July 13, 2025 • 34 mins
Clint Leavitt believes that every great story we love is actually pointing us toward something bigger. As pastor of Midtown Presbyterian Church in Phoenix, he's discovered how fiction can serve as shadows of the deepest reality, and how narratives can pierce through our purely rational defences to reach the heart. His approach to ministry focuses on creating space for sceptics, deconstructors, and question-askers, building trust through shared stories and artistic mediums rather than demanding immediate belief.
In this conversation, Clint shares his journey from selling flip books on elementary school playgrounds to becoming a Tomatometer-approved film critic, pastor, and author. His latest book, "Cockroaches, God, Death, and Mangos," tells the remarkable refugee story of his friend from the Democratic Republic of Congo, one of the bloodiest conflicts in world history since World War II. Through this friendship, Clint discovered how western colonization continues to impact current refugee crises, and how the church is called to expand its vision beyond national borders to embrace God's heart for the marginalised and displaced.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:07):
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening today.
Bleeding Daylight is a place to encounter stories filled with hope and inspiration.
Dozens more episodes are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:31):
Please share this and other episodes with others through your social media and word of mouth.
Do we underestimate the value of story?
Whether they're fact or fiction, stories have a way of drawing us into something bigger, something that can help us experience more of life.
(00:52):
Today's guest helps us unlock that power.
I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome today's guest, Clint Leavitt.
He's the pastor of Midtown Presbyterian Church, where he's creating space for folks who might feel spiritually disconnected but are searching for meaning.
(01:15):
When he's not at church, he's teaching at Grand Canyon University, writing as a Tomatometer-approved critic.
And somehow, he's found time to write his first book, Cockroaches, God, Death, and Mangos.
Beyond all that, Clint's about to embark on his biggest adventure yet, becoming a parent alongside his wife, Emily.
Clint, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
(01:37):
Yeah, thank you so much, Rodney.
It is a joy to be with you, and a joy to hear you say tomato instead of tomato, as we say over here in the States.
I think I need to be careful with my first question, because I get the feeling that you have such a passion in this area, I might not be able to stop you, but I'm going to jump in anyway.
Tell me about your love for the power of stories.
(02:01):
Yes, yes.
Thanks for asking.
Yeah, I can trace my passion, my love of stories, about as far back as my memory can go.
I have thought of it this way, sort of as breadcrumbs that God has kind of put along my story over the years.
For instance, in early elementary school, I would compose and write flip books and sell them on the playground to my classmates.
(02:23):
My teachers eventually shut down my industry, but that didn't stop me from continuing to write and create.
So I made movies growing up, and screenplays, and we'd have these sheets of paper that we'd like scroll down in front of our old camcorders, like the Star Wars scroll, right?
A story has always been kind of central to the way that I've understood myself and the world, and how I want to show up in that world.
(02:44):
As I got older, that became more and more clear to me, that that had a real intersection with the story that the scriptures are telling.
The story of God's creation of heaven and earth, and the unity of heaven and earth, and the fracturing of that, and his bringing of it back together.
That became abundantly clear for me in my own personal story.
My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the end of my high school journey.
(03:05):
That produced in me this real kind of bringing to the fore, bringing to the surface of, and what is the true story of the world, and how does that affect how I show up?
How does that affect my personal story or particular story?
That's the way that I've kind of made sense of it since then.
I have chased after finding the truth of the story of the universe, and trying to figure out compelling ways to communicate that creatively.
(03:29):
I'm a C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and Frederick Buechner junkie.
Those are my kind of folks, and love literature.
That's what I studied in my undergrad, and then in grad school, brought those things together, studying theology and culture, and how we meaningfully communicate our own stories within the framework of that larger story.
Most of what I get to do professionally is talk about the story of Jesus, and talk about stories in general.
(03:53):
I get to, like you mentioned, write film reviews and write books.
This latest and first book for me is a story of a good friend of mine, and it's really a privilege to get to bring together these little breadcrumbs of my, what I would call vocational journey, together in life.
We have stories that are a shadow of reality, in that they're fiction, but they shine a bit of a light onto what's really happening.
(04:16):
Then we have the story of scripture, that right throughout we see that thread that carries on.
