Rediscovering the Gospel with Rev. Rob Schenck
For decades, Rev. Rob Schenck was a leading voice in the religious right, shaping policy and influencing power from the halls of Washington, D.C. But over time, he began to see that the gospel he was serving had become entangled with politics, ambition, and illusion.
In this episode, Rob reflects on the experiences that cracked his assumptions: moments of human suffering he couldn’t ignore, the limits of religious influence, and the moral compromises he witnessed in powerful circles. He shares how these experiences—and encounters with people whose realities he had once dismissed—led him to reimagine faith as a call to truth, compassion, and reality rather than fantasy or control.
This conversation isn’t really about politics. It’s about confronting hard truths, facing the realities of the world and ourselves, and rediscovering the gospel in a society where our imaginations, privileges, and systems often distort it.
About the Allender Center Podcast:
For over a decade, the Allender Center Podcast has offered honest, thoughtful conversations about the deep work of healing and transformation. Hosted by Dr. Dan Allender and Rachael Clinton Chen, MDiv, this weekly podcast explores the complexities of trauma, abuse recovery, story, relationships, and spiritual formation. Through questions submitted by listeners, stories, interviews, and conversations, we engage the deep places of heartache and hope that are rarely addressed so candidly in our culture today. Join the Allender Center Podcast to uncover meaningful perspectives and support for your path to healing and growth.
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About Our Guest
Rev. Rob Schenck is a minister, non-profit executive, author and speaker. He holds degrees in Bible and Theology, Religion, Christian Ministry, and Church and State. Schenck is the founding president of The Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute in Washington, DC, an institution dedicated to applying the theological and ethical insights of this brilliant World War II-era Protestant church leader, Nazi resister, and moral philosopher to the social crises of our time. You can find his podcast at Schenck Talks Bonhoeffer.
Rob is, in his own words, a “recovering member of the religious right.” His memoir, Costly Grace: An Evangelical Minister’s Rediscovery of Faith, Hope, and Love, is a 44-year odyssey taking him from his initial conversion from nominal Judaism to born again Christianity, to a second conversion from a simple faith to a highly politicized religion, and, ultimately, to a gospel marked by God’s expansive and permanent grace offered equally to all.
He and his wife, Cheryl, a psychotherapist in private practice, have two adult children and live in Washington, DC. You can follow him on Facebook @rob.schenk
Episode Transcript
Dan: Rachel, have I given a trigger warning for any of our episodes?
Rachael: I feel like a couple, but it’s a pretty rare occurrence.
Dan: Yeah. And so let’s just say we have a special guest who, from my standpoint, is a very dangerous man. I’ll introduce him in a moment. But in one sense, I want to say, if you’re currently in a place position, place of heartache where talking about, I’m going to say the word very lowly, politics is troubling enough that you just don’t need anymore. We’re good. Move on to another episode. But let me just say, honestly, this episode isn’t really about politics. It’s really about the gospel. And if the gospel at the moment is really too dangerous for you, I just want to honor that there are just times that you need to, in one sense, step away. So let me introduce the Reverend Rob Schenck. And I want you to know enough about this man that it may be helpful to have the spelling so that you can go online and begin to explore some of the wonderful things this man has done and said in the context of the last month or so. So it’s spelled S-C-H-E-N-C-K. Rob, it is a delight to have you. And to say more, you at one point were the former head of Faith and Action in D.C. dealing with the issues of the gospel that could be often called mid to right. And in that, there were many things you did that were just beautiful things that you today would find very problematic. But currently, you are the president of the Dietrich Bonhoeffer Institute in D.C. Those are just basic beginning points, but to basically say you are a remarkable man. And whether you like this sentence or not, one that has borne a great deal of both scrutiny and vengeance from people that you were dear friends with and indeed some degree of honor. But whenever you become an interplay of whistleblower, but also truth teller and any context that disrupts the fundamental structure of empire, you bear both danger but also harm. And just to say immense respect for you and honor to you. So to have you with us, thank you. Thank you for joining us. And just to say, who are you, sir?
