probably didn't know that we had a problem we didn't know we were doing 49-person events called belongs they were filling arenas with them like okay how about they're called something else and so the gatherings the belong events and then as we continued to do different topics that we felt like needed more voices we eventually just got to the place like can we have more consistent voices like all the time because it really it wasn't just the topics that we couldn't speak about anymore we realized even topics that we're knowledgeable about hearing from people from different intersections of identity hearing from different perspectives religiously wherever people are at we found that it enriched the conversation and we finally got to the point where we like do you think we could add somebody kind of as hosts we had a list and at the top of the potential season four co-host lists were [Music] hillary mcbride and william matthews they weren't four or five or seven they were one and two so we said here's the deal we don't know what we're doing we are both chronically withdrawn loners who collaborate somehow we expect this to be extraordinarily difficult would you be interested in trying something that could be a nightmare for you and that was that was our real pitch and uh both william and hillary said yes so hillary you are i think it's fair to say a busy person yeah that's true finishing your phd working with clients traveling the world doing all sorts of things when we called you to see if you were interested in being one of the hosts last season why the hell did you say yes yes i said yes to working on the liturgists because of the same reason that i said yes to doing a phd i really love to have challenging conversations that encourage me and other people to grow it feels really important for me to be a part of something where i'm being stretched to my edges i'm being asked to think about things from different perspectives and as much as the four of us have a lot of stuff in common we actually see the world in different ways too we have different life experience and i knew that i would grow that there would be something in it for me to have conversations with people who who would stretch me who would help me see the world differently and would help me flourish in that way [Music] my first time on the liturgist podcast was when we did the black and white episode with propaganda that was amazing yeah and so and then i think you you'd ask me to be on a few more episodes here and there just to do a little segment or so um i think for me one of the reasons i wanted to join the liturgists was i've always in my own life felt a little bit like i'm a misfit i'm a bit of a rebel i was always kind of like the guy that was like uh is this really what it says it is even even while being a true believer i was always you know carrying a lot of doubt and skepticism which i just found to be really helpful to see the whole picture and so one of the reasons i love the liturgists because i was just a fan listening as well too um was because you guys were talking about things that no one else was talking about and especially things that mainstream christianity didn't want people to talk about conversations um around sexuality conversations around theology conversations around atheism and doubt and all those things that are typically taboo to talk about i just loved how brazen how bold how just real the liturgist was and so honestly i felt like it was a big honor when you guys asked me to be a part of it it's been such a pleasure getting to know you more and having you part of the family man i don't know if people know from listening to the podcast we really like each other like there are lots of people who i have conversations with where the conversation is stimulating but you guys feel like my brothers you feel like family to me you feel like some of the most important people in my life and that has been such an unexpected gift of this journey of being a part of the liturgist and i'm just so grateful that aside from the opportunity to have these conversations that feel stimulating and enriching and how it's helping other people i just really like having you and mike and william in my life right that's that's part of it for me now too you matter to me [Music] we were sitting in a hot tub with uh hillary at one of the last kin events mike and i uh discussing the liturgist network and laughing about how it sort of had some parallels in our minds to like the avengers model [Laughter] we've been trying to identify through the years and we've happened to get on board some bad asses like hillary and william and you're going to continue to meet more and more badasses and we like the idea of the the podcast sort of the front door of the liturgists being a place where all the different characters within the liturgist universe interact and have our big storylines together but we also like the idea of sort of having these offshoot one-off movies podcasts if you will um where you know some of our differences can really take their full form so ask science mike is mike's show i have a podcast called this those are very different shows a little bit at science mike we just do the exact same thing every week with no variance or change whatsoever you've been varying it lately a little bit i invented well not invented i created two additional formats if you'll notice they follow precisely the same structure like within that format it's always consistent wait so what were the avengers characters that we talked about in the hot tub it varied a lot yeah we had a lot at first somebody said you were the the vulnerability hulk yeah it was hulk but instead of anger vulnerability so it's just like you