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To Be Continued… with Tim Keller is a captivating podcast inspired by the wisdom of beloved pastor and theologian, Dr. Tim Keller. The premiere episode features a conversation with Tim Keller. Subsequent episodes seamlessly blend archived Keller teachings with fresh dialogues featuring Christian leaders from across the globe. Through these conversations, "To Be Continued…" paints a hopeful picture of the global church, bridging the gap between timeless truths and contemporary challenges.
In partnership with Redeemer City to City, each episode showcases a dynamic exchange between two global leaders deeply shaped by the gospel-centered approach infused throughout Keller's work, delving into topics central to city ministry, but accessible to all.
Listen and discover that the best conversations don’t end… they continue.
Laura Sauriat:
Let's face it. Cities are complex. In cities you find more skeptics, more religions, more suffering. You also find more diversity in background, worldview and ideology. Cities are centers of much of the world's wealth, power, art, and innovation, all of which eventually shapes and informs non-urban lifestyles. It could be said that the future of the world is forged in cities. This is To Be Continued with and without Tim Keller. And on this podcast, I'll be joined by dynamic City to City leaders. These city leaders have been shaped by the work of the late Dr. Tim Keller and have much to share about how the gospel can bring shalom and hope to our cities, our work and our relationships. So wherever it is in the world that you find yourself, we invite you to listen in on a conversation, one that we hope will spark new ideas, curiosities, and questions. Because the best conversations don't end. They continue.
Tim Keller:
It's right and natural to want to affect your culture. Everybody does. Everybody would like to move the culture in a direction that we think is wholesome. Okay? So if you feel like, for example, that the nuclear family is not being supported by a culture and you want to move the culture in the direction of the nuclear family, is there something wrong with that? No, it's fine. Everybody wants to, in a certain sense, help the culture become more wholesome and change the culture. But the danger for Christians is that if you get into transforming culture in such a way that we say, oh, the Lord is behind us and we're fighting evil, you can actually become, frankly, more about power than you are about love and faithfulness. There's a great danger in that. Some people would say that if you try to make the world exactly like the church, you end up making the church like the world.
Laura Sauriat:
It delighted but ought not surprise me to learn that repentance is a key aspect of cultural engagement. Today's guests are seasoned pastors working intentionally on cultural engagement in their communities, and yet they both emphasize the importance of genuine and frequent repentance as the best posture for cultural engagement. Please welcome Robert Guerrero, Dominican and native New Yorker, now based in Miami. He serves as the director of the Latino initiative at City to City in North America and the Caribbean and Caleb Campbell, lead of Desert Spring Bible Church in Phoenix, Arizona, Robert and Caleb, I'm so grateful to be here today with you to talk about cultural engagement.
Robert Guerrero:
It's great to be here. Thank you for the invite. Good to see you, Caleb again.
Caleb Campbell:
Yep. It's great to be with you both.
Laura Sauriat:
Well, it's great to be with you. Thank you. Christians talk about being in the world but not of it or resident aliens as Tim Keller would say. What does this mean to either of you?
Robert Guerrero:
Well, the simple answer is that Jesus came to redeem the world. Our Bible, our faith starts is the most worldly faith. It starts in creation. God made the Dominican beaches that are the most beautiful in the world and he loved that, right? God is the creator of everything and endowed us with that—creative music and culture and everything that we produce as co-creators is beautiful and we should love it because it's God's work of art, but it's tainted by sin. Not only personal sin, but also how sin structures itself in powers and systems. That's what Jesus came to redeem. In the cross, he came to redeem all things to himself, not just save human souls to go to heaven. And then our work is to engage in that work of restoring, as much as we can, the world according to the lordship of Jesus. But we dream of the day—oh, we dream of the day—when my island is going to be so amazing. We dream of the day when all things will be restored and justice and beauty and fellowship and community.
Laura Sauriat:
Thank you. You took me to the D.R. just then.