Oftentimes, the scriptures have been used really as a textbook, that we get down and we study verse by verse, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes I think we lose the thread of story that goes throughout scripture.
Is that something that you've seen, and something that you've tried to rectify in the way that you teach?
(04:40):
Yes, yes, definitely.
I'm glad you brought that up.
You know, it's funny, speaking of C.S. Lewis, who obviously has been an example of this in the Western world over the last 120, 130 years.
He, in his conversion story, tells of a long conversation he had with a couple of buddies of his who were literary experts, philologists, and mythological experts and academics.
(05:01):
He was an atheist, a devout atheist.
He felt that the stories of scripture were lies breathed through silver.
That was his phrase, that they were somehow false stories that still communicated something deeply human.
Through these conversations, he actually found
that the true story of Christ was ultimately being echoed by all of these other stories,
that in every story we've been trying to tell of sacrificial love and of redemptive goodness
(05:26):
and of care for enemy and peace among men and all those different kind of central Christian
themes, all of our great narratives, all of our great myths have been capturing bits and
pieces of that.
Over time, that idea got ahold of Lewis, and eventually he converted precisely because he saw, all these stories that I love have come to their fruition or have come to their completion in the person of Jesus and the story of Jesus coming into the world.
(05:52):
It was so captivating that it took him.
For me, similarly, I found this deep spiritual and emotional resonance when I get glimpses or you mentioned shadows as a picture.
These glimpses or shadows of the Christ story in film and in literature.
They have moved me and stirred me in the deepest parts of who I am.
(06:12):
I regularly, when I teach, try to weave my story together with the story of Jesus, try to weave different stories together.
I'll often tell expansive stories.
A couple of weeks ago, I told the myth of narcissists to start our time together to kind of engage people when it comes to understanding the self and how we relate to the self, those sorts of things.
Yeah, it's been a central part of how I think about my own ministry and my own speaking.
(06:36):
I think in particular for the people we tend to reach in our church community, skeptics and deconstructors and question askers and those sorts of folks, stories are a primary way to kind of pierce through the purely rational and logical part of us, which is a part of us, but it is only a part of us.
And we need to be able to get at, I think, a deeper thing that connects to our hearts.
You've touched there on the fact that you do like to reach out to people who don't have a faith or people that feel disconnected from faith and using story to do that.
(07:06):
How do we do that?
I mean, you've touched on it a little.
We hear a lot about deconstruction and those sorts of things.
How do we reach out to people who are in that place?
Yes, yes, it is a good question.
It's what we have been trying to figure out over the last few years in our church community in Phoenix.
Phoenix is an urban, bustling and expansive city in the US.
(07:26):
We're the sixth largest city in the United States.
And what that means is there's an urban young core based upon stats in urban environments, both in the US and across Europe and Australia.
Urban cores are just oftentimes where faith goes to die for people.
There are more people who have left the church in the last 25 years than people who came in, more people who left the church in the US than people who came in during the first Great Awakening, second Great Awakening and Billy Graham revivals combined.
(07:54):
So we are experiencing the largest religious demographic shift in American history right now.
And the vast majority of those folks are Gen Z or millennials.
So urban centers are usually not places where at least Christianity is considered a viable option for people.
And so naturally, I would say as missional people, it's our job to go to the places where the message is most needed, where it might not be heated, but where it's most needed.
(08:20):
To do that, we have found that the arts have been especially helpful and storytelling through the arts has been especially helpful.
So for instance, we have a part-time staff member who's a local artist.
She trains and teaches students and works at local gigs here.
And then she works part-time for us, not only leading gatherings together musically and developing a team to do that, she is creating connections with the local arts community in central Phoenix, open mic nights and storytelling opportunities.
(08:48):
We actually hosted just last night, we've been doing a week over week film screening at different coffee shops and beer and wine bars in our neighborhood, just as a way to get to know the people around us and to engage in some really compelling and thought-provoking stories with the primary agenda of just seeing how stories move and shape us first as kind of an entry point.
(09:11):
For many of those folks, a Sunday gathering is not going to be the most effective or the first way that they want to interact with some of these spiritual conversations.
They need to develop years-long relationships of trust around tables and around artistic mediums like this.