wouldn't like me when i'm vulnerable but you're also really iron manny i feel like you got all the but without the snark and grandiose sure not personality wise but as far as powers the mind to be able to like you've crafted your own suit of armor with your mind and your own these powerful tools i don't know i was doctor strange there's no question hillary was captain america yeah william was william was also the hulk wasn't he yes oh yeah william was definitely the hulk because he's like thoughtful kind of quiet until he's not yeah he's still thoughtful but until you say trump and then then the beast comes and then william smash [Laughter] so that the liturgist network is something we want to continue to build into the future as part of the vision of the liturgists which has never been about two dudes even though this started as our friendship our vision from the beginning was never about us and my thoughts and mike's thoughts but how can we be together listen converse practice presence with one another because we live in this extremely divisive divided fractured culture with this side warring against this side and if you if you want to believe in god and love jesus then you better also believe this about this issue and this issue in this issue and if you're going to be a science person and not believe in those superstitious things then you know what are you doing practicing meditation what are you doing talking about god so having these like cross sections of humanity be together in a space in order to to love one another to love ourselves to grow to be enriched that's always been at the heart of it so this liturgist network that allows us to start new projects and new works of art and new methods of communication and and places that you know once people maybe don't need the hospital of the liturgist podcast so much that there's other places to go to continue their exploration and their being together within the whole liturgist universe and that's kind of how we see the long long haul of this thing it's not just about a podcast it's not just about gatherings it's not like these are all sort of offshoots of this universe where we're together it seems like there's if you're a part of any exclusive spiritual tradition there's a lot of media for you yeah there's a lot of things for you to process that with there's books there's films there's whatever i mean any exclusive faith tradition not just the different denominations of christianity and we care a lot about inclusive spirituality that's also inclusive of people of no spirituality whatsoever we care a lot about non-judgment we care a lot about non-duality we care about in inclusion representing the fullness of all this amazing species is capable of and can be and our vision for how we we take that forward is to use the popularity of the liturgist podcast to incorporate more and more voices to have more and more people contributing to get you you know get someone on your radar that may not have been there but then also to promote not only other podcasts but other media that drives forward thoughtful and evocative discussions about the human spirit and how it interacts with the world the liturgists means the work of the people and one thing that we've always wanted to do more and we're figuring out ways to do now is incorporate more work of the people and there are so many of you out there who are extremely talented creative people and we want to finally make a system to figure out who you are and what you do out there so that we can cooperate more on this work together people tell us that all the time after events they send us patreon messages you send us emails hey i can blank i can program i can make music i you know have experience running social organizations i have done this i've done that and i'm like every time wow that's so cool and then i have no idea how to keep track of everyone who's offered to help or what we do so then when we turn around and have an idea uh then we don't know who we would talk to about it and um so many people who listen to the podcast like we don't we don't we don't know you we don't know who you are you just listen to the podcast and what do we do put out a call so then we put out a call like we did when we said we want to hire an associate producer and 300 people send in resumes and then um you know michael and i look at them and get sad and confused because we don't know how to review 300 resumes and the cycle repeats wherein we go back to making another podcast episode instead of a larger work of the people so our friend tanner tanner who is really incredible has gotten very involved in uh gosh everything the liturgies is doing um and so tanner and brent put their heads together and came up with a way for us to actually organize people into some type of collective collaboration and you'll be able to find it today by going to the liturgist.com contribute this is a community organizing tool um where you go in and you tell us what you're good at that could be your graphic designer or you can translate and things in a different language or you have a lot of expertise with non-profits or your community organizer you shoot video you make great photos whatever it is you have a talent you have a gift and you'd like to use that we'd like you to go to the literatures.com contribute and tell us who you are and what you're good at and then when we have a thing we're working on that's where we're going to go and look for people to work with to collaborate with and to be clear we're not talking about you volunteering we're talking about having a business model and a budget and hiring people to do things um and i think that's going to let us push forward with a lot uh that we've wanted