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Two friends examining the faith they inherited, one patch at a time. Jacob and Sam are former church staff who believe Jesus invites us into a fuller picture of being human — one with room for doubt, critical thought, and perspectives that don't always fit the frameworks we were handed. Table Talk is a lab, not a platform. A place to look honestly at what's fraying, keep what's load-bearing, and practice integrating the rest in real time. Less explaining, more exploring. Good company for anyone discovering the surprising transformation downstream of surrendering certainty. Here's to faithful curiosity and patchwork spirituality.
Sam Strutton (00:01)
And I'm Sam. Welcome to Table Talk.
W. Jacob Mancini (00:04)
We're friends who left our jobs at the church learning what it means to be faithful to Jesus when certainty isn't the goal. This conversation is an extension of our years of questioning and wrestling. And we're talking about theology, books, culture, scripture, spiritual formation, and whatever else lands on the table. Here's to faithful curiosity and patchwork spirituality. Let's talk.
Sam Strutton (01:53)
That's it. That's where this started. Sunday mornings, a circle of chairs and questions we weren't always supposed to be asking out loud. Welcome to Table Talk. I'm Sam Struttin.
W. Jacob Mancini (02:08)
I'm Jacob Mancini. ⁓
Sam Strutton (02:08)
I was
going to introduce you, but I guess go ahead.
W. Jacob Mancini (02:13)
I'm sorry.
I'm Jacob Mancini.
Sam Strutton (02:17)
And this is Jacob Messini.
What you just heard, it wasn't staged. That was a real moment from a room that we keep coming back to week after week. It was a space where something shifted for us and where faith started looking a little bit less like having the right answers and more like being willing to ask better questions. So before we go any further, it's probably worth saying this episode is going to be and feel a little bit different than what's coming next and coming after it.
but today we're mostly talking to you, ⁓ dear listener, ⁓ and letting you in on where this came from, why we're doing it. And what does it mean when we say table talk? Our hope is that this will become more of what you just heard real conversations in real time, less explaining and more exploring, ⁓ because at the core of this podcast and at the core of this conversation is a very simple question. And that is, what does it look like to follow Jesus?
if we trade certainty for curiosity, not because we're trying to tear anything down and not because we've think we figured out something new, but because we're trying to be faithful, faithful enough to stay faithful enough to ask faithful enough to admit that we're still learning. ⁓ so we're not coming to you guys as teachers or as experts, but as people in process, as disciples, as learners, as apprentices who are still trying to figure this out, ⁓ and as friends.
who keep pulling up chairs on Sunday mornings ⁓ and realizing that we didn't want this conversation to stop. So that's what this is. It's a table. It's a lab. It's a place where we're going to be able to show our work. ⁓ And for this episode, we just wanted to tell y'all how we got here.
W. Jacob Mancini (04:09)
Dude, well said. Yeah, I'm glad we're here. All these years later, ⁓ three, was it three years ago that we started an event called Table Talk at the church we both worked at. So that's where we met. ⁓ And yeah, and now we're continuing this conversation. Let's share a little bit more about our origin story, about how we met, ⁓ what Table Talk began as, and then.
Sam Strutton (04:24)
Yes.
W. Jacob Mancini (04:38)
Of course today we're talking to our listeners, if we have any. And yeah, and just trying to capture what we're doing now. yeah, yes. So I was the college pastor at this church. ⁓ It was a big church, mega church, and I did college ministry for seven years, full time, and absolutely loved it. So, you know.
Sam Strutton (04:43)
Yeah.
Yeah. Do you want to start or do you want me to?
W. Jacob Mancini (05:05)
We met in that environment where you were joining my team and getting to do ministry together was so fun. But one thing I love about the years of people's college experience, even if it's not a traditional college experience, is there's something about coming into your own, coming of age, 18, 25, in that range. And it was an honor just to serve that community of people who are finding out who they are.
and find out with them and just be in that process of discovery, whether it's talking about what are you studying? What do you hope to get at the end of your college years? Or what are you aiming your life at? Or if it's making your faith your own. And oftentimes I found as a college pastor that conversation about, hey, I inherited Christianity from my parents. ⁓ I have tacitly followed Jesus most of my life.
I have some questions or I want to make sure that this is actually mine. That was such a endlessly fascinating and empowering conversation that again, was an honor to have. So that was a little bit of the context of what we were doing and when we met and that was the environment. How did you actually come onto the team? Because I was doing that for seven years but we only met in my last one or two years.
before we both left that church.
Sam Strutton (06:31)
Yeah.