And so that's kind of in the way that we have pursued that.
We also have a skeptic study that we host in our community that is specifically designed for people who are not already connected to our church.
(09:36):
So people who have what I like to call questions, comments, rebuttals, or angry diatribes about faith, the Bible and the scriptures.
And I use that fourfold phrase kind of humorously to kind of invite people into it, but also to say like, Hey, there is room for every bit of your experience.
There is space for every bit of your challenge that you've had when it comes to walking this life of faith.
(09:59):
I actually just started a new cohort for the skeptic study recently, five new folks who were connected to in central Phoenix who are not connected to a church and have found this narrative of Jesus in some way to be challenging or unbelievable or difficult to enter.
And so we're spending the next few months chatting with them through a variety of topics that they chose.
I've actually got a whiteboard here right in front of me that we filled up this last week.
(10:22):
I roll out the whiteboard and I say every question, comment, rebuttal, and angry diatribe about faith and Christianity and the Bible.
Let's get it all out there.
And then I write it down and then I build a kind of topical curriculum for us to go through, engaging the arts, engaging some of these big thoughtful questions.
That's been our means or medium to start to build these bridges to folks.
(10:43):
Do you think we're sometimes afraid to open ourselves up to those bigger questions from skeptics?
I know that for a lot of young people, they grow up in a church where it's wrong to question and then they hit the big wide, wonderful world.
And suddenly there are questions and many are turned away from faith.
How important is it that we actually give people license to ask the big questions, knowing that we have an even bigger God who can answer them?
(11:10):
Yes.
Yes.
Well, well phrased and well said.
It's funny.
I think in our Western world, maybe not reduced, but at least contained faith down to a purely rational and intellectual ascent to an idea, right?
And when you do that, what that accidentally does is it means that any questioning rationally or intellectually means you've left faith behind.
(11:34):
But that idea that faith or belief is something that is intrinsically intellectual or rational, that's actually not how the scriptures understand belief.
In fact, belief according to both the old and new testaments has much more to do with how you integrate the rest of your life with some of these intellectual ideas.
And it means getting your body and mind and spirit and soul all involved in the process, which means that there's actually room all over the scriptures for intellectual or rational doubt to go right alongside faith.
(12:05):
Doubt and faith are not actually opposites.
I think they are supplementary.
And I think you see examples of this.
For instance, in the gospel of Mark, there's a man who approaches Jesus, whose son has been struggling since birth with what we would read as possession, possibly mental health challenges, right?
Whatever that looks like, independent of how you want to interpret possession.
His son has been struggling his whole life, physically, emotionally, spiritually.
(12:27):
And this father approaches Jesus and said, will you heal my son?
And Jesus gets into a conversation about faith with him.
And he says, well, look, if you believe I can heal your son, if you really believe.
And the man says, I believe help my unbelief.
And then Jesus heals his son.
He doesn't rebuke him for saying your faith isn't strong enough.
He doesn't rebuke him for having that doubt.
He actually responds to this man's faith, which was loaded and caked with doubt.
(12:51):
He responds by healing his son.
There's all sorts of examples like this, right?
Thomas is not condemned for his doubt.
Jesus simply says, blessed are those who have not seen and believed, but he still responds to Thomas.
Then even in Matthew, the resurrection narrative, this is so often overlooked at the end of Matthew 28, the disciples are told by the women who witnessed the resurrected Jesus to make their way outside of the city.
(13:15):
And there they will find Jesus.
And as they're walking, they encounter the resurrected Jesus, which was a remarkable, transformative experience for them.
And then Matthew goes out of his way to say, they worshiped, but some doubted amongst the disciples, these people whom the church is built on.
They see the resurrected Jesus and said, you know what?
Are we sure about this?
Like, are we positive this is real?
(13:37):
In the middle of worshiping, there is doubt.
And so I think there is room enough in God's grace to respond to our human capacities for doubt.
And I think creating space for that, what we've seen in these skeptic studies has deepened faith.
And I can speak from my own experience that when I have entered into some of those doubts, when I've done that wisely and in community, when I've trusted people, both in the Christian tradition throughout history, in understanding the ways people have reckoned with these questions, but also in my own time and with trusted relationships today, I have found a deepened belief, a deepened faith.