Caleb Campbell:
I think Robert's got such a great perspective on it. I mean the beautiful example of the beaches, I think too often we use language like be in the world and not of the world. And what that is actually expressing for many Christians is a disgust for people who are not like them. And I just don't see Jesus being disgusted at people. But when scripture talks about it, it's the world systems as Robert said, or the kingdoms of this world. And there's this constant juxtaposition that Jesus shows us that there's the power structures, the kingdom of God, and then there's the power structures and the kingdoms of this world and they're always inverted. So the kingdoms of this world, for one example, leverage the power of the sword to dominate over. The kingdoms of this world leverage the threat of death. The kingdoms of this world believe that there's not enough to go around. And the kingdom of God does not leverage the sword, but rather the power of the cross. It's upside down.
The kingdom of God says there is enough—that our Creator is a good Father who provides for us. And so we don't have to take from each other. We don't have to dominate over each other. We don't have to power over each other. And so being in the world's systems, but not of the world's systems, is very much like an ambassador who lives according to their citizenship, but they're in another space that has different rules and different powers and different ways of being in the world. And as ambassadors, which the Apostle Paul uses that language to refer to Christians that we’re ambassadors of reconciliation, we’re ambassadors of the kingdom, that we live, whether it be in the Dominican or New York or Phoenix or wherever it might be, we live in these spaces but not according to the power structures that dominate over these spaces for now. And in a very real sense, this is the hope of the Lord's Prayer. “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done on earth as it is in”—and I'll add a little piece—”the kingdom of heaven or the kingdom of God.” And so when we pray the Lord's Prayer, we're praying that in so much as it relates to us now in Phoenix or in Manhattan as it is in heaven,
Laura Sauriat:
Thank you for bringing such different facets to give us a very full picture of that. James Hunter's term “faithful presence,” what do you think that has looked like in your city? Would you like to talk about Miami or even New York?
Robert Guerrero:
Yeah, my city is New York. I'm in Miami. I'm a resident alien in Miami. We haven't done a good job in discipling our people on how to engage the powers. The powers disciple our people on how to engage the powers. So the church either goes right or left. So I think faithful presence is to not be co-opted by the right or the left, but to understand that we have our own ethic, our own values that are kingdom, that are upside down, that are still, there's signs of it in one or the other. We know how to connect with that, but people see it's something different.
Laura Sauriat:
Very good. Caleb, what would you like to add to that?
Caleb Campbell:
A faithful presence thinks first locally insofar as it relates to us. The three or more of us that are gathered, how are we practicing the kingdom now? And as that's done faithfully in the context of a local community and that's multiplied throughout a community or a state or a country, it’s saturating the communities with kingdom presence and kingdom values. And it's a means of bearing witness to the gospel through the beloved community that's actually frankly attractive to people who are outside of it. They look in and say, that's beautiful, what's happening there. And I'm not sure what they believe, but I love what I'm seeing. The church, however, has an unfaithful presence where it tries to dominate over a culture or society through means of government power, influence, and we're seeing an awful lot of that. So I think a focus on the local, a focus on the three or more of us that are gathered here and how we practice the kingdom in our local communities.
Robert Guerrero:
Yeah, what Caleb is saying is very essential to our faith. Our faith changes cultures from the margins, from the local, right? I mean Jesus, our Lord, from the cradle to the grave was like in the margins. He changed the world and he created a movement that changed the world, and it wasn't from the elites and the power structures. So I love what you said, Caleb, because as we are faithful witnesses at the local level as a community, not just as individuals, it takes a community that embodies the kingdom. It's beautiful and challenges at the local level. Some Christians, I don't know, Caleb, if this been in your experience as a pastor, I've been a pastor for over 30 years. I just turned 60. And I know a lot of leaders that say they feel called to engage in politics or spaces of power. And I say, that's great, but where you learn how to do that is at the local level.
