Theological Education in the Church with Cody Matchett

Rob Chartrand (00:01.85)
We're stoked to have with us Cody Matchett on the Church in the North podcast. He is an author, he's a speaker, sometimes scholar from Calgary, Alberta. He's a dad and a husband and a disciple of Jesus. And Cody, welcome to Church in the North.

Cody Matchett (00:16.43)
Yeah, thanks Rob, it's really great to be here. Appreciate you having me.

Rob Chartrand (00:20.89)
So I want our listeners to kind of get up to speed on who you are and a little bit about your ministry journey. So why don't we start back in the beginning when the Earth's crust was still forming. I can say that I'm older than you are, but let's start.

Cody Matchett (00:37.55)
You are, yeah, that's why I think it's funny. People are gonna think I'm much older than I am now.

Rob Chartrand (00:42.842)
Um, let's start with your education and your start in ministry. Um, you, you have an interesting story because you didn't actually begin with this, you know, coming out of high school, wanting to go into Bible college or ministry. So, uh, give us your background.

Cody Matchett (00:45.774)
Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (00:56.27)
Yeah, I mean, I grew up like lots of kids, you know, doing sports, maybe unlike lots of kids, but like lots of kids doing music, also doing theater. And then when I got into high school, there was sort of a two path option. You couldn't really, I went to a high school that had a great arts program. So you couldn't really do like sports and arts at the same time. I opted for arts, cause you know, why not? And so I did a lot, I think that.

Rob Chartrand (01:16.666)
Okay.

Rob Chartrand (01:20.282)
So you weren't the quarterback from Glee, the guy who did both? Okay. Sorry.

Cody Matchett (01:23.662)
I think that anyone who's ever seen me knows that that's not the case. I chose the arts route, which I did a lot of theater and a lot of music. I did competitive improv, competed nationally at improv, did all of those really fun things. And so then coming out of high school, I applied for programs to do theater and arts. That's what I did. I was a first year university student doing theater and I had...

Rob Chartrand (01:36.954)
Nice.

Cody Matchett (01:51.374)
and experience of Jesus. I don't know how to quantify it. I'm not even sure I still have a grid for it. We could call it apocalyptic. That's what Paul calls it. But I had a God experience and I didn't really know what to do with it. And I didn't have a strong background in faith or belief. I don't come from a family that has any that I wasn't raised going to church or in a Christian home. And so I left the theater and arts program after that first year and tried to figure out kind of what to do next and spent a few years living with some friends. And then eventually,

I got swindled into applying to Briar Crest, got convinced that I should apply to Briar Crest College. And so I did, and I initially came to do worship arts and arts ministry, because that was like my background for so long. And then through a convergence of experiences in my first year, which were pretty rough because of the background I was coming from and sort of trauma and baggage that I was carrying, but also my lack of familiarity with being in the kind of environment that Briar Crest is.

led to some issues and problems in my own life where it led to therapy, but with therapy, lots of re -examination. And I found myself in a class on John's gospel with Wes Olmsted. And it was there that I had, I would say like a kind of second experience of God. And I heard the voice of Jesus, my sheep hear my voice and they follow. And something happened in that class. Again, I don't have a grid for it other than it was a type of spiritual encounter that then sent me on this.

interesting journey of wanting to learn and grow and read scripture and know scripture better. And so I switched to become a biblical studies major at the end of my second year and took kind of every class in that regard I could. I was not the best student by any stretch of the imagination, but I was just so curious and wanted to learn and wanted to grow and.

Rob Chartrand (03:35.258)
Okay, that's good to know.

Cody Matchett (03:44.046)
just had the immense privilege of learning from people like Wes Olmsted and David Miller and Susan Wendell. And it was so influential on me. All of my sins remain my own. All of my blunders are not on them, they're on me. They're really great. And so from there at Briar Crest, and we'll come back around to this, I'm sure, in a minute, I stuck around for a few years kind of working at Briar Crest and then transitioned to doing a master's in New Testament at Northern Seminary under the direction of Scott McKnight.

And then I'm a year now into a PhD program in New Testament. I live in Calgary, but I'm a distance student through Ridley College in Melbourne, Australia. And so I'm studying with a guy called Michael Bird and Brian Rosner. So I'm doing PhD work now, but I'm also, as we'll come back to, I'm a church person. So I'm continuing to do this thing of wanting to discover. I can't seem to quench that insatiable curiosity about.

Rob Chartrand (04:32.89)
Yeah, yeah.

Cody Matchett (04:38.766)
Jesus in scripture and our faith that was nurtured in that class at Briar Crest. And so I keep moving forward, not again, not because I think I'm the smartest student, but I just have a lot of questions and curiosities that I keep trying to track down. And so yeah, that's kind of the educational journey.

Rob Chartrand (04:50.33)
Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so failing student to PhD. Listen, there's hope for everybody. Everyone who's listening, any Briar Crest students or any other theological students across the country, you can keep going. Just keep going. So you eventually, you became the chaplain at Briar Crest. How did that happen?

Cody Matchett (04:55.534)
Yeah, something like that.

Cody Matchett (05:10.83)
Yeah, yeah. So I ended up through a convergence of events being student body president in my last year at Briar Crest. And that put me in an office next to a person who remains a mentor and great friend to me to this day, Dan Kabor, who is the former Dean of Students at Briar Crest. And Dan and I had this great relationship and Dan was a pastor to me and a friend and a mentor to me. And

Upon graduation, Dan had asked me if I would be willing in a sort of hybrid in recruitment and student development, kind of sticking around. So that was my first year. I was in student development and in recruitment. And then in my second year, I transitioned to fully being in student development and working with Dan. And that's when I became the college chaplain. So not my first year, but my second year being on staff at Breitkrist. Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (05:59.194)
Now you almost planted a church with the Evangelical Covenant Church. Tell me really quickly the story of you getting from Chaplain to almost church planting and then...

Cody Matchett (06:02.798)
Yeah, that stinks.

Cody Matchett (06:11.118)
Man, from failing student to failing church planter, I didn't know this was gonna be this podcast, Rob. What are you doing to me here, man? Yeah, we came to the end. So I got married in my time of being on staff at Barcrest and my wife completed her masters in counseling at the seminary. And there was always this impetus and movement and draw towards church planting, being a part of nurturing communities. You did this, Rob, you know.

Rob Chartrand (06:17.146)
We're all open here.

Cody Matchett (06:38.606)
so many people who come to know Jesus for the first time, it happens in a church community that is around five years old or younger. And so there's such a missional movement to these communities where we have the opportunity to not just do our own thing, but to come in and actually be a part of doing what exactly we see the apostle Paul doing in the book of Acts and getting into communities and cities and planting and working. And so we felt the call to plant the church. And so we...

Rob Chartrand (06:45.306)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Cody Matchett (07:05.678)
When we felt like our time, like Bri's time with her degree and then kind of my time and my role was coming to an end, we began a discernment process for figuring out what we would do next. We knew part of that process was that I would do my masters because Bri had finished hers. But then it was trying to figure out how we would plant, where we'd plant, where we would go. And so we got in touch through some friends with the Evangelical Covenant Church of Canada, ECCC, and began a discernment process with them for planting.

And we went through the process, we were approved. We went through the litany of things that you go through to have that approval from rigorous interview process to they adjudicate preaching and you do marriage counseling and I'm sure you know all of this. But we went through all of that and then we had started to have gatherings here in our community. We had started fundraising and doing the work that you do as church planters to build your core team and to kind of build your budget and to find your location and place and all of those things. And then...

COVID -19 happened. And it's hard to plan. Yeah, so we were faced with an interesting question, which was, do you want to be an internet church? And there's nothing wrong with being an internet church. There's nothing wrong with starting that way and then going to in -person. But we just had a lot of people who really love, they got on board as a part of our core team out of that idea of like being, you know.

Rob Chartrand (08:04.858)
you

hard to plan a church in COVID.