Yeah. Well, I came on the team as, ⁓ as the college resident or as I like to refer to myself, the glorified intern. I had just finished up my senior year at Liberty university. and I was looking to get a job at Liberty, ⁓ that specifically worked with college students and their spiritual formation, which was a concept that I had just been introduced to that same year.
a little bit earlier, and I was kind of met with so many questions and flooded with the reality that my faith is something that I'm invited into, into the way of Jesus, that ⁓ there's, there's parts of it that I have to actually ⁓ work on and I have to, I have to grow in and I have to be formed. ⁓ I am being formed into something. so ⁓ aligning myself and submitting myself to the way of Jesus meant that
I had to follow his path and his way of living. And all of that was kind of new for me coming out of Christian college, going into a Christian college, thinking that I had all of the right answers and then kind of being met with this reality that there's parts of my faith that I didn't quite understand fully. And that question kind of reverberated and echoed across all of my faith and understanding. And I began to ask myself, what do I actually understand about my faith? Is there more that I don't know?
W. Jacob Mancini (07:49)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Strutton (07:59)
Is there more that I have just inherited, like you said, from my parents and their faith. And so I really began to wrestle internally with that, ⁓ that realization that my faith was becoming my own and that, ⁓ I had a lot more questions than I had answers. ⁓ and so when I joined onto the college team, ⁓ and I first entered into, ⁓ this, this space that was called table talk, on Sunday mornings, well, the rest of the church is, is worshiping and sitting
in a message, we were ⁓ asking questions. And when I entered that space for the first time, I remember ⁓ I was a bit nervous and kind of, ⁓ I think I was nervous for you because a lot of people showed up and they had all of these like theologically deep questions and all these incredible thoughts. And I was like, man,
I don't have answers for these. So it's a great thing that I'm the glorified in turn, not the pastor right now. And then I was, remember just being so taken aback when somebody asked their first question at my very first table talk. And I was like, Ooh, okay. What's, what's, what's going to be the pastoral answer? What's Jacob going to say? I got my notepad. got to write all these down in case I get asked this question. And I remember you answered it with a question and you kind of held space.
W. Jacob Mancini (09:19)
You
Hmm.
Sam Strutton (09:24)
for this kind of uncomfortable feeling of, what if there isn't an immediate right answer to this? What if there isn't a cookie cutter, perfect answer to this question that the student had? ⁓ and I was so taken aback by that. And, ⁓ I began, I kind of realized right then and there, like, that's what this space was. ⁓ it was a space to hold, ⁓ questions and uncertainty openly with open hands.
W. Jacob Mancini (09:46)
Hmm.
Sam Strutton (09:54)
and to, ⁓ to let go of the need to kind of grasp for certainty. as as graduated college student sitting amongst college age individuals, I think that ⁓ it shook more people than just me who entered that space. And ⁓ I think it was a catalyst for me. ⁓
W. Jacob Mancini (10:16)
Yeah.
Sam Strutton (10:16)
coming
out of that that season for me where I had so many questions and I had more questions than answers and I began to realize, hey, it's okay. I'm still learning. I'm still figuring this out. And it's actually okay if I don't have answers. It's actually probably more okay if I seek and search and sit with and engage with curiosity instead of just trying to find the right answer to a question.
W. Jacob Mancini (10:23)
Yeah.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, he started to almost say Matthew seven there. seek and you will find and if you knock, what might be on the other side of that door? at a mega church, I love that reflection and I forgot about some of that with college students showing up with their beautiful Bibles and notebooks and like just pins at the ready and how disappointing.
Sam Strutton (11:01)
Always with a coffee.
W. Jacob Mancini (11:03)
yeah, we're making coffee. I'm always offering a pour over to everyone. know, people are ready to fill in all the answers that they're going to get and probably leaving so disappointed at times. I'm not sure everyone was shook up in a good way, but you know, being at a mega and, having ⁓ what is probably a two or 300 person community that we were serving. So we weren't in a college town. So
Sam Strutton (11:16)
Yeah.
W. Jacob Mancini (11:28)
like I said, just more of that age group where people are finding out who they are. You do a lot at a church like that to fill seats, because you got a big building and a big budget. So we're going to take our resources and we're going to invite everybody. And it's going to be just a banger of a good time that bring your friends and we're going to talk about the good news of Jesus. And it's awesome. And Table Talk was
my favorite thing I ever did at that church that we ever did, and it was the whole team got behind it. So it was not, I don't even think it was my idea, but it was kind of like an anti-event in so many ways ⁓ because it really flowed just naturally out of teaching the Sermon on the Mount. So I had taken that on with the team and we all agreed that was a good idea for a long eight week series at our midweek college event, ⁓ Thursday nights,
going line by line through Matthew five through seven. And we called that Kingdom Manifesto, that was that series. I loved, like this was the charter of our faith. One of the lines I think that I said every week was,
this is how we live if our claim to be Christian is true. So very provocative. And for me, that dynamite that is the Sermon on the Mount, that when you take Jesus' words and sit with them and like stare down what he's actually saying, what is loving your neighbor as yourself according to the sermon, ⁓ it's not as straightforward or cookie cutter as people expect. Or just speaking for myself, that's what I found.
felt good to say, let's not have the last word on a stage about these honestly super deep and ⁓ the most famous words of Jesus. So super enduring teachings, but also just they're not black and white. And not only do people disagree about them, scholars and teachers, but as a community, we have to actually take this and do it.