Rob: I’m still asking that question and we’ll probably ask it for the rest of my earthly days until we’re transported into a glorious state where we know ourselves better, I suppose. But first, may I say Dan, as they say, south of the border, equalamente, I feel the same about you and lovely to connect with Rachael. And I know there’s an Andrew lurking in the shadows putting this whole thing together technically. So it’s just a pure pleasure to be with all of you. And it’s part of my healing journey as much as anything else. And before I forget to say it, may I say that I wouldn’t be talking with you if it weren’t for the good work, Dan, that you have done for decades now.
Dan: Thank you.
Rob: Because it touched me in a powerfully indirect way. Through my life partner, my best friend, my wife of 49 years in just a few weeks, Cheryl, who ventured out west from the East Coast to sit under your tutelage in several settings. And then in a late in life, a career change decided that she had to go to The Seattle School of Theology and Psychology and is today a wonderful psychotherapist helping people in beautiful ways and so much because of your influence on her thinking and her life and her own spiritual journey. And for me, for much of my 40 years of ministry, I did not spend, this is scandalous to say, but I did not spend a lot of time in my interior world. I was preaching out from the pulpit, out, from stages, out into audiences. I was thinking more often of them and their sins rather than my own. And then Cheryl started a journey of her own, and it had a lot to do with her interior life, and eventually that would spill over and influence me, and I started looking inwardly instead of always outwardly. And wow, I had had one conversion at age 16 when I gave my life to Jesus as Lord and Savior. What we would think of as sort of, if there is even a conventional conversion, that was it for me. I was born again. I became a Christian. I professed Jesus publicly, and that was the Jesus of the Sermon on the Mount who blessed the poor, who succored the suffering, the lonely, the marginalized, the forgotten, the grieving, blessed the peacemakers who instead of agitating for conflict, resolved it in themselves and with others. And by the way, since you mentioned the forbidden P word for so many people, I cast my first vote for president for Jimmy Carter, a Democrat. Why? Because to me, he reflected those Beatitudes I heard from Jesus in that beautiful sermon. And I said, “This is the guy who’s a little closer than the other guy.” So I wouldn’t vote for another Democrat for 40 years because in the mid ’80s, I went through a second conversion to what I call now, didn’t call it back then, Ronald Reagan Republican religion, distinctly different from the Jesus religion that I first embraced. As not to say it was all bad, as you suggested, there were some lovely things to do, and that frankly, I did. But over time, the seduction of power, of influence, frankly, of prosperity, the first Jesus movement I embraced wasn’t big on private jets, but the second one was, and they’re quite comfortable to travel on. I will admit that.
Dan: So I’ve heard.
Rob: Yeah. And they are. If you get an opportunity, they’re quite comfortable, quite a comfortable way to travel. And it was that gang who thought that flashing an American Express cobalt card was a sure sign of God’s blessing and pleasure with you. So I drifted off the narrow road that Jesus said leads to life and got on the boulevard on the four lane expressway that took me right up to Capitol Hill. I spent 30 years there hobnobbing with the big machas, the big and powerful presidents, leaders of Congress. And the thing that got me into the most trouble in the end was private time with the justices of the Supreme Court, four of them in particular. It started out benign enough, prayers in their chambers, gifts of Bibles and plaques of the 10 commandments, but it quickly turned into something less benign. And I’ll summarize this. I’m sorry to kind of hold forth here, but-
Dan: Keep going, brother.
Rob: Well, I’ll say it this way, that whenever religion is placed at the service of the political, it corrupts both. And so my own faith was corrupted, but the political apparatus I was engaging was also corrupted by our presence. Religion gives any political actor a unique advantage because if God intends for this, if this is God’s will, then who would dare question it? Because to question it is a form of rebellion, to question God’s anointed is a form of rebellion and rebellion is, the scripture says is as the sin of witchcraft and witchcraft is associated with the devil and who wants to be associated with the devil. So don’t raise a question. And that’s kind of how it went until I had a moment of truth. And that’s another side of the story. So I’ll stop my soliloquy at that.