Cody Matchett (08:29.326)
Missional and organic and central to our city and being online was not what any of us dreamed or imagined or hoped for And I'm not even sure My ecclesiology has really worked out what Internet Church means or what it what it means to stream all of our services I think there's lots of really complex and important questions that people like you and others are asking and should be asking and and so we had to put it on pause and then pause as you remember turned into house arrest and then house arrest turned into

a certain number of people, but then more people, but then house arrest again. And so it was a funny convergence of experiences where, yeah, we just had people saying, listen, we can't give money that we said we would give, or we can't donate at this time because we don't know what finances look like. And then for us asking those questions that I think many of us asked during COVID of like, well, what do we do now? How do we adjust in such a way that offers an appropriate response?

recognizing that we heard correctly, we went through a discernment process, other people validated that, there were hands laid on us and prayed for us that this was the thing we were to do, and then we were in a situation where we couldn't do it anymore. And so I felt like, and Brie felt like through prayer and consideration, we had to ask the question of, well, what do we do now? How can we have positive impact for the church right now in this tumultuous circumstance that we're.

faced with. And so eventually through the stops and starts, stops and starts, it went on pause and then pause became permanent pause. So it's funny, I'll often say that I'm a failed church planter and people will often push back on that and say, well, that's not really true because it never really got off the ground. And the convergence, you know, the reasons why it didn't happen were not really on you. And all those things are true. But I think it's been good and important for me to recognize, hey, we set out to do something and the thing that we set out to do is not what happened.

And not because we didn't hear correctly or because we weren't obedient. We were obedient and I think we heard correctly. It's just the world shifts and moves in turns. And sometimes it requires a different response at a different time. And so that was kind of that experience. And it was a hard experience. It was really challenging, dark for all of us and then dark in different ways when you feel like there was a sort of, to use a funny proverbial phrase, like a God -sized dream in your heart that you were pursuing and you were

Cody Matchett (10:50.958)
giving all your labors and efforts to that all of a sudden wasn't going to happen. And so it was a dark season for sure. It was a difficult season for sure. But I found, you know, it's interesting how these things happen, right? The scriptures are the scriptures, but when we bring our seasonality to them, we see things in them that maybe we didn't see before. And I think maybe it was the first time that I saw Paul with clarity, where Paul is like,

laboring for people that he loves and trying to do this work. And more often than not, it seems like it's not necessarily succeeding or people want to choose the celebrity preachers and pastors over Paul, the so -called super apostles, you know, and Paul's offering this sort of reverse CV, if you will, where he's saying, listen, you want to know what apostleship it's like? It's like being shipwrecked and it's like being beat and it's like being thrown to the ground. And so I think that I found a companion in Paul in that season.

Rob Chartrand (11:46.65)
Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (11:47.118)
in a way that I had not found a companion in Paul before. But I'd be lying if I said it wasn't really challenging. It was like it was for many of us in that season of trying to, as we said many times, pivot or adjust or figure out what it looks like to be faithful. Yeah. Mm -hmm. You're not wrong.

Rob Chartrand (11:56.634)
Yeah. Oh, hate that word. It's so triggering. Pivot as somebody who pastored COVID. Yeah. Well, he you know, that word failed church planter. I mean, it's it's it can mean so many things. I mean, because a lot of church planters who didn't their church plant didn't last. Let's just say that. I mean, they were mitigating systemic.

Cody Matchett (12:17.998)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (12:21.114)
factors that contributed to that as well. I mean, and even if it wasn't a pandemic, it could have been something else. Loss of a certain group, loss of a building, loss, you know, there's so many other factors that are there. So.

Cody Matchett (12:32.654)
It's certainly a volatile experience and it presents all sorts of challenges in the best of circumstances as you're describing. And I think too, like for anyone listening who's been through that experience, like I'm with you and I think it provides us some great opportunity to remember why we're in ministry and why we're responding to a call and to refine whatever in us needs to be refined. Not because God made this thing happen, but because oftentimes circumstances just happen and we're invited to respond to those circumstances.

Rob Chartrand (12:51.898)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (13:01.646)
At least that's what it was for me.

Rob Chartrand (13:02.266)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So from there, your next step in your journey was you ended up at First Assembly in Calgary, a payhawk church, our payhawk brothers and sisters. What was your role there? And how did that, how did you, you know, how did you end up going from church planter apprentice to, you know, to whatever your role was?

Cody Matchett (13:05.966)
Thank you.

Cody Matchett (13:11.726)
Yeah. Yeah. Yep.

Cody Matchett (13:29.454)
Yeah, I had a good friend in the city who was, who was, is still on staff at First Assembly here in Calgary. And so when I moved here, he and I connected and became fast friends and remain close friends to this day. And, you know, he just said to me, somewhat funny, you know, maybe, maybe in the moment, like if I were to look back and laugh, maybe lacking a little bit of tact where he was like, Hey, listen, man, if that's not going to work out, if that church planting thing is not going to work out for you, like I'd love to hire you. And, uh.

It was kind of that funny experience of like, hey, if that's not gonna work, why don't you come over here and do some work for us? And it was a bit of a recognition when I first went on staff at First Assembly that I have this interest for the kinds of education that you and I have experienced and for seeing biblical or theological education being a central part of church communities. And so First Assembly had launched a ministry school, not accredited, just trying to target individuals.

who wouldn't go to like an Ambrose or a Briar Crest or a Miller or somewhere else, but people who are gonna go to like U of C or somewhere else in the city, or maybe they just came right out of high school and did a trade job or something else, who are never going to go have that formal biblical experience to say, how do we create a kind of track program for them over a couple of years, where they can be apprenticed into some basic things of like how to read the Bible and what are spiritual disciplines and what does it look like to have a rule of life?

and how do we do kind of be on mission together and what is community and some of those things. And so, you know, one of my jokes, and I've said this many times to others and I'll say it to whoever's listening now. One of the things I've joked about with my payok brothers and sisters, of which I am one, so like, you know, is that sometimes they're really good at getting people together and they don't necessarily have a plan for what to do with them once they get them together. It's just this like, the spirit will do it, you know? And I love that, like that's charming to me and I believe it.

Rob Chartrand (15:11.13)
Yeah, right.

Rob Chartrand (15:22.01)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Cody Matchett (15:24.686)
But also I am that proponent of like, well, if we're gonna have a ministry school, we should have more of a structure and more of a sort of a structured outline for how this is gonna operate and what life together looks like. And so they had done a year of that ministry school and it was wonderful. And they had all of the preliminary building blocks in place, but what they were really lacking was maybe some of the more academic portions of how these classes would run, the curriculum would run. And so they brought me on to...

Rob Chartrand (15:31.13)
Yeah, yeah.

Cody Matchett (15:54.126)
to do some of that work initially with the ministry school. And then that just sort of snowballed into being asked to do some other things, some teaching at the ministry school also in conjunction with the work that I was doing. And then that became, hey, can you be the assistant director? And in their mind, assistant director, you teach and you do kind of academic -y stuff. So in their mind, it would be like an academic dean for this kind of ministry school. And then that turned into being asked if I would come on staff.

as a pastor of teaching and formation for the church as a whole to try to do some of the work that I'd been doing here across the church as a whole. And so it was a kind of snowball effect over those two or three years where once this other thing had ended, they asked me if I'd be willing to help in some of these other areas. And all of that was while I was doing my MA. And so it was a part -time experience, you know, part -time MA, part -time doing some of these other things. And so that's how I got involved there and remained there now to this day at this point.

Rob Chartrand (16:43.898)
right.

Rob Chartrand (16:53.21)
Okay, well, and we're going to come back to this later. But you also wrote a book during this time while you were there. Was that just really quickly? Was that right after your MA? Or was that during your MA? Okay, yeah, yeah. Okay, so we'll talk about that a little bit more. But so now now your role is shifted yet again with First Assembly. What are you doing lately? Tell us, give us a snapshot of that.

Cody Matchett (16:58.83)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (17:02.734)
It was during my MA process, yep.

Cody Matchett (17:11.054)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (17:16.078)
Yeah, so all of that work then transitioned and culminated in, again, part of this process where I got to be a TA for a couple of scholars at Northern, Scott McKnight, of course, who was my thesis supervisor, and then Nijay Gupta was also there. I was a teaching assistant for him. And it was during that time that they had both encouraged me to consider doing PhD work and PhD studies.

And that wasn't honestly on my radar. Again, like I love to learn. I love to be a part of theological education, but doing a PhD. And in my mind, I think of like the people whom I deeply admire, the people who are formative to me, someone like a Wes Olmsted or a Susan Wendell or David Miller. I'm like, well, I'm not on their level. So I'm not sure that's the greatest of ideas.