Sam Strutton (13:36)
Yeah.
W. Jacob Mancini (13:36)
So we need a
lab. let's turn our conference room table in our little portable office, and go from our big stage, big event where we were filling all the seats in the house to, hey, if you are one of those weird people who's not satisfied with the easy answers, pull up a chair with us. And man, what an honor that was to be part of that. Like I said, it was one of the proudest things that I felt like I got to sit in.
recording that we started this pilot episode that is a little more, know, we're scripting this out a little more to be clear on what we're trying to do. That wasn't scripted and we didn't even know we were being recorded. Someone shared that with us. And so this little gem that has survived all these years still shows the essence of what that anti-event was. And for me, it just became a symbol of my faith in so many ways. ⁓ This open-ended path of
trying to be as faithful to Jesus as I can muster and being okay with ⁓ being in process, being okay with not being there yet. ⁓ So that was then, that was three years ago. And here we are still wanting to be in this conversation and you and I never fully cut it off. Did I leave anything out? Is that anything else you wanna add to the backstory of this thing?
Sam Strutton (14:58)
Thank
Yeah, ⁓ we just, we're still here. Still have questions. ⁓ we definitely don't have all the answers. ⁓ but as we both moved on from that space and from that church, we maintained just an incredible, ⁓ just brother like friendship and, ⁓ continue to have these conversations, ⁓ over texts over phone. and yeah, I think.
It's still something that we are sharing today. And
Do you want to talk about like, what's one question or area of following Jesus that is still a mystery to you?
W. Jacob Mancini (15:49)
Yeah, thanks for asking. Yeah, it's showing our work. You know, this one has, yeah, it's good. This one has been true for me for years, actually, so it's not new, but it is real time. ⁓ I have just, I have not come to terms with prayer. Prayer from my background in growing up in,
Sam Strutton (15:54)
I'll put you on the spot.
W. Jacob Mancini (16:19)
Just the most loving family that raised me in an environment where we were all following Jesus together. But prayer has evolved for me and talking to God and praying the way that Jesus teaches us to pray in Matthew 6. It's just, I have more questions than answers on that. And so I've been exploring it. There's more contemplative paths that I've discovered recently.
And so I've been experimenting with some contemplative Christian prayer practices. ⁓ Many of them involve silence. It's awesome, man. But yeah, the short answer is I am turning over new stones with prayer and looking for better ways to show up and be in that conversation with the divine.
What about you, Min? thanks.
Sam Strutton (17:13)
Beautiful man.
I think that is much less.
What's that beautiful? ⁓
W. Jacob Mancini (17:24)
Well, you haven't said
anything yet. We don't know.
Sam Strutton (17:28)
I am wrestling with, and I think I have been for a long time, the narrative complexity of God's Word of Scripture, what we call the Bible. ⁓ I think just like one subcategory of that, that I think ⁓ really baffles me and I have so many questions about and was reshaped. ⁓ Shout out to my father-in-law.
W. Jacob Mancini (17:39)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Strutton (17:55)
He's the first one who put me onto this through a Bible project video actually, but spiritual beings, ⁓ that is something that I have so many more questions than answers for ⁓ in their place, their role, ⁓ their interactions with the physical realm ⁓ and how that plays out in all the narrative complexities of the Bible is just, it's a mystery to me. And it's one that ⁓ I think
It's a small subcategory of just a greater desire to ⁓ ask more questions about the Bible and try and figure out what are all of these weird interactions and crazy stories that I don't understand and not just kind of pass them off as little stories or parables that I should just learn something from. But I want to look deeper at what's under the surface, what's actually happening there. What is this divine council that God summons together?
in the book of Job and has a staff meeting and Satan is there as a part of the staff meeting. Like what is going on? I have so many questions.
W. Jacob Mancini (18:58)
Wait, you're telling me Satan's
on the payroll?
Sam Strutton (19:02)
He took to my current, you know, understanding he's, he's invited to the team's meeting when God has him. So he's, he's there. I don't think he turned his camera on though. He's, but he does talk a lot. He's definitely not muted.
W. Jacob Mancini (19:19)
I love it.
Hey, that was not just beautiful, but also some good comedy. That's a good bit. God uses Microsoft Teams.
I thought God was an apple guy for sure. ⁓
Sam Strutton (19:32)
Well,
no, that's like a triple entendre pun. Oh, man.
W. Jacob Mancini (19:40)
Dude, somehow we're
in deep now with, we've got the apple and we've got the spiritual beings and was the serpent in the garden actually a seraphim? This is why you gotta listen because we're gonna go there, but not right now. ⁓
Sam Strutton (19:53)
Right. And is it, is it wrong to own Apple products of technology? We'll get there eventually.