Dan: Well, two things quickly. First, thank you for that honor, but let’s just be very blunt about this. The major change agent was your wife and her gifting and Cheryl is a remarkable woman. And we could spend, shall we say, a whole nother episode just on your marriage, but we’ll for the moment leave that as another conversation for another day. But just to say that the intersection of a woman who’s really addressing matters of her own heart, her own story, and something of the reality of what we all know to be true, that we are all to a degree blinded by our own self-deception. So in her engagement with you and your own engagement with your heart and the process of disruption of a very, as you have put it, a very comfortable, but also profound life, comfortable, profound, and in some sense, very meaningful life, there was a turn. And I’d love for you to put some words to what was the turn?
Rob: Yeah. Well, I guess I could summarize it all in saying that it was the encounter with reality. My best dead friend, you named him, Dietrich Bonhoeffer. And by the way, we just merged the Bonhoeffer Institute with the Miller Center for Interreligious Learning and Leadership at Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.
Dan: Oh, congratulations. I know we talked about that a few years ago. So yay.
Rob: It was a good marriage and it’s working very well for both. I have to tell you that I think of Hebrew college as the kosher version of The Seattle School. Dare I say, I sometimes call it the circumcised version, but that’s just a more complicated discussion.
Dan: Yeah. Well, we would take that with great honor. I would hope they would as well.
Rob: They do. They absolutely do. But really very similar institutions in many ways, even scale, ethos, personalities, approach to text, et cetera, et cetera. A lot of compatibility there. But in any case, it was Dietrich Bonhoeffer, if you’re not familiar with him, brilliant, brave, brilliant World War II era, young German church leader, who, he was both a pastor and moral philosopher theologian. And he talked about the propensity of Christians to engage in an endless flight of fancy. We tend to create for ourselves fictitious worlds, imaginative worlds. And there’s nothing so bad about imagination unless you live only in that imagination. And in my imagination, during at least 25 to 30 years of work as a Christian advocate in Washington, D.C., engaging with government actors, I had drawn for myself an imaginary world where everything went precisely as God designed it to go. All the formulas worked. The Bible verses always fixed everything. If you just put the 10 commandments on the wall of your office, you would be sure to obey them. Well, it just doesn’t work that way, as we know. And for many, this is a keen sense of the obvious. For me, I was quite obtuse for way too long, but I had encounters here and there. For example, I was in the Montgomery, Alabama County Jail arrested for defending then the Chief Justice of the State, Roy Moore, for illegally displaying a monument of the 10 commandments in the chambers of the State Supreme Court. And they threw me literally in the psych wing because the jail was overpopulated and people had a lot of fun when I was put on the psychiatric ward of the jail. But the peculiar thing about that psych ward was that it was, what do we call it? Men and women mixed on the same wing, co-ed. That’s a weird way to describe a jail, but it was co-ed and we weren’t in the same cells together, but men and women were on the same wing. And just about three doors down from me was a woman who was in great emotional and mental distress. And she screamed the whole time I was there, she kept screaming, “Who’s with my babies? I have three babies. Who’s taking care of my babies? Nobody’s.” This is tough to even recount. “Nobody’s with my babies.” Now, in my imaginary world, whenever a woman was in distress about her children, she could cry out and a bevy of church women would show up. And in my mind, I’m sorry to say it, they were White, cherry-cheeked of a certain disposition and they would just come flying to people in distress and they would bring them everything they needed from diapers and formula to coupons for pediatric care, vouchers for free childcare, everything they needed. So we would say, for example, “Why would a woman ever contemplate abortion when there’s all kinds of support ready, just available to you? Just say so and we will be there.” Nobody came for this woman in the Montgomery County jail, not a soul, not a guard, not even a guard came to her. She just screamed and was ignored. That was the first crack in my foundation because I realized that my imaginative helpers never arrived. So here was a person in a situation I said, just shouldn’t … it doesn’t exist in the real world because there’s too much help available for them. If they’re choosing to abort their child, it must be for selfish reasons. So without getting into it, I know you don’t want to get into a big discussion about that. That’s the session that’s an episode all of its own. But the point for me was simply that what I thought would happen in my perfect world did not happen in the real imperfect world. So that haunted me for a few years, although eventually I packaged it up, put it in a storage facility and forgot it. But it was one of the first cracks and then came others, more and more. I remember sitting with a group of Republican Party leaders and I said, “Every time we hold a national news conference, we have a phalanx of middle-aged white men. Why don’t we bring some women? Why don’t we bring in some people of color? This movement needs to look like the people we are.” And the response to that was, “What would that gain us? Not a single vote. Forget it. Onto the next idea, please.” That was a harsh reality, and they just kept coming and coming and coming and cracking my foundation. So I won’t give you a whole catalog. It’s just way too long, but that was the start of it.