Laura Sauriat:
It brings us down to earth and down to the earth where we stand right now. So thinking about cultural engagement, in what ways can Christians contribute positively to culture without compromising their core beliefs?
Caleb Campbell:
Yep. Don't reach for the sword. So what I mean by that is the disciples were constantly asking Jesus for power positions. If you read through the Gospel of Mark, one of the frequent things that Jesus is saying to them is, “The kingdom is here. It's in your midst. It's coming soon. It's right here.” And they're hearing that kingdom language and they're responding with, “Can I be in charge? Can you put my brother and I at your right hand and your left hand?” Even down to that scene in the Garden of Gethsemane, when the mob comes to take Jesus, Peter, who has been discipled for three years by the ultimate peacemaker, when he feels like something is about to be taken from him, Peter's flex is to reach for the sword.
When he’s pressured, when he feels anxiety or fear, he reaches for the powers of the kingdoms of this world. Every Christian faces this decision. When I'm operating in any community, in any culture, when I feel afraid, when I feel anxious, when I feel like something is under threat, will I reach for the sword or the cross. The way that we bear a faithful witness, as we're operating in the arts, in education, in government, in entertainment, in whatever cultural aspect you want to look at, the way that we know we're bearing faithful witnesses when it feels like something important to us is about to be taken, we reach for the cross instead of the sword. For me at least that's the ultimate test of am I living on earth as it is in heaven?
Laura Sauriat:
Wow, Robert.
Robert Guerrero:
Yeah, I mean that's it. And I would add that we need to be faithful as we engage and true to who we are. We have to know who we are. So I think that as we walk together and strengthen this new identity that we have, that Jesus gives us, the gospel gives us a new identity, and we grow in assurance and mature in that identity, then I can engage as myself because culture has a way to give you an identity and has the systems to give you that identity. So you can't be naive entering - we have a call to enter culture and change everything. That's our mission. And we shouldn't do it alone. It's in pairs because it's a struggle. We have to be reminding ourselves in community with one another. Hey, who are you in that struggle? Because as we engage in the different spheres of culture, we can forget who we are, and that gives you the courage to speak up and to influence. but from that perspective. But that's not easy. I mean to be engaging in the culture, actively engaging in the culture and being faithful, it's not an easy task. It's a struggle all the time. And that's why we need to be in community and we need to be strengthening each other and being in the presence of God all the time.
Laura Sauriat:
I really appreciate you talking about the word courage. I always need to hear that. So thank you. Have you ever found yourself over engaging with culture or withdrawing from it? And how did you reorient?
Robert Guerrero:
So my story of coming to Christ is I didn't grow up as a Christian. My father was agnostic and I followed his path and I thought and was trained to think that the Christianity was the problem. So I come to faith really enamored by Jesus, but soon discipled by a picture of Jesus that was an over spiritualized Jesus. And something in me said, that's not right. That's not the Jesus that I read in the Bible, but I didn't have the theological categories and stuff. I started learning that culture's bad, that the world. But soon I found out then, okay, well the stuff I'm being shaped by is cultural European.
So the first time I worshiped God hearing a salsa, I raised my hands and my hip starts moving, and that's my language. I was a salsa dancer and I'm like, am I sinning? That's how I was conditioned by this extreme fundamentalist counterculture movement that thought that the world is bad and protecting me. It helped me because I needed to step out a little bit from that world. But then I went to the other side and I was enamored by the seeker church movement because the seeker church movement, I saw that they were making an incredible effort to be relevant to the non-churched. And that was my world, the non-churched, and there were my guys, these are my people, these are the people that I engage, and it gave me tools and language and stuff. But let me say this, we became enamored with that because it was overreaching, it was overreacting from the other.