W. Jacob Mancini (19:59)
Absolutely not, it is not. I'm gonna shut that case right now. ⁓
Okay, yes, thank you for that beautiful insight into what you're addressing. Yeah, no dude, so it is good that you brought this up, because if we weren't still in process, then I don't know, I don't know that I'd wanna be doing this with you. I don't know that I wanna be starting the project up again to
Sam Strutton (20:10)
distraction.
W. Jacob Mancini (20:29)
to go into questions. We're not experts. I'm actually, I've used to teach the Bible vocationally, full time. And I wanna be Christian mystic and Bible scholar and all of it. But at the end of the day, it's so refreshing just to feel like we can have faithful curiosity, not just be a tagline, but be a banner over our lives and say, this is what it looks like. It is an ongoing.
exploration, one of my favorite scholars talks about faith as exploring a national park. It is such a killer metaphor. ⁓ And he talks about how so many of us oftentimes shortchange ourselves by stopping at the gift store. So you can imagine being at Yosemite and just like being slack-jawed at
some of the postcards and not recognize that those actual mountains are out the window and you can go hike them. And so we oftentimes we settle for, ⁓ I don't know, our curiosity dies at some point. And funny enough, was doom scrolling last night on Facebook, highly recommend. ⁓
Sam Strutton (21:27)
Yeah.
W. Jacob Mancini (21:43)
But funny enough, my algorithm over time has been trained enough to where I come across some good things. And I came across this quote I had never seen before last night.
All right, here it is. The quote is this, “The day you teach the child the name of the bird, the child will never see that bird again.”
And the quote is attributed to Krishnamurti, ⁓ who in all honesty, I'm not researched enough to know all about the person behind that quote, but what stood out to me the night before we're recording this today is that, you know, as soon as a child who, again, is awestruck, who sees this creature flying, colorful, ⁓
and they're watching its movement and they're looking, they're enamored, engrossed in the beauty of this thing. And if an adult walks up to that window and says, ⁓ there's a hummingbird at our feeder, that's a hummingbird. There's something about naming that experience and that dynamic living creature and just saying, that's just a hummingbird that can collapse all of the wonder of that moment. ⁓ And so there's ⁓ a degree of, think, faithfulness to Jesus that
Sam Strutton (22:57)
Mm-hmm.
W. Jacob Mancini (23:03)
necessarily involves holding at arm's length some of our categories, even though they're not all bad and they're not all wrong, some of our quickness to just lock things down and say, okay, we know that answer now, which again, many of us are looking for and it's not always wrong to look for that. But I want to see Jesus. I want to experience the good news of the kingdom.
and like participate in that. There's something dynamic. ⁓ And so now I'm just, I'm off on like two different tangents. That to me, faithful curiosity has everything to do with ⁓ saying yes to that experience. What would you add?
Sam Strutton (23:46)
Yeah. Yeah. I, I want to address the listeners once again, and just, ⁓ potentially, I mean, if you're coming into this and you have no experience with, ⁓ the person of Jesus or faith, I mean, welcome, you're welcome into this conversation. You pull up a seat at the table, and you might be ⁓ exposed to, ⁓ the hummingbird.
without knowing what it is via this conversation and via this, this podcast. Um, but I think for Jacob and I, we, I'll speak for me and then you can speak for yourself if you want. Um, we, think in many ways with our faith were pointed out the birds of, of our theology, of our doctrine. We were pointed out very early on by teachers and loved ones and people who meant well for us and loved us and meant the absolute best for us. They pointed out the hummingbird. They pointed out
the theology, the doctrine, they took away some of the mystery. And I don't think any of, at least for me, I don't think any of it was malicious. I don't think any of it was like malintent. ⁓ but I want to kind of set up those two kind of, spaces that, that you might be in listener or, ⁓ that we're coming from, ⁓ specifically because to, to reenter that curiosity, to, to reenter that childlike, excitement about sitting.
with something that you don't know and asking questions and examining it and looking at it and having wonder about it. That I think has been framed up in our culture as, ⁓ one of the words I think has that has described it as deconstruction. ⁓ and I, I want to, I think I want to, ⁓ kind of clarify this is, ⁓ this is not deconstruction for its own sake. It's not pulling apart,
everything that we believe just because we don't want to believe it anymore, right? It's not deconstructing for a license to sin. It's not deconstructing because our faith, is, ⁓ not good enough for us anymore. and it's, it's also not reconstruction, ⁓ for the sake of a new certainty project, right? So it's not, ⁓ it's not trying to, replace the different theologies with new ones or different thought patterns with new ones.
W. Jacob Mancini (25:48)
Hmm.
Mm-hmm.