to do and have been able to do forever we've been working on like how could we make an app that helps helps people access what the liturgies is up to more easily and the way we got to know tanner is tanner spearheaded people building an app for us and it really opened our eyes to what's possible when we actually collaborate together with all the people who listen to this show which i'm always really really kind of amazed and overwhelmed with how talented you all are so this is going to help us organize all that together again it's at the liturgist.com slash contribute hi my name is bree and i'm from the chicago region i would say that besides the enneagram episode which helped me as an enneagram one feel a lot less like a critical asshole all the time i would say your episodes on suffering did a great deal for me personally about a year and a half ago my husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor and we are only 30 years old that's been really hard he doesn't really know what i'm going through and i can't specifically know what he's going through so it's isolating even though we're in it together and you guys you helped me realize that suffering is suffering is suffering is suffering and that heart is hard no matter your circumstances and if they happen to be vastly different from one another i would also like to thank you guys for all you do for this community you're just really helpful in times of need thank you i've been trying to figure out this whole time who our audience is yeah it's really hard i mean i knew we started out with a mix of like evangelicals and recovering evangelicals from the intersection of like gunger music and answers in genesis on one end and then on the other end i brought like pete holmes weirdos an atheist because i've been doing so much work in the atheist community and then we put that in a blender so already you've got some pretty different perspectives but that was season one and in season one like we would get you know 10 or 20 000 downloads in an episode which by the way is an amazing number of downloads for most podcasts but we get a lot more downloads than that today and that means the audience has grown and i'm always trying to figure who they are so i started surveying people and as a pretty small sample of people people who've been to a liturgist gathering because i'm always trying to figure out how we like best serve you in our time together and i would ask people like do you think the literature's gathering was too spiritual not spiritual enough or just right and 49 of people would say it was just right and 51 was perfectly split between two spiritual and not spiritual enough right so and split right so less than half of the people are happy with it but what should we do utter and total disagreement about what would be good so then we ask people would you go to the literatures gathering would you rather go to a church or a neutral venue like a theater and 48 percent of people said oh a church and 52 people said a neutral venue and we asked if people felt strongly or not strongly about that 85 percent of people felt very strongly then we were like well should we do the eucharist at the liturgist gathering 51 said yes 49 said no but now the fuels very strongly goes up to 93 so there's been this notion in that data man we are just screwed like whatever we do it's not just that people have different needs in many cases giant segments of our audience have oppositional needs so let's put it like out of hypothetical and into practical terms uh we did an episode called the ethics of f dash dash dash ing uh which i thought was super clever and funny not because we're afraid to say fuck and we included a segment in there with a guy named christopher west right and christopher west is a theology of the body person in the catholic church and we were trying to talk about sexual ethics and what we figured out is the same guest who could help someone from a conservative christian background of any denomination open their eyes on an issue like christopher west is the exact same voice that will deeply traumatize our intersection of trans listeners the same person opens up the eyes of one group saying wow i should think about this differently the way this person talks who i thought i would agree with actually disturbs me and it opens up a time for contemplation whereas this other person says i thought the liturgists were safe i thought they cared about me and now they've brought on this person and given them a platform to say something that i don't just just disagree with but puts my legal standing in society in jeopardy which is already very tenuous and that um that dynamic has been the thing that most oftenly makes me think about hanging up the podcast mic i am not credentialed in any way i'm not a therapist i'm not a doctor but that notion of first do no harm is vital to me and so the fact that our audience is so d so wildly different i mean we have almost an equal number of conservative evangelicals and atheists and both of those groups at this point are probably smaller than our lgbt audience um we have we have people who are very concerned about the sanctity of marriage and i don't mean that in a same-sex marriage context but are very that think monogamy is a really core part of human society and then we have like a pretty decently sized polyamorous audience and trying to host discussions and times of sharing and times of exploring around important ideas that involve that many different perspectives in the framework of the terrifying political polarization we're in like it's not unjustified there are really existential stakes involved in global politics right now that's not just america i mean all over the world