And I just went all the way and I would do anything and everything. And suddenly in that space, sometimes I felt like, is this right? So because in that model of engagement of culture, you understand the value and the beauty of culture, but you're not critical of it. So you don't develop the discernment to know what to do. How do you spit the bones out and eat the meat? It is like when you understand the moments that you over engage, that you're not being loyal to your Lord. And when you under engage, you're not being loyal to your Lord. There's a pain there because we can think about this in terms of pragmatically, look, oh, over engaging, under engaging to be effective in ministry. But we're talking that Jesus is our Lord and how does he feel and see when we are buying into this world and the structures and systems and values, and how does he feel when we are in our little corner protecting ourselves and not living him out in the world that he loves. So, I think that when we go there, there's a level of repentance that takes place that leads you to do your homework. To say, “Okay, I need to learn. I need to grow in this.”
Caleb Campbell:
So where my mind goes is not that we over engage in culture or under engage as if we can not engage in culture. We're constantly engaged in culture. The question is, am I shrinking away from bearing faithful witness in whatever culture I'm in, or am I running to a different cultural expression as a juxtaposition to the other or in rebellion of the other? So my local church has a culture, so the more engaged I am with my local church, I'm not running towards a pure cultureless expression of the kingdom of God. It's our church's culture that's constantly being reshaped. And what we're looking for is, are we taking aspects or elements of the kingdoms of this world and are those things flavoring what we're doing? They just kind of creep in. The kingdoms of this world—when those powers try to infect the church, they never present themselves as evil.
It's always presented as a good thing for a good end. And then once we start sensing like, oh, maybe the means to get to that end, there's a little corruption there. If we bury that, if we turn away from that, if we don't address it, if we don't do public confession and repentance, it may be that we've imbibed the powers of the kingdoms of this world and then that's corrupting the culture within our local church or our church network or whatever it might be. And I think you're seeing a lot of that now with the Me Too movement and that coming out and really giving a lot of people freedom and courage to share of church leaders who have been abusive and who have engaged in acts of evil and that used to be buried and now it's coming out well, the church needs to be first to confess and repent.
And when we're unwilling to do that, it may be that we've imbibed an unhealthy culture. I think it was Luther who said, all of life is repentance. I don't know that there's ever a time where I will have the right amount of culture that I'm over/under imbibing it. I think I'm going from one side of the horse and then an overcorrection to the other side, and instead of trying to hit the bullseye, I think it's being willing to recognize that I'm always in need of repentance, that the culture that I'm in is always influencing me and to pray like the psalmist says, “Lord, search me and know me and see if there's any corrupt or broken way in me and reveal it to me and lead me back to the path of life.”
Laura Sauriat:
That's great. That leads me to asking about comfort or discomfort in regards to cultural identity. Should it always feel comfortable to engage culture?
Robert Guerrero:
No, I don't think it's ever going to be comfortable. I don't think the disciples when Jesus was in the party, [in] Matthew, were comfortable. That's the thing about Jesus. If you hang out with Jesus and I hang out with Jesus, it's going to be very uncomfortable [to] hang out with him because he is going to enter us into spaces and situations which deconstruct us. Paul said—one of the passages of cultural engagement that’s my favorite, 1 Corinthians 9, where Paul says, “Because of the gospel, I'm free from everybody, but for the sake of the gospel, I become a slave to all.” I mean, Paul, it's not a comfortable thing. “For the weak, I become weak.” What he's saying there [is that] the gospel gives me the freedom and the strength to enter discomfort for the sake of those who are lost and for the love of God. So it's not comfortable.
Laura Sauriat:
Paul, what a great example.
Caleb Campbell:
All healthy growth involves discomfort. So I've got four kids, 13 and under, and they will sometimes say that parts of their body hurt and they're not sure why. And we will say, oh, you're growing. These are growing pains. The healthy growth is causing discomfort. If you go to the gym, you're supposed to feel discomfort. If you go to the gym, you walk up to a bench press or some machine, you put the weights on, you bring the weight down to your chest, what are you expecting to feel? Discomfort. It's a hurt, but it's a good hurt. And spiritual maturity is developing the muscle to carry the distance between you and me. The ability to sit in the presence of people who I have very little if anything in common with, and to be able to be okay in that space, that's a muscle I've got to develop.