Sam Strutton (26:13)
just for the sake of replacing them. ⁓ but it's, it's curiosity, ⁓ as a form of faithfulness to Jesus, which I think is what you were saying just now, Jacob, it's a, it's a necessity. And when you say yes to the way of Jesus, and you say, I'm in on this life that you call me to live, ⁓ there's a, there's a certain amount of curiosity that you have to hold to look at your life and the way that, you interact with the people around you and
⁓ ask questions. Hey, what does it mean now that I'm, I'm following this, this, you know, ancient rabbi, what does that mean for my life? What is, what does the sermon on the Mount mean? What does that call me to do in my life in my little, ⁓ corner of the world? ⁓ and, and how does that play into a bigger picture and a bigger narrative that's going on here that I'm invited to be a part of? ⁓ so it's, it's this openness, but also reverence for what we've been given.
W. Jacob Mancini (26:50)
Yeah.
Sam Strutton (27:11)
You know, when people loved us and told us that's a hummingbird, we want to like hold that with gratefulness as people have tried to teach us and they have taught us a lot. ⁓ But as we, as we seek to be taught more and more, ⁓ I think experientially through following Jesus as our ultimate teacher, we want to have openness to ask questions and reverence to hold what we've been taught in both hands, both being open. it's, an ongoing work of apprenticeship.
but I wanted to kind of note that, that if, if you hear the words deconstruction and your alarm bells are going off, Hey, I mean, that's, that's okay. ⁓ you're, you're welcome here. And if you, if you have no idea, and if, if you, ⁓ if, if you're here for answers and you're here for all, dude, these guys sound like they've got it, man, they're, they're so smart. They got all the answers. ⁓
W. Jacob Mancini (27:49)
Yeah. The D word.
Sam Strutton (28:08)
Yeah, I hate to disappoint, we don't. And we're here trying to be faithfully curious in the ways that we show up.
W. Jacob Mancini (28:12)
Yeah.
That's good, Wait, you don't have all the answers though, just to be clear, because I thought...
Sam Strutton (28:23)
I'm missing a few. I'm almost there. I'm like 98%. You know, like the bar is like almost loaded and it takes like 10 years for it to finally load. That's where I am.
W. Jacob Mancini (28:24)
Okay.
Yeah,
yeah, yeah, makes sense. ⁓ Now, well said, dude. Yeah, I think one of my other favorite teachers ⁓ talks about deconstruction, which is, can be a scary word, as discipleship. And when Jesus says, follow me, it is open-ended, you know? He doesn't say, believe in the doctrines about me. He says, follow me. And that's gonna take a life-size response from us. ⁓ So if the word disciple means learner, and it does,
then that's what we're being invited into, right? Is ⁓ a, you know, from the Sermon on the Mount, one day at a time, ⁓ just looking up, seeing where Jesus is headed today, and what that's gonna look like in my life. So ⁓ speaking of metaphors, which I think now I've dispensed three or four metaphors, and that wasn't my intention, because there is one metaphor to rule them all.
on this show. And it's really, it's been something that organically ⁓ just came up in our conversations. So we built this metaphor together in one-on-one lunches that we were having on our, you know, on our staff development lunches when we were working together, all the way back then to today. So this metaphor, just to come out and say it, is about quilting. I had a great phone call with my sister. ⁓
a weeks ago and I was catching up with her and she was talking about quilting as her new hobby that she's gotten into. And I was quite happy that she brought up quilting because I was like, there's this metaphor I have about quilting with my buddy. And she was not impressed with the metaphor because she's like, you've never quilted, have you? You don't know the first thing about it. And ⁓ I'm sure people would hear us walking around the church talking about quilting and like just scratch their heads. Like, what are these guys into, man?
So all that to say, we have used the naming and quantifying of doctrines, theology, trying to capture those things. We've used quilting to say that's like having a square on a quilt or a patch. oftentimes we begin our faith journeys with this endeavor to assemble the best quilt that we can. We want not just to have all the patches,
⁓ But we want them in the right places. We want to make sure that we understand the layout. So systematic theology is of course all about having the most logical God honoring presentation of humans' thoughts about the divine. And I think there's something to say for that. think that there is, it's beautiful when we can use our God given minds and logic to come at this. ⁓ But what we found is oftentimes when we're trying to
maybe take one patch out, you know, that we inherited this square and this quilt and it's not working for me anymore. I've learned some things and it's not like I'm trying to throw out the whole quilt, but I got to replace this patch and I got to get my, I have to get my theology ⁓ a little sharper, you know, and we get into this mode of trying to perfect and we end up getting defensive oftentimes about what we have, what we believe, other belief systems can be threatening. ⁓
really interesting to even just pause and think about that. When is the last time that you felt defensive about your faith? And ⁓ is that reflected in the character of Jesus on the pages of the gospels? ⁓ Or is he kind of doing his thing and inviting people to follow him into this open-ended adventure and not so worried about what other people think about it, not so worried about making sure that the whole thing is ⁓ maximized, that the whole quilt is perfect. And so you and I, over time,
use that as a way of saying, if, instead of having the perfect quilt, what if quilting itself is the goal? Which is our version of that cheesy, like the journey is the destination line. ⁓ That while we're in this process together of pulling on threads and asking the questions, and just being honest about what we have and what we don't have yet, and where we are today, and authentically engaging with our faith that way, that's quilting for us. ⁓
It meant so much, it kind of made sense all those years ago. And I feel dimensions of that metaphor have just helped me today immensely. Are you still thinking about quilting at all or have you got a better metaphor? No.