But Scott was really encouraging towards me in the process of working with him and then writing this book together to consider that. And so I got to the point of saying, yeah, that's the thing that I'm going to do. And then applied for PhD programs and we settled on this work. And then I resigned from first assembly, slash became a kind of scholar in residence. So while I'm doing my schooling, still being around, but not being on the official staff team, but then being contracted to teach at our ministry school. So I'm considered internally.

like our sort of professor of Bible or theology for our ministry school. But I'm contracted to do that. And then I'm also, again, doing my PhD work at the same time. So I'm a PhD student who also teaches some classes and does some speaking. And then if that sounds glamorous to anyone, which it shouldn't, I spend the other part of my time with my two children who are two and a half and one. So that keeps me the most grounded.

Rob Chartrand (18:41.05)
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Chartrand (18:48.826)
Okay. Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (18:59.738)
Yes.

Rob Chartrand (19:04.09)
Yeah, that's right. Yeah, you're a busy family man as well, which is totally cool. Yeah. Let's have a conversation about theological education in the local church. You're obviously an advocate for it given what you're doing. Why is theological education important for local churches?

Cody Matchett (19:07.662)
Do my best.

Cody Matchett (19:13.55)
Yeah, please.

Cody Matchett (19:25.294)
Yeah, I think I want to say upfront, I think where the church goes through, as you know, like the church has gone through many changes and transformations and the church is aiming to respond to the moment that it's in faithfully at any given time. And I think that we had some great missional movements, we had some great leadership -esque movements that emerged in recent years in the church.

And those are all great things. So before I say anything else, I wanna say like, I think like, one of the things I've learned from Paul is that he's a pragmatist. And it doesn't matter if it's big or small, styles vary, traditions vary. If Jesus is central and we're learning to follow Jesus together, that's the main piece. I think for me, what has become really important.

is thinking about what it means to be a pastor scholar or a pastor theologian. Some people will mix all of those words around theologian pastor, pastor theologian, whatever. It doesn't matter to me where you put the words, but that one of the things I realized, Rob, was that for most of church history, people who pastored churches like priests and leaders of congregations were also scholars and theologians. Most of the people we read,

whether it be patristics or in the medieval ages or even beyond that, they were never people who just taught at universities or just taught at colleges, but they were also people who were deeply involved boots on the ground in church life. So they were writing treaties. Sometimes their sermons were their treaties. Nobody would go for that today in a 30 minute three pointer. You get into some of the Edward stuff and you're like, there's 75 points in the sermon and it's at least two hours long.

Rob Chartrand (21:02.106)
Right. Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (21:08.954)
Raising the affections of the heart, Edward.

Cody Matchett (21:09.582)
I'm not advocating for that, by the way. I think one of the things that I've just realized is I want it to be, again, an embodiment of that. Doctors of the church, people who do scholarship, but are also pastors who recognize that not everybody does have the experience of getting to go to a Briar Crest or an Ambrose or a Miller or somewhere else, but they're people who live in our cities.

who live in our communities, who work faithfully, who love Jesus faithfully, and they need to be taught. They need people in their community who can do the work of the learning or the PhDing or the de -mining or whatever that is to be the presence of the person who can help them become, the ancient word of course is catechized. They can become catechized in the way of Jesus. They can learn to be a faithful follower of him.

And so I think I just become an advocate of like, if the word mathetase, which we typically translate as, you know, disciple or apprentice, the word means learner. Part of what we're to be is we're to be learners. I mean, in Matthew 11, right, we love that, come and rest with me, you know, take my yoke upon you. We love that part. But Jesus says, come and learn from me. Come and be my student. And so I think for me, it's the opportunity to do,

theological education and teaching in church context that is rigorous and robust but accessible. However imperfectly I'm sorting out how to do that. And I think for me that's become just really important. So a good example, last fall I taught 200 adults in our church through Romans on Wednesday nights. And a big part of that class was not just me showing up to lecture but it was very dialogical. Like let's read a section of the text.

and let's talk about it together. And I came prepared with note packets every week, 20 or 30 pages of notes, just too many notes that we're never gonna get through, but each week giving them the notes and saying, here's some extra work if you want to do it, but just being here is part of that journey, learning to read, learning to follow Jesus together faithfully. And I know that every pastor is trying to do this, so I'm not trying to say that they're not, but I also wanna say that not every pastor can do the same things that you or I have done.

Cody Matchett (23:31.502)
And some pastors are the pastors that need to do the hospital visits, and some pastors are the pastors that need to do the outreach and the evangelism, and some pastors are the pastors that need to do the rigorous study, and then together we function as a body, right? You know, channeling the work of Paul here. So yeah, theological education has been really important. And I think in one sense, you know, Mark Knoll, remember that book, The Evangelical Mind, you know, like the first line of the book.

Rob Chartrand (23:56.57)
Yeah, yeah.

Cody Matchett (23:57.902)
the scandal of the evangelical mind is there is no evangelical mind. You're like, well, that's not entirely true. But rhetorically, I see what he's saying, like pushing us to say, have we lost some of our depth? And have we become perhaps a little bit shallow and have opted in some ways for a kind of mastery and control over specific things rather than having maybe a bigger or more robust picture? I think all of those things are true.

Rob Chartrand (23:59.706)
Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Cody Matchett (24:27.694)
And I think I just want to be a part of theological retrieval in the church. I hope that was coherent. There's so much that could be said.

Rob Chartrand (24:32.442)
Yeah, yeah. No, that's great. I mean, it's so I mean, and you already alluded to this already, you know, with with the missional movement. So, you know, pushing back on that a little bit. You know, when we think about, say, disciple making movements that are happening in the world today, like these rapid mobilization, disciple making movements that are occurring, not as not connected necessarily to scholarship all the time, right, but connected to.

Cody Matchett (24:59.406)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (25:00.922)
disciples who make disciples who make disciples make disciples and highly evangelistic, highly emphasizing the formation of leaders who can form leaders who can form leaders, right. And so there's rat and there are these movements that are happening, but there's no scholarship there. Right. So, you know, reflecting on that, like I was reading Stephen Addison's book, movements that change the world. I don't know if you've

Cody Matchett (25:02.862)
Yes.

Cody Matchett (25:13.998)
Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (25:19.662)
Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (25:28.686)
Hmm. No, I'm not familiar.

Rob Chartrand (25:29.754)
touched on that one, but he's looking at the the Methodist movement in the States. So this is something I'm reflecting on lately. And I probably shouldn't be because I work in an academic institution. But he's the Methodist movement in the States, like with Asbury, Francis Asbury. I mean, how was the West one in the US for Christianity? Well, it was the Baptists and as the Methodists and the Methodists were 18 year old kids with barely a facial hair.

Cody Matchett (25:36.238)
Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (25:41.614)
Hey, we need those too.

Cody Matchett (25:46.478)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (25:58.81)
riding horseback from town to town to town, not necessarily highly trained, but trained on the job like that was the Wesleyan model. And yet winning people on the frontier. I mean, and, and Addison pulls out the, the statistics of the movement of the, the Methodists. And you can see this bell curve of it reaching its apex at a certain year. Like, so it's going up and up and up more and more people, more and more converts, baptisms, members of churches.

Cody Matchett (26:06.254)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (26:25.914)
And the one year where it reaches its apex and then it starts going down is the year where they required all clergy because it was always a criticism of the Methodist clergy that they weren't educated, was a requirement of them all to be seminary trained and educated. And then so all of the churches that the nature of the sermons, the nature of all of that became, you know, high church, high education, high scholarship, but not really practical. Right. And.

Cody Matchett (26:40.11)
Oh, interesting.

Cody Matchett (26:53.326)
Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (26:54.586)
and not necessarily, you know, calling people to respond to the gospel and whatnot. And it really changed. And you can see the bell curve going the other way during that year. So I'm more of a balanced guy. Like I want I think both are important in tandem. But yeah, so I just I just I think we need scholars in churches. I mean, and there was a certain portion of people that need that. So anyway, give me some pushback on that. Like reflecting on that.

Cody Matchett (27:07.214)
Yeah, yeah, of course. Yeah, I'm with you.