Dan: Yeah. Something about self-deception is part of the creating of an illusory world. And in that, the idea that it is the cries of the heartbroken that is meant to awaken us all. And yet, at some level, you chose to listen even if it took a long period. You didn’t, shall we say, harden the surface to keep the cries mute to say again, thank you. Rachael, I know your mind’s going somewhere.
Rachael: Well, I’m just grateful for this language of imagination because I’ve been so moved by Serene Jones’ use of disordered imagination to talk about what she was borrowing kind of like a pre-psychology term from doctors trying to make sense of traumatized people and the hysteria and the trauma and how there was no return to a rightly ordered imagination. How would we imagine that? She’s talking about spiritual imagination really and how we get disordered. And I think for so many of us, you think about, oh, the disorder comes from harm or the disorder comes from something outside of this system, but I’m grateful for what you’re putting words to is that no, actually for many of us, it is the theological religious systems we are being formed in that are actually contributing to a very disordered imagination. And I echo what Dan’s saying. I think when those cracks and fragments come, it’s really scary. It’s really existential. And it also is such an exposure and confrontation with our privilege that we haven’t had experiences or we’ve somehow been able to, I would say, spiritually bypass or make sense of a very painful experience of suffering to keep this imagination of God intact, that everything’s ordered. And if you just do things the right way, it works out for you. And so I am very struck by your tenderness to be moved, to let reality in. I think for so many people, what we’re seeing right now is a doubling down on not being moved by what is true and real, because it feels too threatening to, I think, fragile spiritual imagination, but I also think very threatening to power and prosperity, and understandably so, because it is actually threatening to those things.
Rob: Indeed. And the rule applies across the board. For me, I had my own imagination of my family and how healthy we were or had to be. And I discovered we were not, and that of course led to my own revelation that I was not healthy and that even my relationship to God, to the gospel, the message that I was the bearer, I was ordained as an evangelist, literally, as a proclaimer of the gospel. And I did that all over the world, traveling all over the world, proclaiming the gospel. And with time, that gospel, I bent it, I distorted it, I massaged it, and then I tortured it into something that was no longer the gospel. It was almost an anti-gospel. First of all, it excluded too many people. When I see the invitation of the gospel being to all, come, everyone that thirsts, come, everyone in need, come. God so loved the world and every human being in it that he gave… And yet, mine became a very … And I’m not speaking in a Calvinistic reformed Westminster sense. That’s another episode, isn’t it? Not that. I’m talking about the expansiveness of God’s heart for the creation he loves and the apex, the epitome of that creation. I don’t mind saying, I know it sounds so arrogant when we say it, but I do believe humanity is the crown. Not that it diminishes anything else, but that it’s the crown. And so I say all that just to say that I remember the day I was standing inside the Supreme Court. I was a guest of the marshal of the court. I was about to be escorted to my seat in the front row for the hearing on same-sex marriage. Now, this is another trigger warning right, Dan? Okay.