And spiritual growth and maturity is whatever the distance between us, I can carry it. And as it relates to engaging in any cultural expression, recognizing that the power structures of the kingdoms of this world are operating there, I should feel a discomfort, but a healthy discomfort again to Robert's point, rooted in my identity in Christ, recognizing that while I may be uncomfortable here, I'm okay. I'm okay because what I am, who I am, who my Lord is conquers all. And so I'm uncomfortable with the way things are. I'm uncomfortable or recognizing a discomfort when I see the kingdoms of this world at work. And that's a different type of discomfort than derision or disgust, but there's a discomfort knowing that hey, this person or this community or this culture is expressing that's not in line with the kingdom of God and operating in that space requires a muscle.
And when that muscle has to be operated, I feel discomfort. And I would just also make a note, there are also spaces in which I can experience harm and being wise enough to tell the difference between hurt and harm is also a matter of maturity. Again, back to the gym, when the weights come down on the muscle, I feel discomfort or hurt. But harm is when the weights come down and I feel that shrill pain shoot up my spine and everything in my body says, stop and going to the gym with healthy ways, you'll feel hurt, you'll sweat, you'll feel discomfort, but it's all good for you. But if I'm harmed, if something's breaking inside of me, I need to go to physical therapy. And the church does both physical therapy for the soul and gym work for the soul. And what I mean by that is there are times where Christians need to find deep and profound healing from harm. And so in that sense, the church is like a hospital, but also the church is like a gym where we are, I think church leaders are called to disrupt or provoke aspects of the congregation that are not experiencing confession and repentance.
Laura Sauriat:
So we know that our ethnic culture matters. How do we honor the beauty and diversity of God's creation and how do churches miss out in doing that in their intent to unify people in the body of Christ?
Robert Guerrero:
Yeah, that's a very good question. Very close to my heart too. One thing that I say, and my friends know that I say this, is that the gospel makes me more Dominican, not less, and a gospel that makes me less Dominican, there's something wrong with that particular version of the gospel, right? And I say it out of my experience. My conversion and discipleship was making me more Anglo. I was reading—all the theology I was reading was white people and the worship was coming from white culture, although the world, the whole world's hearing bachata, which comes from my country. So it's like suddenly my culture and the stuff of my culture is at best folklore stuff, at worst is worldly. So I was stripped from my cultural identity to become Christian. That's part of the taintedness of our Christianity where white is the standard by which you judge everything else.
Everything else is accepted as long as it moves towards whiteness. I don't want that unity. I do not want that. So, I believe in a unity and a reconciling space where our diverse cultures are celebrated and we learn from each other because each culture brings a beauty and a richness and a reflection of who God is. God reveals himself to different cultures. If you want to know joy, hang out with Dominicans. That's an aspect of God's character that he's embedded in the Latino culture, right? So when we celebrate, not tolerate, celebrate, when it's not through assimilation, then yes. And that's the power of the gospel, that of the two, it makes one without destroying the identities of those who come together—without destroying those identities, actually redeeming those identities, those cultural identities. And when we show this, when we show that unity, Jesus says, the world's going to believe.
Laura Sauriat:
Caleb, any thoughts on this?