Cody Matchett (27:21.838)
Yeah, no, I could be Wesley back to you, right? And say, Wesley gathers his circuit -riding preachers at one point and says to them, why are the people under our care not better? And his answer is, because we are not knowing enough and we're not holy enough. And that combination is what makes Wesley one of my heroes, just that it's not enough just to know.

Rob Chartrand (27:34.202)
Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (27:39.834)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (27:47.79)
You know, I think of, I was in preparation for the interview, for whatever reason, it came into my head thinking about, you know, Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline, which is a book that's older than me. But in that book, you know, he says, we don't, the world is not in need of more intelligent people, but more deep people. And I think that's what I'm getting at too. I'm not just talking about being scholars for the sake of, you know, highfalutin treaties and intelligence. I'm just talking about the kinds of proficiencies that allow us to have a depth of knowledge.

Rob Chartrand (27:56.986)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (28:04.634)
Mm -hmm. Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (28:10.426)
Yep. Yep.

Cody Matchett (28:16.462)
of who our God is and what it means to be here in the world. And I think that sometimes just the continuous pipeline of maybe regurgitating the same things over and over again, not that any of us are guilty of that, is not actually gonna help people get catechized in the right kinds of ways. And I think too, working with young people so much, it's just fascinating to see being, I work with a lot of young adults in particular.

And that they're, one of the things I notice inner city young adults right now, which is who I work with, is that a lot of them, they have fluency, like they can give you an answer for something that's like, here's what I believe about X. And if you ask them to come back to scripture or tradition or where that view comes from, they don't have the literacy or the capacity to do that.

And then that's why for a lot of them, I think that their faith feels, it doesn't feel stable because they don't necessarily know where, yeah, where they come from or necessarily how scripture pushes towards that. So I'm with you actually. I'm not against, I think reaching people is integral if we believe what we say that we believe. And I think that being like Paul, having these types of conversations with normal people in the Agora and while you're working like that, those are.

Rob Chartrand (29:15.354)
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't have this legacy.

Cody Matchett (29:37.87)
so, so important. But at the same time, Paul is also clearly writing at a high level and he's pushing for these sort of deep theological premises. So no, I'm with you, I want both things. I think what I'm saying is I feel the call to be in communities as the pastor scholar or my community as a pastor scholar. And I would wanna advocate for space.

for church communities to ensure that we have those types of people in our communities in the same way that we ensure that we have the missional person or the pastoral care person. That I think the idea of pastor being all things to all people, I don't know if it ever worked, but it certainly doesn't feel like it works right now in an age of, you know, speciality. Whereas we have, you know, pastors that can mobilize and equip people in really specific kinds of ways. So I'm not, my dream is not that everyone becomes a scholar.

Rob Chartrand (30:08.378)
Yeah, yeah.

Cody Matchett (30:30.158)
or a scholar pastor or whatever, that wouldn't be practical at all. We wouldn't reach anybody. It would just be a bunch of people in their rooms by themselves with too much social anxiety to go out into the world. That would not be helpful for any of us. Yeah, exactly. So, and I think too, that's part of why I'm doing PhD while I'm still in the church, because again, that was part of our family decision of saying, I don't just want to go be in an ivory tower somewhere. Not there's anything wrong with that. I have friends doing that and they're amazing people. I just, I don't actually want to.

Rob Chartrand (30:41.754)
Yeah, in school for a very long time. Yeah. Well, I agree with you. But.

Cody Matchett (30:59.502)
work in a seminary or in a university, I wanna work in a church and be a part of rubbing shoulders with people who are like, wait a minute, say that one more time. I've never heard that before. And I'm like, I love to live there.

Rob Chartrand (31:05.498)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (31:10.874)
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Chartrand (31:14.81)
Yeah. Well, I think NT Wright is a good example of that. I mean, he's has said it all. I keep one foot firmly planted in the church, one foot firmly planted in the academy and he can be there for be a great bridge from from one to the other. I yeah, yeah. And you know, for myself personally, I mean, I was I've been in school my whole life. I mean, it's there's maybe a couple years I took off. So, you know, a couple of graduate degrees and then and then my doctorate is just I mean, I was doing ministry the whole time and.

Cody Matchett (31:17.486)
He is.

Cody Matchett (31:25.71)
Yeah.

My dream.

Rob Chartrand (31:44.218)
actually I found my ministry was all the more richer because I decided to do that, to continue to learn. And I think Wesley would say that too. He encouraged those riders to continue to be students. So as they're riding their horses, they're reading books for the journey. Yeah, it's a different model. So what you're about is also discipleship. I mean, there's a discipleship deficit in churches. That's been something we've been talking about the last couple of decades. I mean, it's certainly one of the highly -

Cody Matchett (31:47.47)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (31:57.678)
Yeah, I know. It's so wild.

Cody Matchett (32:12.526)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (32:14.234)
commoditized book markets that's out there. There's a lot of books about discipleship. How does what you're doing intersect with the formation of disciples in the local church?

Cody Matchett (32:19.95)
Hmm.

Cody Matchett (32:25.87)
Yeah, I think that's a big part of it, which is coming back to the question of, okay, well, what is the gospel? What is the story that we believe? How do we then learn to follow Jesus faithfully in the moment that we live in? And I think, you know, one of the arguments I've tried to make with my students over the last few years is it's going to be really difficult for us to navigate the present unless we're tethered to our past. And by that, I'm not advocating for a kind of nostalgia.

Rob Chartrand (32:38.746)
Mm -hmm. Yep.

Cody Matchett (32:55.022)
or like a recovery of Christianity from like the 1950s or the third century. I'm trying to say it's in becoming deep learners of our texts and our history, which is hard work, that we can actually know how we live faithfully right now. So yeah, I mean, even as I say, you know, pastor, scholar, scholar, pastor, at the end of the day, all of that is unto the end of helping people be faithful followers of Jesus. And to know what it looks like to...

Rob Chartrand (32:59.162)
Right. Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (33:21.338)
Yeah, yeah.

Cody Matchett (33:25.518)
to navigate the complex moment that we live within faithfully. So, you know, one of the things I've said, you know, over the last year in particular, at some events we were at, the YWC events, is that I think for a lot of these young students, and I've alluded to this already, I think what I see in terms of their discipleship deficit is that we do a lot of our preaching and teaching just based on fluency. So here's the application, go do the application. But then when it comes time for people to do their own fluency, oh, I don't know what to do in this moment.

they don't have literacy to back up the fluency. And so they can't be fluent because they're not yet literate. And so I'm trying to help with that literate thing so that they can be more fluent in learning to navigate the social complexities of 2024, which are myriad.

Rob Chartrand (34:13.338)
Yeah, and I appreciate your preaching because you're not just chewing the food for them and then spitting it out and say, here, please eat this, but you're allowing the text to preach itself and you're walking them through just kind of a fundamental exegesis of the text. And then therefore, what does this therefore mean to us? So I found that very, very helpful in terms of your style.

Cody Matchett (34:33.422)
Yeah.

That's kind, I think that's kind. I'm trying to think about preaching a little bit like a funnel. I think that Stanley's sort of model of one -point sermon is a helpful reminder for all of us. So for me, it's always a little bit like a journalist. I try to do some of the complex stuff right off the top if I'm gonna do anything complex. And then I try to just weed it down through the exegesis to trying to say, you've missed everything, point, or if there's one thing.

So again, I think what I try to do sometimes is just to say there is complexity in here, but it's always whittled down to like, I think everybody could walk away, hopefully. Again, we're all still working on our process of public speaking. I think that people could walk away being formed with a particular idea or that they then have to, in partnership with the spirit, figure out how that works itself out in their life. Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (35:26.682)
Yeah, yeah. You know, as we think about the future of the church in Canada and we think about the formation of ministry leaders, I mean, Heimstra just came out with some stats. Rick Heimstra, he's with the EFC and he's doing research there with them. 600 and something, we'll need 612 or 612 trained ministry leaders every year for the next 12 years if we're just gonna catch up.

Cody Matchett (35:43.15)
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Chartrand (35:55.162)
you know, and I think about all the theological schools across the country, both undergrad and graduate, we're not producing that many. We're not even close to that. Like we're like one sixth of that we're producing every single year in any given year. And then, you know, half of them are not lasting past the first five years. So we've got a resiliency challenge. So a lot of churches have turned to say, well, maybe there's new ways of forming future pastors and leaders and churches like, uh,

like First Assembly, like Bula, like Northview or whatnot are saying, well, how do we create our own school or how do we partner with educational schools in our own context? Is that kind of part of the process that you guys are working with there?