the political system seems to be tearing itself apart in some ways an overdue reckoning and in other ways something that only furthers to deepen oppress and marginalize people [Music] it's for me there's this tension of the fear of making an action that can cause pain and those emails we get saying i didn't commit suicide because of this episode or that episode and we can't figure out how to connect with our audience because we don't have an audience we have a vast group of people who don't know each other who are united only by the fact that they share rejection in common [Music] i think the most important thing that the literatures have given me over the years is just a seat at the table unconditional no matter what i'm going through thinking feeling my seat was taken from me and when it felt like i had nowhere else to go there was there was always the litter just there saying welcome have a seat from the other side of the world these voices came into my life my home my car my day and they took away my aloneness in my doubt they stood alongside me in my inherited legacy of christianness and church and grieved with me in my disappointment they laughed with me the craziness they raged with me at the injustice and they cried with me at the loss and trauma and they're still helping me determine what is baby and what is bath water they're still beside me as i keep challenging and refining my ideas of god and faith and love and justice so thank you mike and vishnu for being hopeful enough to believe that we were all out here and for making something for us and yeah for helping us to not be alone and for introducing us to all the other wonderful voices that you've brought into our world yeah that's been a really hard aspect of of this work is to try to say the things that we feel like need to be said especially for people who are being bullied especially for the people who whose voices are often squashed in our society um but also to not demonize anybody to not because we disagree with somebody just create another group for an us versus them war um how many of our movements i think maybe all of them in society uh and religiously you know it's like screw that group we're the new group and then it's a matter of time for well screw that i'm the new you know like if we got rid of the entire right right now in this country how long would it be before the left split up into two camps it would not take long we need them to fight against that's how we work going back to those early days again like we were the them in some ways and the us another way like we didn't fit we straddled all these lines we we wanted to talk about science but we also wanted to talk about faith and then i was an artist and i was like can artists have us at the table too and people who like creating can all of this stuff somehow be in the same conversation and that is messy it's messy too to speak what we find to be true but to not do it in a way that's at the expense of the humanity of anybody so that there's always this tension it's just built into it it's like you can't please everybody you can't be safe for everybody and our friend mickey scott bay jones had a beautiful she's done it at a gathering and mike's talked about it before it's really beautiful this idea of a brave space and so over the last few seasons as we've been learning some of that we have constantly tried to how can we serve the audience and where they're at but also push on the things that need to be pushed on and confront the things that need to be confronted and do it in a way that honors everyone uh that's hard to do so for me when i think about the future of the liturgists i think there's this center of gravity of kind of being a place for the main podcast anyway the liturgist podcast of being a place that can be a sort of hospital a sort of place of safety for people who who need it um who have had religious trauma who have felt alone in their spiritual journey who have felt spiritually homeless in some way i think that's going to always be some sort of sense of middle of the mission of the podcast but when i think about the future of the liturgists i i love imagining pathways into not just healing from trauma but and and just deconstructing or whatever but also like moving forward and thriving with our spirituality together with our lives together for so often like spiritual connection was limited to brick and mortar and like who was in your neighborhood and your tribe and whatever right there physically and geography and now that we have the internet we have these like all these ways of connecting and all these ways of communicating and and we can use the internet to find each other physically and stuff too and i love the idea of the liturgists continuing into the future us doing more work not only with the main podcast which we want to do more of in fact i think it'd be great to eventually be able to go weekly if we can build the infrastructure to handle that sort of thing but to also provide other avenues of connection and health for people in this space that it's not just for the people who need the hospital and then they move on and now they're done with the liturgists but we've got other podcasts we have other events and we have other ways of connecting and being with each other for people that still valuable that sort of non-judgment uh a place to grow where you're not going to be judged or where you're belonging does not depend on your belief i think you don't have to just be injured for that to be a a beautiful gift to your life where we started there is one word that i think is so perfect to describe everything we were about or at least people connected to and that was deconstruction yeah like just i i've