Dan: I said dangerous. That should have covered it.
Rob: It’s dangerous because I had spent years working for the defeat of same-sex marriage initiatives all across the country, but particularly in Washington. And I was sitting as an opponent of the legalization of same-sex marriage anywhere. And I thought I could make a pretty good argument from scripture and elsewhere, but just at the moment I was about to be escorted into that majestic chamber of the Supreme Court to hear this argument. A woman stepped towards me and with a graciousness that’s hard to describe, she said, “You sir, are the most unethical person I have ever encountered.” Now, mind you, now she was a marriage equality advocate. She was on the other side. And in that moment, what came roaring back to me was first Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s posthumous Magnum Opus, Ethics, really worth it read. If anybody thinks they know Dietrich Bonhoeffer without reading his ethics, you just don’t know much of him at all. If all you know is Cost of Discipleship or his martyrdom, 15% of Dietrich Bunhoffer. Get into ethics and you’ve really got him. And when she used that schema, that phrasing, “You, sir, are the most unethical person I’ve ever encountered.” And I asked her, “Why?” And she said, “Because you would deny me the same companionship you have enjoyed in your life and leave me bereft of it.” Now, that may or may not be a good argument, but again, for me, it was an encounter with reality, her reality. And as a result of that encounter, I came to this realization that as an evangelist, my task, my call is not to demand that others leave their reality to enter my fantasy. It’s for me to leave my fantasy and enter their reality. And that was utterly transformational. It was life-changing, I call it, being born again again. And it was a marriage equality activist at the Supreme Court who brought that revelation to me. So I don’t say anymore, well, God could never use that person, which God could never use such a person, which I used to say with regularity, but I can’t say it anymore. So it was all of those things. And finally, the straw, the coup de grâce, whatever it was, the awakening came. I went to a competing seminary just down the road from The Seattle School. Faith Evangelical Seminary in Tacoma.
Rachael: This is a safe place, Rob.
Rob: Friendly competitor. They always spoke well of The Seattle School, but it’s where I did my late in life DMin. While Cheryl was doing her masters at The Seattle School, I was down the road doing my late in life doctorate at Faith. And I was sitting in their musty, moldy basement library, reading about the German evangelical church of the 1930s in lead up to the horrors that became the Hitler, that became the Hitler racialized dictatorship of the Third Reich, that mass murdering catastrophe to visit humanity. And as I’m reading, I’m realizing, first of all, not only did the church, the Evangelische Kirche, the Evangelical church of Germany, give its full support to the Nazi Party and to Adolf Hitler, but in April of 1933, when Hitler ascended to the chancellorship of the country, they declared from their pulpits in the words of Paul Outhouse, a very popular Bible teacher in that era, they declared Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party a gift and miracle from God sent to return Germany to greatness. And reading that, it was the scales dropping from my eyes and I saw I am engaged in a similar apostasy. And that was the final moment. That was the Damascus Road, to use a hackneyed phrase. That was for me, the Damascus Road experience.
Dan: Yeah. Well, thank you for falling off the horse. And in that, the question … I spent a good portion of my academic doctoral career reading and thinking about dogmatism. And it came certainly out of the 40s, 50s with regard to trying to understand how could a good people, how could a cultured, wise, lovely, beautiful community allow their being, their heart to be over time… and that’s very important, none of this happened in an instantaneous dramatic revolution, but a slow, progressive movement, and I’ll use your term, into illusion, into fantasy, but particularly in the context of significant cultural financial issues that spawned from World War I and all the implications of the Versailles Treaty, et cetera, et cetera. So when you look at your own dogmatism, when you look at the reality of what you see within the believing Evangelical community today, I’m reflecting on a friend who wrote, Pete Wehner, recently in the New York Times, speaking about how the Evangelical community seems to have aligned itself with revenge, with power, and to some degree with cruelty. And baptizing that requires such a deep alienation from Jesus. And the only form of capacity to have that alienation to be able to survive the antithesis between Jesus and what we see in the current world and administration is incredible dogmatism, a kind of righteous refusal to face something of the nature of there’s something wrong here. So I’m just curious for you and how you allowed your own dogmatism to be disrupted. You’ve said it already brilliantly, but when you look at the world we’re in right now, how has it been that we have turned so easily into that kind of political malice?