Cody Matchett (36:30.126)
Yep. Yes.

Cody Matchett (36:38.926)
Yeah, I mean, you're speaking to, you know, they're not insider discussions, because as you've alluded to, like, I mean, I know Bielo's doing it, I know other churches in Ontario are trying to think about this too. Yeah, we are trying to think about something like what, you know, Nicky Gumbel and their team has done in the UK, which is like, you know, as pithy as it may be, like there's a Peter track and there's a Paul track. There's like, how do we help?

Rob Chartrand (36:58.298)
Right. Yep.

Rob Chartrand (37:05.018)
Yes.

Cody Matchett (37:06.03)
expedite this process of seeing people educated in important and deep ways, but also to be practitioners, not just to be scholars or to go to seminary in the formal sense, but people who have done the trades who then do this and they become bivocational or co -vocational. Yeah, exactly. So we're thinking about that. Like how do we...

Rob Chartrand (37:10.906)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (37:26.01)
Yeah, it's more diachronical roles. Yeah.

Cody Matchett (37:31.758)
partner with institutions. And I mean, for us right now, obviously at First Assembly, we're POC, so Vanguard is our school here in Alberta, is figuring out how do we establish these types of partnerships where we can bring that education to churches proper. And again, I don't wanna speak for Briar Crest, I'm not in the internal workings of this, but I think even for Briar Crest, the brilliance of bringing some of the incredible world -class faculty that's at Briar Crest to churches.

I just think if you can begin to nurture that, which will take time, you will find what I've found, which is like, I have like, out of those 200 adults in Romans, I probably have at least 50 who have asked me if I will do a more technical seminary level course that they would even pay to take. So like, if we can begin to nurture hunger, I think that we can see that type of education move, and then that can fund these other avenues of seeing people equipped in and through the local church because,

As much as I wish it were true, Rob, I just can't convince most of my people to move even to Edmonton from Calgary, let alone Carromport. I love Carromport, I love Moose Jaw, of blessed memory in my time. But I can't convince most people to make that move. And so again, I'm saying, well, how do we help people get a taste of these things to see them get equipped in certain ways that they recognize that they just are pastors, where God has placed them, and that how we see more of them equipped to find themselves in church roles. So a lot of our,

Rob Chartrand (38:35.674)
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Chartrand (38:52.602)
Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (38:58.19)
A lot of our pastors on staff at our church or staff at our church are doing our ministry school and or doing classes through Vanguard or Briarchus or other places. So they're doing their education while they're in church ministry. So they're learning, as you know, as I do so much, and you learn the questions that you don't just ask when you're just in a classroom, but you're getting the experience that's actually going to form a deeper kind of knowing. And so, yeah, I think like you, I'm just arguing for both. Like, and I just think like, I can't help with all of the things, but.

Part of what I want to help do is, you know, and being a teaching pastor and then, you know, teaching in the classroom also is just to help formation happen in this particular kinds of what kind of way, knowing that we need more people on our teams to help it happen in more robust ways too. But I think, I think your question is exactly on point is how do we, how do we help more people catch a vision for what pastoral ministry is like and what it means to be a pastor and to heed to the call of mission in this kind of way.

Rob Chartrand (39:41.722)
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Chartrand (39:55.834)
Yeah, and I think larger churches have a better opportunity to do it because, well, you just have the capacity, you've got the space, you've got more specializations on staff than a small church. That's right.

Cody Matchett (39:59.246)
I think you're right.

Cody Matchett (40:05.582)
And you have funds that other churches don't have. And again, like I think, you know, a couple of my friends have quoted this to me and it could be just folklore or wrong. So someone can send me an email to correct this. But I think, you know, people like Eugene Peterson and others have just made the point of like, every church can't be everything. And some churches, and again, this is something that, you know, this is just full honest, right? Like I think young people were like, oh, the big churches.

Like some people can just poo poo on big churches. It's like, well, we need big churches and we need small churches in order to do all of these types of things collectively for the kingdom that God has called us to do. And so again, I've been really fortunate to be a part of the formation of a ministry school over these last years and continuing to dream about what that looks like because our church can afford that reality. And then to help create pathways, again, what we're thinking about as I'm sure you are, for other churches to be a part of that that can't afford to have someone like.

me on their staff or someone like you on their staff.

Rob Chartrand (41:04.314)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I think schools are getting better at that. And I mean, COVID was great. It was a great bump for schools. Just by thinking about different models. Even here at our seminary, I think 90 % of our courses are now online courses. And then the rest are modular and you can come and take them in person. I mean, it's always better to take an in -person course. It's always better to teach an in -person course. There's just so much of the embodied experience. However,

Cody Matchett (41:08.398)
Yes, of course.

Cody Matchett (41:27.726)
Ye - yes. Yes.

Rob Chartrand (41:33.05)
If you're working in a full -time job and you got a family and you want to take a course and you're living in Calgary, an online option is a great option for you as a learner. And you're already, you may already be embedded in a community of learning where you're at or a community of formation where you're at. And so you don't need to come and do it here. Unfortunately, at the undergrad level, we don't have that available, but we have a greenhouse. That's the other thing is you can come here in this amazing discipleship.

Cody Matchett (41:42.638)
Absolutely.

Cody Matchett (41:59.95)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (42:00.282)
environment and grow as an undergrad but rather than taking a yeah yeah

Cody Matchett (42:03.534)
Yeah, which is vital. I mean, it's so important. And I would advocate for in -person education at every turn, even as someone who, because of COVID and other restrictions, has done, did their entire MA distance apart from one class, and is doing a PhD distance. No, a UK model, so it's mostly research anyway. But nonetheless, I've had to, as you've described, create my own kind of learning pockets and environments here, yeah.

Rob Chartrand (42:16.666)
Right.

Rob Chartrand (42:27.834)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I appreciate all that. Let me change the subject a little bit. You're working with Tequila, you work with a lot of emerging adults, Gen Xers, sorry, Millennials in Gen Z. What are you learning from working and teaching with this next generation? What can be helpful for maybe some of our ministry leaders who don't have that face to face involvement? What should churches be paying attention to?

and maybe how do we contextualize the gospel to what we're seeing now, boots on the ground.

Cody Matchett (43:01.742)
Yeah, I think I would first say whatever myth that's out there that the church is dying or that there isn't spiritual hunger, like I only see the opposite. I see lots of hope and I see growth and I see a lot of young people who are like really hungry to sort out what faith is really about and what it looks like. So I would want to say that right off the top. You know, I see...

Rob Chartrand (43:12.506)
Hmm.

Cody Matchett (43:29.774)
I see hunger, I see all of those really great things. I think I also see, again, coming back to the previous point, maybe just a lack of a type of education or saturation education where I think there's a recognition among many of them that they really want to believe, but often they don't always know why they believe what they believe. And so I think there's a deep invitation in a moment where, I know it's kind of catchy and kitschy, but.

where so much TikTok content or otherwise is about deconstructing or putting out the hard questions because the hard questions get views or the scandalizing statements get the views, to be the kind of people who are familiar with that discourse that's happening and the hard questions that are being asked, and then to engage those yourself. Again, it's a form of apologetics, but I think deeper than that,

It's a form of helping people construct and reconstruct faith in really healthy and good kinds of ways. I think to do that though, we just have to be willing to ask the hard questions. And we have to be willing to recognize that we even sometimes have to defamiliarize ourselves with something that seems so obvious to us. So like we're moving, we just bought a house, so we're moving here in the city soon. And we've been living in this apartment for the last few years. And...

moving out of this, now that I know we're moving out of this apartment, I see things right now, knowing that I'm leaving, that I didn't really see before. Like, I had become comfortable with the way that our house is and was, that maybe there's like a little dirt here or there, or a crack in the drywall here, or a hole over there, that now that I know I have to fix that or fill that, I'm very aware of it in a way that when I'm just living there, I can just sort of skate by it.

Rob Chartrand (45:12.474)
Right.

Cody Matchett (45:20.654)
I think that we have to know that when young people are reading these texts, so like I taught, again, 80 students through Torah last fall, man, they're reading Torah for the first time. They've got a lot of questions. And I think we just have to be willing to sit with those and journey with those and then defamiliarize ourselves with what we think all of those things are about to maybe see again with clarity what's really there. That's a hard journey, but I think it's a really rewarding one.