Sam Strutton (33:20)
No, it's still the one I use ⁓ when I talk with ⁓ people today about ⁓ the journey that I'm on. ⁓ It's an easy way to kind of like use an analogy, kind of paint a picture. And yeah, I think as we built it out the first time around, it
It didn't hit me until much later on, ⁓ that, and I think it was at your reflection that the journey is in the quilting noticing when patches are getting worn down, noticing where there's fraying, noticing where things are coming loose. and I think there's something to be said for just the noticing. ⁓ and, and
W. Jacob Mancini (34:13)
Hmm, I love that.
Sam Strutton (34:16)
not immediately trying to fix the patch or replace it just so that you have a completed quilt once again. So I think that how do you quilts? I'm kind of just playing to the metaphor here, but how do you quilts fray? How do they need more patches? It's through use. And so I think that while this is a space where we, I mean, we can go theologically deep real quick.
⁓ in, into, into all crazy, ⁓ sorts of questions and spaces, ⁓ that are awesome and fun to have conversations in. But if it doesn't come back to that kind of a lab aspect, if it doesn't come back to like the practical use of the quilt in our lives and like, how does this actually, that's why the proponent of it, not just being about curiosity, but faithful curiosity, where how does this play into my faithfulness to Jesus? How does this play into me, Sam Stratton?
W. Jacob Mancini (35:10)
Mm-hmm.
Sam Strutton (35:13)
in 2026, as ⁓ as a apprentice under Jesus in my super unique set of circumstances of my what I call my life. How does this quilt work here? And in what ways ⁓ does my understanding need to need to shift need to change need to adjust needs to rearrange need to maybe put a new patch on it ⁓ based on my daily commitment to try and be faithful to Jesus.
in what today has.
W. Jacob Mancini (35:43)
Yes.
Dude, yes. think, yeah, I think when in the Sermon on the Mount, when Jesus says, you've heard it said, and he quotes scripture and says, but I say to you, I think he's quilting, baby. That's just Jesus quilting right there.
Sam Strutton (36:01)
Yeah. Yeah.
W. Jacob Mancini (36:05)
And it's so just just to be clear to anyone who's listening We are not trying to take shots at patches or having a quilt or you know desiring some bearing or some sense of You know having answers answers are not the problem, right? The problem is what we do with answers. Oftentimes is you know, we we we stop living we stop seeing and
Sam Strutton (36:30)
Yes.
W. Jacob Mancini (36:35)
We forget that the quilting that we're invited into was never to finish the quilt, but it was always to just to keep, like you said, to keep noticing, to keep our eyes open and to keep following, to keep being faithful. So for us, I back at the college, you know, team years for us, faithfulness was the touchstone for us. That was what we talked about every day, every staff meeting, every post event, know, post-mortem talking. It was always.
How can we be as faithful to Jesus as we can be? And ⁓ that question, I think, is the spark. So at the risk of saying the spark and then going into another metaphor, let's talk about our framework for the rest of the conversations that will follow. Like using so much flowery metaphorical language, which is me. ⁓ That is how I tend to think. So apologies, dear listener, if ⁓ you're more concrete than I am. But again, this is going to be.
Sam Strutton (37:21)
Yeah.
W. Jacob Mancini (37:32)
totally candid and open and unscripted. yeah, you kind of get what you get a little bit. But the framework for this whole project ⁓ can be described using two concrete verses that we feel are in a creative tension. And so we're gonna read those verses and I'll start. Just unpack a little bit of how we are understanding these scriptures, okay? And then that will kind of be our coordinate system, so to speak.
⁓ Just laying out like this is the approach ⁓ going forward and then we'll wrap up. Does that sound good Sam?
Sam Strutton (38:12)
Thumbs up for the YouTubers.
W. Jacob Mancini (38:15)
let's go. So the first one is Galatians. We've got a little Galatians 5-6 action. And I'll go ahead and read this. The only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love.