Rob: Yeah. I’m not sure I have even close to a complete answer to that one, but I often think these days of words of the resurrected Jesus coming from the heavenlies to his churches, as we have it recorded in Revelation. And he says to the church at Ephesus, you’ve done so many wonderful things. You’re to be commended, but I have this one thing against you. You have left your first love. And I think my cohorts, I was ordained an Evangelical. I remain an Evangelical. I’m doing my rotation as bishop of the tiny little Methodist Evangelical church right now. Sorry to admit that I’m an Arminian amidst Presbyterians, but hey, we got something to say.
Dan: You Semi-Pelagians, we let you in.
Rob: Thank you. You’re so gracious.
Rachael: I’m like, Dan has to talk to me, and I’m an Arminian, probably more of an Arminian than therefore. So we’re good.
Rob: There are so many more important things to discuss, especially these days. But I think we’ve fallen… my cohort has fallen out of love with Jesus. Jesus has become just too hard on us. It’s just too tough. It’s tough to follow the Savior. It takes a lot of work. It’s not easy. It’s not comfortable. I started out in ministry. My very first ministry post was living with 25 recovering heroin addicts in a ramshackle, old Victorian house who were finding their way towards sobriety and wholeness. Very gospel-centered program that people know of it, Teen Challenge. I was a Teen Challenge Director for four years. Cheryl and I came home from our honeymoon and moved in with 25 recovering heroin addicts, all of whom were magnificent Puertorriqueños from Brooklyn. They were Puerto Ricans from Brooklyn. And I loved those years, and I’m still in love with those guys. And when I watched Bad Bunny, yes, I did the other halftime show, but when I watched Bad Bunny’s show, it brought back all those beautiful memories of arroz con habichuelas, eating rice and beans with these guys. I loved them, and I think they loved me. And it was just some of the most beautiful years of ministry, but they were very, very hard. They were tough years. Cheryl and I were newly married, making $20 a week and living off of government surplus food. That was our initiation into Christian ministry, and we loved it. But by the time I reached Washington DC, I was finished with that. I wanted the nice house. I wanted the black chauffeured sedan picking me up and delivering me to the private university club where all the important people eat their meals in rare company, and that’s the life I was living by then. And it seemed easier, and it’s easy for us to do. I was doing it on the grand scale, but there’s much simpler ways that we do it and more modest ways that we do that. And we just simply say, “I’m done.” And as Donald Trump Jr. told a hall filled with Evangelicals not just a few years ago, he said, “when I hear ‘turn the other cheek,’ I get it. I get the religious sentiment of it, but it’s gotten us nowhere.” So turning the other cheek won’t get you to where I was sitting on Capitol Hill for 25 years, and it won’t get you a private jet membership or a private social club membership. It won’t get you there. It’s not part of the package. And look, White Evangelicals are now the ascendant, religious, socioeconomic, and religiopolitical subset of the US population. We are on top, period. We are on top. Drive into Anytown, USA and the biggest church with the biggest budget and largest staff will be the Evangelical church in town, period. So we’ve gotten pretty comfortable and in our comfort, we’ve left discipleship behind. So nevermind what I said about Bonhoeffer. Do read The Cost of Discipleship. It’s definitely worth it.