Rob Chartrand (45:32.922)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (45:48.526)
And then maybe one of the things that I'm really sensitive to, Rob, and people can just say, well, this is just me. What do you know about what you're talking about? I think the more we can pull ourselves away from some of the insider talk and some of the, again, assumed kind of Christian -ese ways that we speak, it will be really helpful for us. Because I think right now, if we think about recontextualizing, we need different language.

Rob Chartrand (46:06.874)
Yeah. Okay.

Cody Matchett (46:17.294)
that again, same gospel, same heartbeat, but we need to think about how we relay these things in ways that are not going to sound like we're marshaling out the same stuff that was used 20 or 30 years ago, but actually really asking those deep questions. So again, I think, again, what I see boots on the ground, this is obvious, everybody's talking about this, identity is a big one. Who am I? Why am I here? Again, you know, those are the existential questions that we all ask.

But coming back to then, what does it mean to be a human? What does it mean to live in this strange world? And I think sometimes we will just jump to robust theological categories rather than trying to work back to what are different angles and ways we can talk about these things that are going to be really helpful. Maybe it's using psychology or using sociology or if it's using.

the angle of pop culture that we have now, or I think we have to become, I think, students of pop culture in our historic moment to try to know how to navigate those things well.

Rob Chartrand (47:20.57)
Okay. Yeah, which is good gospel contextualization. I mean, it's right. So we yeah, we were talking often speak about these issues from our frame, but we're not entering into the frame of the culture we're trying to reach and understanding them and then bringing the gospel in a contextualized way to those. We need to be good missionaries, good missiologists in our own culture, but we assume.

Cody Matchett (47:25.294)
Yeah, I think so too.

Cody Matchett (47:35.47)
Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (47:45.658)
that because they live in the same country as us or they live in the same street as us or in the neighborhood as us that we're actually speaking the same language when we're not. We haven't discerned the context.

Cody Matchett (47:54.318)
Yeah, you're exactly right. And then I think figuring out, you know, I'll often joke with my students like Christianity isn't about doctrines, it's about a way of life, which is actually not true, because that's a false dichotomy. It's both those things wedded together, of course. But I think, yeah, you know this, of course, and the data would back this up. Young people that I work with, they want to see how this impacts their real life, and they want to see it impacting their real life. And they want to see us,

modeling this as types that they can follow. And so I think just coming back to that Pauline notion of imitate me as I imitate Christ or as he says to his protege Timothy, become a model for the faith. I think those things become important. But the way you said it is more eloquent than I did, which is entering into their frame to contextualize back as opposed to just pushing the frames we have sort of back on younger people right now.

Rob Chartrand (48:35.386)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (48:49.434)
Yeah, yeah. So you you said that you're seeing a hunger, you're seeing a greater desire. What does that look like?

Cody Matchett (48:54.542)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, I think it looks like a lot of people right now coming back to faith and or people just asking a lot of questions. I think that people recognize that there is a kind of social turbulence, at least here in my city. There's a kind of social turbulence that exists where they don't know what is real or true or right and there is this kind of...

murky morality where people are just saying to them, well, whatever you want to do is right and whoever you want to be is right. And I think that that's led to so much anxiety and hopelessness that people then start asking the questions about faith again that maybe they had stopped asking at one point in their life. So I see it with young people, but I also see it in our church as a whole. I think people are looking for hope and I think they're looking for...

a groundedness and a rootedness in terms of those big questions. And so I see people coming all the time in droves to Tehila and to our Sunday services, just kind of trying to find who God is and why they're here.

Rob Chartrand (50:02.49)
Yeah, maybe for our listeners, we should define what is Tequila. Give us a... We've been talking about it.

Cody Matchett (50:06.286)
Yeah, sorry. It's a Monday night city -wide event that's been happening for 30 years. And it has a charismatic flavor, but it's non -denominational, technically. So we have about 16 to 25 denoms on a Monday night. Maybe recently we're up to 600, 700 students. So it's high school students and young adults that come. And we do...

you know, worship and ministry time and a teach. And it's really just about a gathering of the saints to encounter God together and to be on mission in our city together. And then it's like a lot of young adult events where it's like some just come because they want to meet other young adults. And that's a good thing, too. But it's been it was birthed out of a type of language we would use as revival that happened years ago, where at one point in Zahila's history, it was like.

Rob Chartrand (50:50.042)
Sure, yeah, yeah.

Cody Matchett (51:00.59)
gym was packed during the hour before for prayer, you know, five, 600 people coming, people driving all over from Alberta to come to Tehila. And it was a catalyst for lots of people to come to know Jesus for the first time. And so it has this interesting history and it continues to this day. And then the ministry school is a part of that. So a lot of the people who come to Tehila, they stay at their own churches, but then they also come to the ministry school that's funded by Tehila and First Assembly.

Rob Chartrand (51:28.282)
Yeah, so you have a kind of a counterpart in Edmonton, the project. Are you familiar with the project? Yeah, they're a little bit different though, I think.

Cody Matchett (51:33.262)
Yeah, that's right. I am, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, they're a church of their own. So like, you know, Ruben would be like the project pastor now and they would have kind of their own, where Tehila is not a church. Like we say every week, we're not a church. We believe in the local church. In fact, we've taken another step, which is our lead team has decided, our Tehila leadership team decided that we have a phone number that anybody can text and we will find churches in their area and connect them with pastors that we know in churches. So again,

Rob Chartrand (51:43.29)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (52:05.038)
We don't just want people coming to an event on Monday night. We wanna help get them plugged back into the local church. So we do that every week. We try to get people, because people will say, Tehila is my church. And we'll always be like, it is not your church.

Rob Chartrand (52:11.994)
Yeah, yeah, that's great.

Rob Chartrand (52:16.666)
No, no. And the challenge though, is to leave to heal it to go to a local church. The expression and the experience might be different, quite different than what they're used to. But hopefully a maturing disciple will say, well, that's all right. That's totally fine.

Cody Matchett (52:25.454)
Mm -hmm. Yep. Yeah.

Cody Matchett (52:31.854)
I think it does have a shelf life and I think there are lots of people, so for example, we have a high contingency number of Catholics who come to Gila. And I think part of it is because they get mass and then they get this kind of other low church spiritual experience and I think both those things together for them is really meaningful, the two expressions that go together. So we get a lot of that also, a lot of people who aren't trying to make it their church but just love the experience of being there.

Rob Chartrand (52:38.842)
Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (52:58.106)
is part of the shelf life, just, I guess, the leaving emerging adulthood. So in other words, you finish college, you get a career, you get married, you have kids. I mean, you kind of start feeling a little old at Tehila after that, and you're like, it's time to move on.

Cody Matchett (53:12.654)
I think that's part of it. And then I think the notion of like, I don't know, like, I don't know what your experience was like or other people listening, their experiences have been like, but I think even for me, like, I think at one point in my life, like, loud music and a sermon and, you know, fun community that that was like, it was really spiritually enriching to me. And I've kind of, I've grown up now and...

Those things are great, but I also really love silence and I don't go to church to hear a 30 minute talk. You know what I mean? Whereas one point I did know, but I think that people, it's a shelf life because you recognize that like, oh, there's no, this is not, there's no discipleship element here. It's an experience that is formative and helpful, but it's supposed to be a catalyst. And we say that every week, it's a springboard back out for a season of your life, but it's not forever. We really push people getting discipled, getting integrated into local churches.

Rob Chartrand (53:46.362)
Yeah, yeah.

Rob Chartrand (53:57.274)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (54:10.286)
Tahila can't be their church.

Rob Chartrand (54:12.314)
Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, you just got old, man. You just got old.

Cody Matchett (54:15.374)
Mm -hmm. I know. I've been bald for a long time, but only old for the last little while.

Rob Chartrand (54:20.666)
Yeah, it just makes me think of I'm just reflecting on some studies on on happiness and contentment happiness studies. And and and how that your definition of happiness changes through the course of a lifetime. And emerging adulthood is is always there's a sense of immediacy. And so your sense of contentment and happiness is always in the moment in the experience. But the older you get, the more you start reflecting on life differently, because you start to see the end.