Caleb Campbell:
Most white Christians I know of, they don't have any sense of their ethnic heritage. I wear around my neck a Scottish cross because that's my ethnic heritage. That's where my people come from. And I practice my faith as that Scottish blood flowing through my veins, all of my views of time and food and music, that's all part of my ethnicity. And I think that one of the things that we can do in the Evangelical church today is help majority culture people reclaim their ethnic heritage and celebrate their expression on an equal playing field with everybody else. And so one of the ways you asked practically, how is that done? So in our church we do, every time we do public scripture readings, which is every week, we do it bi- or trilingual. So we elevate people within the congregation to read it in Mandarin, Spanish, whatever it might be, Swahili and English. Bilingual songs are an easy way to do that. When we have food present, at which if you're at a local church, food is everywhere, we're making sure to bring in all of the different culinary expressions from within the congregation. So making sure that your music, your set list, your leadership, your scripture reading, as Robert said, your pulpit is all expressive, is expressing the cultural diversity within your community as close to the diversity of the kingdom of God as it can be, I think that's where the local church can be faithful and reminding people that one of the Apostle Paul's, the critical aspect of his mission was the ethnically diverse local church. And I believe that one of the reasons why that is, is he saw that in the promise given to Abraham. And I also think that he saw that in the eschaton—so in kingdom come. The book of Revelation says, all of the kings of the earth will parade the glory of the ethnos, the nation. Each nation will parade its glory before the throne in the kingdom. And so there is this waiting for us in our future. The church will practice as its worship, parading the glory of its ethnicities before the Lord.
Robert Guerrero:
Yeah, that's beautiful.
Laura Sauriat:
Beautiful image. How do you hope Christians will go forward in cultural engagement? Given all the challenges and the joys of what's set before us?
Robert Guerrero:
I lead the Latino initiative of City to City. What I do is find the expressions of the kingdom—expressions among Latino leaders and churches that are really concerned about making a difference in the culture and bringing them together and co-creating, right? So in that space, what's given me a lot of hope there, is how a lot of Latino leaders in churches are understanding how the gospel affirms us as Latinos. That's first. And then one of our conversations is how do we as Latinos engage to make a difference in the entirety of the culture, not just in our little Latino space. So it's a beautiful thing for me to see the church of a minority group who are not engaging in resentment, because there's a lot to be resentful for. We say “not under nor siloed but with,” and I think that I'm seeing—that gives me a lot of hope. I hear the whispers of that among the African-Americans as well, that they want to bring the richness of who they are in their faith and their history—nobody like the African-American church to teach us how to engage systems and structures—to bring it to the table in the conversation and not be siloed anymore. So that gives me a lot of hope.
Laura Sauriat:
That's wonderful.
Caleb Campbell:
There is a common statement I hear and it goes like this: things are getting worse. It's never been this bad. We're becoming a non-Christian culture. And as I read scripture, I don't think so. It's like Rome's pretty rough and Babylon was pretty rough and Egypt was pretty rough. And yet in each of those seasons in scripture, you see the faithfulness of the Lord in small, quiet mustard-seed-like ways. When I hear the calls, the anxious statements around Christians are losing culture, that's predicated on an idea that we had a Christian culture. And Christian culture is not seen in governments. It's not found in countries. It's found in the local, small, in as much as it relates to us. We're too often looking for hope in the big, and we forget that the Lord is often working in the small. So where I find hope is when I see Jesus in the context of a local communion of saints that's living on earth as it is in heaven, and all of its diversity and all of its misfitness and all of its sacrificial love and cross bearing, though imperfect. That's where I see that mustard-seed-like kingdom at work.
Laura Sauriat:
Thank you so much for this wonderful conversation, Robert and Caleb. I feel like I learned so much.
Robert Guerrero:
Thanks for having us.
Caleb Campbell:
Yep. It was my pleasure.
Laura Sauriat:
This is To Be Continued with Tim Keller. I'm your host, Laura Sauriat. Thank you so much for listening. We hope today's episode inspires you to continue the conversation, which you can do by sharing this podcast within your own circles. City to City is a nonprofit whose vision is to see the gospel of Jesus Christ, transform lives and impact cities. To learn more, visit RedeemerCitytoCity.com. Follow us on social media at RedeemerCTC. All of the above can be found in our show notes To be continued is produced in partnership with Redeemer City To City, our producers are Stephanie Cunningham and Rebekah Sebastian. Audio Engineering by Jon Seale.
Stand clear of the closing doors please.