Aaron Renn
Podcast
JON TYSON: Urban Church in the Negative World
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JON TYSON: Urban Church in the Negative World

This week’s podcast is a very interesting and at times provocative discussion with Jon Tyson, founding senior pastor of Church in the City in New York. Church of the City is a multisite, non-denominational, charismatic megachurch in New York. Tyson is renowned as a very entrepreneurial and successful New York City church planter.

He discusses:

  • How to deal with the constant population churn in the city? (Watch clip).

  • The differences between pre-Covid and post-Covid New York

  • How Covid wiped out 70% of what Tim Keller and others built over the previous 35 years in terms of New York City church plants. (Watch clip).

  • The flow of church planters into New York drying up

  • What's unique about Generation Z? Includes that they don't want to plant churches. (Watch clip).

  • Why New York is not as different from the rest of the country culturally as it used to be. (Watch clip).

  • The impact of the migrant influx on Manhattan

  • The future of the cultural engagement model of church

  • What he thinks of Trumpist culture war Christianity

  • How he talks about flashpoint cultural issues

  • Advice for church planters thinking about New York City.

Tyson gives a lot of helpful insight, particularly for pastors.

Here’s the video of our conversation, recorded last week.

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Discussion about this episode

Really appreciated the whole discussion - thought it was illuminating from start to finish

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Good discussion. Aaron didn't spell it out, but Tyson's observation that "sexual minorities now speak from a posture of cultural power" would seem to be a strong counterargument to the "It's always been Negative World" mentality as promulgated by Keller, Russell Moore, etc.

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He does seem to believe there's been a cultural shift in NYC, though he sees it driven by the pandemic rather than my 2014 date.

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Regarding 30% of Gen Z identifying as LGBTQ+ (mentioned at ~21:30), it's worthwhile for Christians (especially pastors) to understand that almost none of the increase compared to earlier generations is in "lesbian" or "gay" (i.e., actually inclined toward homosexual sin). Instead, the increase is in categories like Bisexual, Queer, Questioning, or Asexual*, which allow someone to feel unique or "oppressed" but also exclusively date the opposite sex if that's what they want.

There has been an increase in "trans" identification, which is a cause for concern because of the evil that frequently follows in the guise of medical care. Since that evil has come to light in the past few years, however, it's worth watching the trends to see if that identity stops increasing or declines.

*As an aside, I identified as asexual to my classmates (I think the term then was "neutral") for several months at age 15 when I went to a private Catholic prep school. The real reason for doing that was straightforward: I didn't have a job or family money, figured - probably correctly - that I had no chance with any of the girls there, and thought it was an easy way to avoid the humiliation of being rejected.

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Truth seems somewhere in the middle on this. A lot of meaningless identification. I had a leftist friend once who seemed to be engaged in meaningless identification as "queer" while married to a woman.

Obligate homosexual behavior seems to be biologically ingrained from an early age and very hard to modify, but willingness to engage in bisexual behavior seems to be highly culturally conditioned, even if there's also a biological component (largely "openness to experience") that interacts with that cultural conditioning. And our cultural conditioning has been moving towards one in which these acts are praiseworthy instead of shameful.

My suspicion is that many of the women who identify as B or Q but don't appear to act on it are sincerely signaling that they would engage in homosexual behavior under some set of "ideal conditions" that never come to fruition. Just as I wouldn't doubt the sincerity of a man who says he'd be prepared to bed multiple women at once, yet never actually does so.

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