Cody Matchett (54:49.934)
Hmm.

Rob Chartrand (54:50.202)
And as you start to see the end, your idea of happiness and satisfaction changes more towards contentment, more towards just, you know, being with people and community and these other rich aspects of it. Although a young person is also thinking, but what's the next thing in career? Like it's what's what's what's happening immediately afterwards.

Cody Matchett (55:12.686)
Yeah, of course. Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (55:15.162)
but they don't have the same longevity of view that say someone who's later in life. So I think it's part of the natural development cycle of an adult. Yeah, anyway. So while you were in FAA, while you were at First Assembly, you were able to co -author this book. Let's get back to that. Revelation for the Rest of Us. It makes me think of Seinfeld. Festivus for the Rest of Us.

Cody Matchett (55:22.318)
Yeah, that's actually really helpful. Yeah, I think you're right.

Cody Matchett (55:31.31)
Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (55:42.446)
Yeah, come on.

Rob Chartrand (55:43.769)
A prophetic call to follow Jesus as a dissident disciple. What a great title. Talk to us about that. I mean, what does, why does revelation matter to the church today? Let's first talk about the book and its content. Obviously you coauthored it with Scott McKnight. I want to talk about that, what that experience was like, but why revelation and why does that matter for discipleship?

Cody Matchett (55:57.582)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (56:09.678)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, we could just admit right off the cuff. Revelation is a strange book for most for most church folk. And a lot of pastors up until very recently have either preached it from really, we'll say, interesting angles, speculative angles, or they've ignored it altogether. And I think one of the things that we try to do in the book is say, how do we read Revelation as a manifesto for discipleship?

Rob Chartrand (56:16.026)
Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (56:26.17)
Sure.

Cody Matchett (56:37.71)
So what does Revelation teach us about how we follow Jesus faithfully right now? And that sounds much more like the rest of the New Testament. So already there, we're maybe at a better place of like, what does this teach us about the triune God, the one on the throne and the seven spirits and the lamb? How do we follow the lamb, as Gorman says in the subtitle of his book, in uncivil worship and witness? Or as we say, how do we follow Jesus as?

Rob Chartrand (56:37.946)
Hmm.

Cody Matchett (57:04.078)
dissident disciples and the reason why we go with dissident disciples is because Empire and Rome play such a big role in Revelation You get to chapter 17 and 18 and you see Babylon the woman she is she is Rome or Roma seated on Rome and And so part of what John's inviting us into by using a weird

Rob Chartrand (57:05.946)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cody Matchett (57:30.99)
mix of apocalyptic and prophetic and Greco -Roman letter is he's trying to invite us to see what it's like to live as the seven churches in Western Asia Minor with the pressures of the empire pushing in on every side. How do we stay faithful to Jesus when we're being asked to give our political worship or we're being asked to go to these feasts and festivals that worship the gods that the culture worships? And so I've borrowed this from Gorman as a kind of a distilled version, but I think Revelation,

Rob Chartrand (57:43.258)
Yeah, yeah.

Cody Matchett (57:59.598)
because it's apocalyptic, it's imagistic literature, it's supposed to actually, believe it or not, help us to control our fear because we see that God is on the throne and that the lamb has been slain and that ultimately victory belongs to God, that judgment is coming but it's not yet come. And it helps us to renew our commitment. That's what prophetic literature does, right? Hey, Laodiceans, you're lukewarm. Hey, you guys over here at Ephesus.

Rob Chartrand (58:17.882)
Yep. Yep.

Cody Matchett (58:26.574)
You've lost your first love. It's critiquing. So it's inviting them to renew their commitment and then sustain vision. So control fear, renew commitment, sustain vision, vision for as we follow the Lamb faithfully as dissidents of empire and the kingdoms of this world who are willing to dissent and willing to dissent even from allowing the Babylon creep to come into our churches. That's a whole other conversation, I suppose. But.

but to mirror the practices of the world and to run on the metrics that the world runs on, to resist that movement, that we sustain our vision for becoming those who are anticipating and longing for the new Jerusalem and that we witness, which is a key term in Revelation, to the victory of the lamb, even when it feels like the beasts and the dragon and Babylon have won the day. So if I lost everybody on that, I'll just say it's a...

It's a manifesto for following Jesus. It's just fine, apocalyptic, prophetic, Greco -Roman literature that's laced with lots of charts and end time stuff for lots of people. But at the end of the day, I think we could all find common ground with Revelation if we could just come back to saying, it's trying to help us see how we follow the lamb faithfully, the one who's slaughtered and standing, yeah.

Rob Chartrand (59:26.97)
Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (59:48.122)
Yeah, the Lamb of the Kingdom versus Empire and its leaders. So dissident disciple, dissident disciple today. So what does that mean? I mean, is it protest rallies and getting on Twitter and, you know, barking at the world? What does it mean to be a faithful dissident disciple today?

Cody Matchett (59:51.054)
Yeah, pretty much. Yep.

Cody Matchett (01:00:11.534)
Yeah, you know, I would want to flip it just a little bit as I often do with my students and say, well, let's first ask how the prophets were dissidents. And whilst they do have judgment oracles that relate to the nations, the prophets are most often first and foremost critiquing the people of God. So there is a kind of dissent toward compromise in the church, I think. And I think that's...

Rob Chartrand (01:00:22.298)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (01:00:33.114)
Yeah.

Rob Chartrand (01:00:39.674)
How have we compromised?

Cody Matchett (01:00:41.742)
I think so, and a willing for that kind of self -examination. And then I think from there, it's definitely not getting on Twitter, and it's not barking at people and making angry statements. That's not it. It might be a kind of protest, although I would want to know in a nuanced way what protests and what we mean by protesting and all of those types of good things. But I think it means that we're not, at the end of the day, maybe the image of

a buoy in water that's just moving along with the current. And the current of church culture and the current of Canadian culture is moving in this particular direction, where you have maybe a Christian nationalism on the right, and then you have ideological propaganda machines on the left.

and you are feeling the pull of any one of these things or you're moving in the certain direction of cultural current, I think it invites you to stop and ask, what does it look like to get pledge allegiance to the lamb? And then how we resist that kind of move towards both nationalism and propaganda machines. You know, one of the critiques of the book, you know, it's written for an American audience primarily, it's written with Zondervan.

Rob Chartrand (01:01:48.666)
Right. Right.

Rob Chartrand (01:02:00.762)
Sure. Yeah.

Cody Matchett (01:02:01.582)
And so it's a lot on Christian nationalism. And a lot of the critique that I've received, especially as a Canadian is, well, you go after the right, but you don't go after the left very hard. And there's some truth to that for sure. And there's also a lot of stuff was cut and moved to an appendix. When you're an author, you don't have all the control in the world. But I have said to people, I think if I was writing in a Canadian context, I would focus probably more on the propaganda machines that emerged with the beast of the sea and the beast of the land and.

Rob Chartrand (01:02:17.114)
Yeah. Yeah.

Cody Matchett (01:02:30.126)
Propaganda that the Roman propaganda in particular that reinforces Empire and cults. I think we have lots of that in our context too that we have to we need apocalyptic vision to see it clearly. Yeah

Rob Chartrand (01:02:41.882)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, and I think nationalism can be empire in many ways, because it's a false, it's a false gospel. And there's a certain amount of idolatry that can stem from high nationalism. Right. And we confuse the flag for allegiance to the lamb, right, and they're not the same. So

Cody Matchett (01:02:46.414)
Yeah, yep

Cody Matchett (01:02:52.622)
Yeah, absolutely.

Cody Matchett (01:03:01.07)
Yeah, yeah, I remember Willie Jennings saying, it's okay to be a citizen as long as you're a disciple citizen and not a citizen disciple. And I think that's a helpful paradigm. Discipleship comes first. Paul has a Roman citizenship, not afraid to use it, but he doesn't wave it around all the time. And he doesn't think that his identity comes from that. He sees that as emerging from being in Christ and being a citizen of.

of the kingdom that comes forth from the heavens. Now, it's helpful.

Rob Chartrand (01:03:31.642)
So how did you end up writing it with Scott McKnight?