The only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love. So near the close of Paul's letter to the house church in Galatia is this exclamation mark of a statement. And ⁓ for me, one of the resources I'm sure we'll talk more about one day is a book called Faith After Doubt. And Brian McLaren, the author of that book,
kind of ⁓ draws this scripture out and the whole book is so good. But he imagines Paul, who is in so many ways like this coach to the house churches. And there are so many issues circulating in these ancient glorified small groups that the early church was the way. And they have all of these. ⁓
kind of arguments and factions and like, it's my way or it's this way and it's people are, they're constantly in these early days of trying to figure out how to be faithful to Jesus. They're constantly shrinking it down into you have to be circumcised or not. Or what about the food laws, right? Sabbath. One of the things that Jesus says in the gospels that is brilliant is,
that ⁓ man was not made for Sabbath, Sabbath was made for man or humans. ⁓ What Jesus is saying in that little text and what Paul is saying in this Galatians text is the same thing. We are getting lost in the sauce of trying to so often ⁓ sum up what it's all about using our little
perspectives of what it looks like to us. And what Paul is saying is we can talk about circumcision, we can talk about, ⁓ you know, eating kosher. But the only thing at the end of the day that matters is love. And I, you know, for me, that has been the clarifying note.
through all of the disharmonies, all of the cacophonies of deconstruction for me, those dark, you know, the dark night of the soul or the really like the dark year, years that I've been through with my own questions and doubts and wrestling. ⁓ Love has been central. Love has been the underpinning of like, man, whatever this is, if I can figure it out and become a person of love, then I'm okay with that.
Sam Strutton (41:13)
Hmm.
W. Jacob Mancini (41:24)
Because I think that is where it all began. I think love found me, know something about this cosmic love this this divine love that began Creating is still creating me ⁓ You know is meeting me in this present moment. That's enough. That's enough if I can just express that if I can get aligned with that so ⁓ In so many ways I see that verse as Paul ⁓
not trying to stop the conversation, not trying to stop the questions, but trying to clarify the big thing is love. It's like Jesus's way of saying the greatest commandment is love God and love your neighbor as yourself. Because there's something about love that is the ultimate undoing of all of our default settings and presuppositions, right? When you're in a relationship and we're both married, you're in a dynamic partnership with someone.
Sam Strutton (42:15)
it.
W. Jacob Mancini (42:22)
You can never lock it down. You can try. ⁓ But it backfires, man. Like as soon as you shrink the other person down into your perspective, your small view of what you think they are, you're not in that relationship anymore. So anyway, I could just riff on that all day. That's Galatians 5-6. ⁓ To me, that's kind of this, that's the big undercurrent of everything that I feel and hopefully, you know, hopefully that's true.
of my life that love is that constant.
Sam Strutton (42:57)
incredibly well said. ⁓ The other, I'll say this, ⁓ if that verse, if Galatians 5-6, the only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love. if that's what we here at Table Talk are claiming is our anchor, ⁓ that's our why behind everything that we do and behind these conversations. ⁓
And then you were just saying now how, how being, being right or having a right understanding of something has often gotten the way of actually loving people. holding faithful curiosity ⁓ kind of allows you to ask that first question of, then what does it look like when faith expresses itself?
in love rather than certainty. And I think that's where we get our second verse. That's kind of in tension with the first, not in the negative sense, but in like a these two, if one is the engine, one is the, the steering, how, how, if one drives us forward, how do we, how do we navigate? ⁓ and so we, our second versus is proverbs 25 2 and this is, this would be our posture. if the first is our
anchor than this is our posture. It says this, Proverbs 25 2 it is the glory of God to conceal a matter to search out a matter is the glory of Kings. And I think this, this is that invitation to faithful curiosity. It is the invitation to sit in the tension of the calling.
and the response to a love greater and to respond to that love. It is...
Once that response has been made and you love met you is what you the words you used when you respond to that love meeting you and you decide to to engage with to to latch on to to be enveloped in that love, which is God. This is the how you move forward as a person of love. That's also language that I think will probably be ⁓ very familiar as we move forward. But
growing into a person of love, it's going to require me to, ⁓ it's going to require me to ask questions, to reflect on in what ways am I not a person of love? In what ways do I need to grow? In what ways am I, ⁓ am I, am I called to ask better questions about my formation, who I'm becoming? ⁓ and in what ways do I not understand love for me from God? In what ways do I?
see the hummingbird and kind of miss the beauty and the awe of what God is really saying to me and is really inviting me into. And so it's this realization that ⁓ it's, I love the language and I think you do a better job of explaining this, so I might pass it off to you. But the God concealing and the King searching, ⁓ we
W. Jacob Mancini (45:59)
Mm-hmm.
Yeah.
Sam Strutton (46:21)
We think of this kind of like, like the Royal vocation of high status kingship. ⁓ but with this kind of like, I think of Solomon, I think of wisdom, I think of like knowledge of how to reign and rule, and, ⁓ not having questions, not, not having to seek something out, but having, you know, the knowledge and the wisdom at their fingertips to make decisions.
but I think beautiful place where we see this play out and, and, ⁓ I'm going to reference it again is what was being talked about in that original audio recording from an original time in table talk that you were talking about was this idea that Adam and Eve with their divine vocation of being priestly Kings of subduing and ruling the earth. They were not given all knowledge and wisdom on how to do that. They were.
W. Jacob Mancini (46:52)
Yeah.