Rachael: Oh, I’ve just … Yeah. I think about these things a lot and they feel deeply personal with people I love who I feel like I’ve lost. I’m like most millennials who were raised Evangelical with parents that I love deeply and I’m still in deep relationship with, that it just feels like there’s like a can’t get through to wherever they’ve gone religiously and the fusion. And again, I know this is not a new story. It’s like if we look at our history and we’re honest, it’s like thinking about Bonhoeffer and Bonhoeffer coming and studying with folks in Harlem and learning about the history of Black folks in the United States and even the influence on the Third Reich and their studying of how they would inhumanely subjugate and annihilate people. And so it’s like-
Rob: By the way, Rachael, he wrote in 1931, the only place you can hear the true gospel in the United States is in the Negro churches. The only place.
Rachael: Yeah. And so I know this is a long history, right? It’s maybe, again, and I think like most things, nothing in this world is all good or all bad. So I think there has been a lot of … I encountered Jesus, I always say it feels like in the belly of the beast, like the true Jesus. And so I’m more, I’m saying it’s even in the midst of a movement I feel like has become so anti-Christ that it’s so unashamedly, unapologetically so. There’s no hiddenness. It’s all unveiled. And so it does very much feel like a very apocalyptic. You’re going to have to choose who you serve. You have to choose who you serve. So on that scale, it feels very clear. But even in my own life, this place of really having a deeper understanding of Jesus’ words, that it’ll be harder for a rich man to enter the king of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle and just how hard it is to discern how to be comfortable and stay on the narrow road. And I work with survivors of abuse, and so many of us have been conditioned to think suffering somehow makes us righteous and holy. So this gets into really nuanced waters of like, what does it mean to follow Jesus unto life, to give up your life unto life, not unto annihilation. So that’s a whole podcast episode to have as well. But just, I guess I’m just confessing that I can look at the larger picture, I think needs prophetic indictment and clear people calling to those who are seeing, who are having fragmentation, who are going, I think something’s wrong. And they actually need sojourners and they need good shepherds and they need a place to be beloved and have belonging. And I can also look at the log in my own eye at the places that I still think I go, oh, which Jesus do I want? Because this feels like a moment where Jesus is saying to me, who do you serve and who will you follow? Even in my own life, even though I would say I maybe have more clarity, moral clarity, it’s still a question being asked and still choices to be made. So I’m just really grateful for your vulnerability and your humility to let us witness, bear witness to some of your story.
Dan: Well, I can feel in my own heart, like we’ve already underscored, there are like four or five more podcasts. And I think that’s important that we figure out how to create a context to come back to like you’ve just spent significant time in Minneapolis. You have been in the realm that most of us read about and have no access to. And I’m not asking now or later to in some sense tattletale, but you have experience of seeing what power brings to those who do love Jesus as you do, and indeed to those who continue to love Jesus in those realms. But it’s always important to come back to this question of what are we willing to give up to serve and what are we unwilling to see and address because it cuts us off. And you have been cut off from significant friendships, places of power and organizations. But in that, again, I can say, having been with you, there is freedom, there is kindness, but there’s also even more power than what you had before. So I don’t want to set you up as, shall we say, the paradigm, no one’s a paradigm, but you are-
Rob: Hardly.
Dan: … an image and in some sense, a sign of what the gospel brings. So I would love to invite you back, but we’ll figure a time and place for that. But Rob, what indeed an honor to know that you have seen and you have been caught by the goodness of God.
Rob: Well, no, it’s sweet fellowship and so much more. I’ll just say that you mentioned Minneapolis, I went only because, well, for so many reasons, but I mention it now only because it’s been part of my penitential journey and that’s one thing I’ve learned in the Black church I’ve kept close company with for the last 10 years and I’ve been tutored by Black church leaders. It’s not enough to say I’m sorry. It’s not enough to say, I was wrong. You have to do the hard work. You have to do the work of repair. And that’s the shiva, that’s repentance. And I’m learning that in a Jewish context with my new institution, Hebrew college, and what that looks like, repairing. So that’s what I’m working on now and will be for the rest of my earthly sojourn.
Dan: Glory, glory.