Cody Matchett (01:03:36.078)
Great question. I don't know, Rob. I was a student of Scott's and I went there to study with Scott and he and I became friends and he invited me to be a part of the book project and to help with research and then some of the teaching and then the writing and editing and all the things that come with that. So yeah, it was just, I'll just say, because maybe this is an encouragement to ministry leaders and people who have particular kinds of giftings, I just couldn't believe.

that someone who had been teaching the New Testament for 40 years, who's written over a hundred books, would invite me to be a part of a book project with them. And I've subsequently learned that Scott has been doing this his entire career. He's just been giving people some of his space, providing opportunity, allowing them behind the curtain to learn from him how he does scholarship and academia and how he writes and his procedures and methods. And again, I think,

Rob Chartrand (01:04:13.914)
Hmm.

Cody Matchett (01:04:34.958)
for many of us, maybe we just don't, many do, but maybe many don't just bring the young people alongside and say, hey, I'm not just gonna give you the grunt work, but, and this is like, your name's gonna be on the book and I want you to be a co -author. And so I felt incredibly blessed. I did lots of work, I wrote lots of stuff, I helped teach classes, all of that stuff is true. But I also was someone who just watched and got a master class from a master.

Rob Chartrand (01:04:53.69)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (01:05:04.11)
in doing the work that he does. And I learned maybe more from being a part of that project with Scott than maybe my entire MA combined in some ways. It was just, it was a true masterclass working with someone who has been doing this his entire career. So he saw something in me and provided an opportunity.

Rob Chartrand (01:05:19.962)
So how did you do it? I mean, did you, he writes certain sections and you write a response? Obviously I haven't read the book yet. I mean, I'm going to, but I mean, or did you write all of it and then he just tore it up or?

Cody Matchett (01:05:27.182)
Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (01:05:35.118)
No, no. We started research together and so we did notes and then we found a couple, very few, companion scholars that we would work with while we were working on our own readings with the Greek text. And so we worked the Greek text and then we had a few people that we worked with that we would go to for reference. Like, I'm a little bit confused here what kind of people say, but not going to all the secondary literature, just a little bit.

Rob Chartrand (01:05:38.714)
Okay.

Cody Matchett (01:06:02.158)
And then that morphed into a class that we taught together on New Testament story. So it was one of our MA classes on just the story of revelation and thinking of New Testament texts from that lens of how does it fit within the broader canonical story also. And so that was the initial work. So I did some of the lecturing for that class, did the notes, did the slides, all the things Scott and I worked together. And then that turned into the writing immediately after, which yeah, I'll...

it would work one of a couple of ways. Scott would write something, maybe sometimes a chapter, sometimes significant portions based on the work that we had already done. And then he would send it to me and I would do tons of comments and track changes and notes and rewrite some sections and then send it back. One of the funniest parts, and I've learned that it was the same for Scott's daughter, Laura, Scott doesn't work with Google Drive. And so we just emailed Google Docs back and forth. True, true nightmares, true, true nightmares are formed.

Rob Chartrand (01:06:51.45)
Oh.

Cody Matchett (01:06:57.838)
But it was a lot of reading and writing and sending back and forth. And then I wrote some sections and then Scott integrated them and worked with them as well.

Rob Chartrand (01:07:07.162)
Yeah, didn't he write a church called Tove with his daughter? Is that right? Yeah. Okay. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Um, did you find yourself having to, um, change the language for a younger audience?

Cody Matchett (01:07:10.126)
He did, yeah, and then pivot with his daughter also, which was the follow -up.

Cody Matchett (01:07:24.174)
Yeah, I think it's a fascinating experience to have written a trade book on Revelation as the first trade book you're a part of writing because it's such a complex book. And so sometimes just even just trying to describe what John's saying when he says things like, well, it was the one king, but then the other king and then the seven kings and then the one that would not yet come. And you're like, there's no way to say this that's going to be less complicated on one level than what he's saying.

Rob Chartrand (01:07:48.922)
Yeah.

Cody Matchett (01:07:52.462)
So some of that was difficult to work against. But yeah, I think thinking about the flow of a book and the flow of an arc, like we do with sermons, like what's the kind of arc we're working with here and how do these chapters flow one into the other? And then how do we write? So I think what's fun for me is because I do academic writing for PhD work and otherwise, but then I also write sermons, it was sort of a fun getting to try to hybrid some of those things of like,

Again, working these things together in some ways. So yeah, I just learned a lot from watching Scott who has learned to write a turn of phrase over 40 years of writing and having ways of tweaking things or taking something that I wrote and reworking it in a way that I was like, oh yeah, that makes a lot more sense of how one would frame a point like this or to nuance it in a particular kind of way. So again, working with Scott who's been writing trade books since.

2003, I think, A Jesus Creed was his first move away from academic writing towards public writing. And even there, he said to me on numerous occasions, I think the story's public, but he said, nobody would take that book. And they just said, you don't know how to write. And some people said, have you ever even written a book before? And Scott had written like 15 or 20 academic books at that point. But their writing style was so different. And so what Scott did, which is really interesting.

Rob Chartrand (01:09:07.706)
Okay.

Cody Matchett (01:09:15.118)
And he gave me this advice too. At that point, he read every time before he wrote, he read four pages of mere Christianity. And he said, I'm trying to pitch at the level that this book is written. And so his advice was like, find those books that really do hit the audience and then also have your person in mind. So when I was writing, I was always thinking about my wife who doesn't read dense theology and isn't just gonna pick up any random book on Revelation. And I was thinking, how can I write a book in such a way that like Brie could...

Rob Chartrand (01:09:22.49)
Okay.

Cody Matchett (01:09:44.046)
would want to even pick it up and read it, and it would make good sense to her. So having an audience or a couple people in mind was also really helpful.

Rob Chartrand (01:09:50.906)
Yeah, or write in a coffee shop. That's what a lot of people do for sermons is, and you're thinking about your audience who's surrounding you. I, you know, Scott is, I mean, for those who don't know Scott McKnight in his work, I mean, he's one of the foremost, if not the foremost American theologians that we have today. So, I mean, what a great honor and privilege to work with him. But I do find his writing is accessible. It's going to be accessible to pastors and to people in our pews who are...

Cody Matchett (01:09:52.974)
Yep. Yeah, of course.

Mmm.

Cody Matchett (01:10:06.83)
Mm -hmm.

Rob Chartrand (01:10:20.378)
who are interested in reading what he has to say. So, I mean, one of the most impactful works I've read in the last decade was King Jesus' Gospel. Just brilliant, brilliant book and very formative for us in the West as we reflect on what is the gospel. Yeah. So, wow.

Cody Matchett (01:10:30.318)
Nice. It's a great book, yeah.

Cody Matchett (01:10:37.422)
Mm -hmm. Yeah, I've benefited from his work too. And I, again, I can say nothing but praise for Scott. I'm just, I was a fan of his and that's why I wanted to study with him. And now it's funny that he's a mentor and also a friend that I text sometimes about things, so.

Rob Chartrand (01:10:54.65)
Yeah, yeah, great. What a great honour and what a great gift to be able to do that. Well, Cody, I think our time's almost done here. I wonder if you could share a final word of encouragement for maybe ministry leaders who are listening in today.

Cody Matchett (01:11:00.046)
Mm -hmm.

Cody Matchett (01:11:13.326)
Can I just cheat and read Paul? Is that okay? I just wanna cheat. I'm just gonna cheat everybody, so forgive me. My dissertation work is in First Timothy, and so there's lots of great advice in First Timothy. But really famous words, which I've already alluded to, First Timothy 412, let no one look down on your youth, but become a model of faith in your words, in your behavior, in love, in faith, and in devotion.

Rob Chartrand (01:11:16.41)
Absolutely. Absolutely. Love it. Love it.

Rob Chartrand (01:11:26.202)
Hmm. Hmm.

Cody Matchett (01:11:42.734)
Until I come to you, keep yourself reading and encouragement and in teaching. Don't neglect the grace act that was given to you through prophecy when the elders laid hands on you. Focus on these things, be in them so that your advancement may be apparent to all. Hold to yourself in the teaching, remain in them because in doing this, you will save not only yourself, but also those hearing you.

Rob Chartrand (01:12:08.986)
Amen. Good word. Thanks for joining us, Cody. We'll have to get to get you back on the church in the north at a future date.

Cody Matchett (01:12:16.878)
Yeah, thanks Rob, it's been a great privilege to chat with you.