Season 2, Episode 10 Cultural Christianity with Bella Easterbrook

Bio- Bella Easterbrook lives in Sydney, Australia. She is married to Daniel and together they have three little boys aged 2, 4 and 6. She attends Hope Anglican church, where she is excitingly watching all God is doing in their congregation! She blogs at Over the Tea Cups which is also her Instagram. She writes about God, the Bible, theology all relating back to everyday life. Summary – This episode takes a slightly different format than our usual interview style guest episodes. Bella and I more or less had a conversation about cultural Christianity and a lot of what that can encompass. What we chat about: ~ Whereas I was looking at it as “American Christianity” versus the rest of the world, Bella helped me to see that really a lot of the western culture is the same in how they approach Christianity, and that maybe it's “the western world” vs other parts of the world. ~ How the physical season relates back to the Church calendar season and how different that can look depending on what side of the equator you find yourself ~ Characteristics of Jesus that line up with differing traits of physical seasons ~ Remembering our call of empathy as Christians ~ The importance of tiers of Christianity ~ Different expressions of Christianity (based on our culture) are important to hold onto, as long as we are also celebrating diversity of our global Christian family ~ Differing cultures worshiping God ~ Rules we have as Christians and their applicability to everyone around the world ~ Motherhood and leading our children into reading the Word ~ Roles of women in America vs Australia ~ God redeems cultures Encouraging quotes -“Jesus is our refuge. Jesus coming into the world is a refuge from the dangers and harshness of our world. You might see that in winter and say He is the refuge and joy and respite of Him coming into the Winter but for me, I see that also in the extreme heat.” “The truth of the gospel is the same always, but the things we value or really notice about God might be different because we are living in different seasons (literally and metaphorically/spiritually).”“God does use all the different seasons, hemispheres and all the different ways that we live and experience things to remind us that He is so much bigger than the little expression of faith that we have.”“If we are not finding unity at the first tier, it is going to be a mess.” “If at all possible, getting involved in experiencing some other (cultural) expressions of Christianity, would be really valuable.” “In Revelation it talks about people of all nations and all tongues. There is this sense that we will get to keep our cultural hertiage in heaven. It's not as if when we are all one in Christ, our culture does not matter. It is still something that is a part of us and we can redeem to bring glory to God.”“When we say Oh listening to your audio Bible isn't really reading the Bible? Well what about all the people throughout history who didn't have access to the Bible like we do today?” “Our own specific way of being a Christian is not the way to be a Christian.” Find Bella on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/overtheteacups_/ Substack

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