heard the word deconstruction so many times in the last four years um yeah it's like practically instead of hello people say deconstruction to me you know and it's interesting that hospital you mentioned it so much was about people in faith transition in some way but as we deconstructed we didn't just deconstruct our faith we deconstructed social issues and politics and and the very nature of existence and reality yeah himself and self and that led us to different places and the liturgies podcast started as a hospital for deconstruction but it moved into all these these other larger things and it made us realize even more than we knew at the very beginning and we did know season one episode one the media universe doesn't represent all of humanity at least not well and the spiritual media universe is maybe even worse at it yeah and one thing that it's like excites me about how much the allergies has grown is the opportunity to take the most compelling writers and speakers and songwriters and painters and sculptors people whose work has such a potential to influence the way that we all see the world and we all relate to each other and to use the success of this podcast to create opportunities to highlight things that otherwise would go unseen by most people and to take things that might be seen by other people but have them be seen by more people because i've become increasingly convinced in the last year that when we get in touch with ourselves and we become open to our feelings our emotional landscape become less afraid of the different ways we can feel we're actually primed more to be transformed and changed and inspired by art and by beauty and so the commitment we had at the beginning of everything we did before there was a podcast at all that art and beauty were capable of speaking a truth that was unspeakable in any other way i feel like this five-season arc of questioning everything and in the process learning who we are not just us as podcasts but all of us in this community maybe has prepared us in a way we've never been prepared before to be changed by beauty so here we are a hundred episodes in in our fifth season and as always things are changing but here's a few specific new and wild wonderful things in the liturgist world one we are running ads to help you find things that will interest you and help us make more podcasts more often and make lots of other great creative work from an ever increasing cast of contributors two we want the liturgists to be true to its namesake we want it to be the work of the people so whether you play an instrument translate things into different languages program code if you're a graphic designer literally whatever talents you have if you think they could be put to use in this movement go to the liturgist.com contribute where we're building a directory of makers and creators and world changers we'd love to figure out how to organize and work together three for those of you who want to help our show happen financially but aren't interested in the patreon thing we're going to start adding donate buttons so you can just send currency no strings attached no expectations and most importantly no password to keep track of and finally number four we're super excited in the very near future we're going to launch the liturgists app in the app store for both ios and google play that's gonna be one place on every device you can find everything we're doing if you want to be the first person to be a part of that app launch make sure you go to our website and sign up for our email list that's what's new with the liturgists [Music] [Music] it felt super weird to do an episode about the podcast for the 100th episode of the podcast it seems kind of appropriate like meta you know doesn't seem inappropriate just weird [Music] it'd be fun to do the 101st episode about the 100th episode [Music] see now i'm interested just an increasingly recursive meta analysis it just degrades over time like a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy a review of a review of a review of a review [Music] we should have done it in like seven parts every day oh and he's talking about the previous day this is why we brought on professionals into the letter just to head off ideas like these before they happen because it sounds like a really good idea what has been fun for me though is hearing your stories of what this podcast has done and what it has meant to you and so i'd love to wrap up this hundredth episode by telling you all what you mean to us without you i wouldn't sleep all at night without you i would feel alone without you i would be lost in ignorance about the issues that people of different backgrounds face the different challenges we all have going about our daily lives without you i'd be bored and stagnant so a hundred episodes is one way of measuring the last few years but another is the fact that in some bizarre way mp3 files and rss feeds and social media and business plans and ticket sales have led to something far more valuable for me that's real honest and genuine community so all of you liturgists i just want to say thank you for being our home [Music] we love you thanks for listening [Music] everybody science mike and i michael gunger have been your hosts for this podcast featured guests were alyssa pano hilary mcbride and william matthews matt ososki and myself edited this episode the episode was scored by me using some songs also from on earth my project with tyler chester brent cradle offered management support victory paul mazzano produced this episode and thanks to corey pig for production management thanks so much to our patrons and to all of you who make this work so important and beautiful all the love [Music] you