COVID's Impact on Church Life

Michael and Collin discuss de-churching, online ministry's limits, and how Zoom became a supplement not replacement.

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Episode notes

Join Collin Hansen, Michael Graham, and Sarah Zylstra as they continue to look back on the top theology stories from the last 25 years. In part 1, they counted down stories #10 to #6. Now in part 2, Graham and Zylstra walk with Hansen through his stories #5 down to #1.

In This Episode:
00:00:00 – Why homosexuality became a presenting issue dividing the church
00:00:41 – Sarah Zylstra introduces the second half of the top 10 list
00:01:34 – Recap of stories 10 through 6 from the previous episode
00:03:06 – Number 5: COVID-19 shuts the world down
00:04:57 – COVID, institutional mistrust, and the authority of scientists
00:06:25 – A decade of digital change compressed into one year
00:09:22 – What COVID did to church attendance and online ministry
00:11:38 – Rediscovering embodied worship after metaverse-era predictions
00:14:11 – Number 4: The Trump era and its theological consequences
00:15:41 – Supreme Court appointments, religious liberty, and legal change
00:18:50 – Dobbs, abortion, and evangelical disengagement from the pro-life cause
00:19:54 – Immigration as a leading social and theological issue
00:22:13 – Executive power, post-liberalism, and Christian nationalism
00:24:05 – Number 3: Obergefell and the moral transformation of marriage
00:25:20 – Sexuality, family, and the collapse of shared moral norms
00:27:48 – Don Carson’s 2005 warning about homosexuality as a presenting issue
00:29:22 – Mainline denominational splits and the global Methodist divide
00:32:11 – Why many evangelicals held to historic sexual ethics
00:33:17 – How race and sexuality became bundled in public discourse
00:36:56 – Rebecca McLaughlin and navigating race and sexuality faithfully
00:37:21 – Number 2: The iPhone and the shift to digital life
00:38:05 – Smartphones, fertility decline, and changing social habits
00:39:13 – Social contagion, gender identity, and online plausibility structures
00:40:08 – Podcasts, YouTube, AI, and the reshaping of knowledge
00:43:44 – Mike Graham on screens, AI, and the future of epistemology
00:48:00 – Individualized media diets, institutional decline, and gender divergence
00:50:06 – AI sycophancy, abuse scandals, and algorithm-shaped reality
00:53:51 – Why digital life felt like it could have been number one
00:54:26 – Number 1: Why 9/11 tops the list
00:56:23 – Christianity, Islam, and civilizational conflict
01:00:07 – 9/11, the new atheism, and the category of “fundamentalism”
01:02:01 – Theodicy, suffering, and major disasters after 9/11
01:03:12 – Mike Graham on why 9/11 is civilizationally decisive
01:06:17 – Middle Eastern Christians, Iraq, Syria, and migration into Europe
01:07:11 – Signs of God’s providence and good emerging from tragedy
01:09:18 – Tim Keller, New York church planting, and the young, restless, and Reformed movement
01:12:58 – Closing reflections on God’s providence over the last 25 years