Sam Strutton (47:20)
given their divine vocation and God was meant to be their source of wisdom and their source of knowledge and understanding on how to carry out their divine calling as rulers and priests and image bearers of a God of love. so with, with that in mind, how much more are we who had been trained up in ways of, of unlove and, and, ⁓ and so many dehumanizing
habits and formations in our lives, just from the world itself, exposure to ⁓ sin and pain and hurt and suffering. How much more do we need to kind of question ⁓ our immediate thoughts, our immediate responses, our ways of thinking and kind of bring those under the light of our, of our rabbi, of our teacher and be like, Jesus.
W. Jacob Mancini (48:01)
Yes.
Mm.
Sam Strutton (48:12)
What do I do with this? And it's, it's, may not be a super theologically great grandiose thing. could just be, how do I love my neighbor? How do I love this person at work? You know, how do I love ⁓ my spouse or my family member? ⁓ And how do I love myself? Yeah. And so I think this posture of, ⁓
W. Jacob Mancini (48:27)
How to love myself.
Yeah.
Sam Strutton (48:38)
of searching out and of holding of curiosity, not being weakness, ⁓ but of royal vocation, kingdom work, sacred work. ⁓ I think it's absolutely what, ⁓ I think it's what Jesus ⁓ kind of turned every single person that came to him with their presuppositions and their
their correct understanding of the law. And he kind of just turned them on their heads. I don't know of any place where Jesus is like, yep, this guy, this guy's got it a hundred percent and didn't, you know, recombobulate their theology in some way, or form. ⁓ yeah. Do you want to add anything?
W. Jacob Mancini (49:12)
Yeah
Yes.
No, it's 100 % what you just said. ⁓ I'm just thinking, it's funny with this verse about God concealing. ⁓ It's the glory of God to conceal a matter. I think there's a little bit, I think it's fair to say there might be a listener out of the seven people total who will hear this, who's like, God, what the heck? But why are you hiding things from me? And we just came off Easter and.
I had my four year old son in like six different Easter egg hunts. It's absolutely ridiculous how much Easter egg hunting is going on where I live. And the joy, again, that wonder and just that absolute absorption into running into, the grass and looking behind that gnarled root and oh, and there's an egg. And someone hid that there, but.
The reason why it's hidden is to be found. So what if we lived our lives with our eyes wide open so that we could find every egg that God hid for us? Like what if that's what he's inviting us into? And what if it is that fun and that dynamic and ⁓ like you said so well, the kingdom of God, all of the symbols of humanity being crowned with glory, Psalm eight.
Sam Strutton (50:21)
Mm-hmm.
W. Jacob Mancini (50:45)
⁓ Image of God, Genesis 1, Jesus's announcement of the kingdom. What if that's a paradoxical kingdom in which it's square one, not a finish line? I love it. So we can wrap, dude. It's a tall order to say, let's live our lives and leave nothing on the field and turn over every stone with curiosity and with faithfulness to Jesus. I mean, we're not going to do that well all the time, but.
⁓ We're gonna have some fun in the process of ⁓ seeing where this goes and doing our best. ⁓ And when we are wrong, and I'll just say I've taught things that I don't agree with today ⁓ anymore, I will name that. You can name that. We are not trying to build an audience, actually. There's no agenda to have a platform, not from my end of this. I don't know about you. ⁓ I know you're pretty obsessed with people listening to you. ⁓
Just kidding.
Sam Strutton (51:44)
trying
to be number one podcast.
W. Jacob Mancini (51:47)
Yeah. ⁓ dude, it's not about building anything. It's just about being in this with you, one of my best friends. I'm grateful just to be here. It's an honor, man. ⁓ And for anyone who is tagging along and wants to pull up a chair, ⁓ we are also putting this, you know, on YouTube.
So you can watch us. You don't just have to listen. And ⁓ you can see me drink from my gallon water bottle that I got this week because I'm trying to drink more water. And this is, it's a true gallon. And ⁓ we're also, we're also just throwing things out on Instagram and TikTok. You can follow us at TabletalkFM. And if you want to participate, if you have a question or you want to push back on something, we welcome it.
you can go to our website, Tabletalk.fm and drop us a line. There's a little contact us section there. So YouTube, socials, wherever you listen to podcast, we're putting this out in love. What else do you have to say, Sam?
Sam Strutton (52:58)
Thank Thank you for, I mean, 55 minutes is a long time. So if you actually listened to the very end of this, thank you so much. Man, yeah, thanks, Dad. But yeah, I'm excited to see where this goes. Again, grateful to be doing this with you, Jacob. Just may the search continue.
W. Jacob Mancini (53:10)
Yeah, thanks mom.
Sam Strutton (53:28)
⁓ You know, the search is the glory.
W. Jacob Mancini (53:30)
searches the glory.
And until next time friends, the only thing that matters is faith expressing itself in love.