(14:09):
I found myself actually more integrated as a Christian, the more that I've pressed into those doubts and sought trustworthy sources to navigate them and to reckon with them.
And so that's actually one major reason why we created this group, because I think it is in many ways missing in the Western church, given that a reduced picture of faith being down to something that's just intellectual or rational.
(14:30):
And certainly in the Western world, we've become more polarized, whether it's our politics or our beliefs or whatever it is, and we either believe one way or the other, it's black and white.
Do you think that that's part of the reason that so many people have abandoned faith?
Because there are those doubts and they don't believe that they have the license for that.
Therefore, if they can't fully explain it, if it's not black or white, but there is some gray that they feel that they just have to walk away from that.
(14:59):
Yes.
Yeah.
I think certainty has become a bit of an idol in our culture and I think it's often misunderstood.
There's actually a great book by a guy named Leslie Newbigin who talks about this.
The book is called Proper Confidence, but it kind of critiques the notion of certainty.
The reality is that the certainty that we crave is actually not something that we as humans in our epistemological position.
(15:20):
That is our position of knowledge.
Certainty is not something that we can guarantee.
All you got to do is watch the matrix to understand it, right?
Neo in the matrix has a great pop culture example of this lives in a world that is an illusion that he doesn't even realize until he's exposed to that illusion.
He ultimately does not have certainty on the life that he leads.
(15:41):
And then he's got an option to either we'll take one pill that would expose to him the real world or continue to live in the illusion that he currently lives in.
There's not a guarantee that we aren't in a matrix right now.
There's not a guarantee that this isn't all a robotic simulation, which there actually are some pretty high up people in the world who affirm that sort of thing, who play around with that sort of idea.
And in a world where many of our movies focus on the sci-fi dystopian reality, it's actually doesn't seem all that farfetched to us today.
(16:07):
And so the pursuit of certainty I think leads us to this black and white thinking.
I think a better question, and this is what Leslie Newbigin would propose as well, is what is the thing that we can place the most confidence in?
What is something that is worth placing your confidence in?
What is the big overarching story that is worth being confident about?
(16:28):
And then how do you establish confidence, right?
Where does that come from?
Does it come from lived experience?
Does it come from reason and rationality?
Does it come from a combination of a majority of those or a few of those?
That's a, I think a better question to ask.
And what I found in my own kind of testing, I get to teach world religions as well.
And I've spent a good amount of time with the different spiritual narratives that our world gives us.
(16:51):
And I have just found nothing that instills more confidence than the person of Jesus.
That is something that is worth placing my confidence in.
And then by extension, the things that have kind of been articulated by the church who has followed him over the centuries.
So I think confidence over certainty allows us to say, you know what, I'm not going to have all the answers.
As a human, I'm on a need to know basis.
(17:13):
Black and white thinking is not going to resolve my problems.
And certainty is not an attainable possibility.
So what is the thing I can put confidence in and know and trust from that perspective?
You've been all about other people's stories and following them and seeing where they lead.
And now you've had the opportunity to write your own story, even though it's the story of a friend in the book, cockroaches, God, death and mangoes.
(17:38):
Tell me a little about that, because obviously it's an intriguing title.
And I know that you would have worked hard to come up with something that is going to draw the reader in with that title.
But tell me about that book.
Yeah.
I hope people are thinking like, what are the dots that connect here between these four words that are draped across the cover?
I had what I would call a sort of conversion moment my freshman year in university year, my undergraduate degree.
(18:03):
I met a good friend.
We met on the basketball court at an intramural sports.
We were both equally competitive.
And what I found is I liked being on his team because I could just stand in the corner and he would drive and kick to me and I could shoot wide open three pointers.
So that worked out pretty well for us relationally.
Beyond that, we started to develop just a budding friendship, had a spring break trip together in the car, driving from Arizona, where we went to school to California, a few hours away to the beach.
(18:28):
We started asking each other a bit more about our history and our stories.
For three hours, he went on this incredible tale of his experience as a refugee.
He grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which actually in my own understanding of history, my own telling of history and classes and my educational journey, Congo had never really been included or talked about at all.
(18:49):
What I learned is that the second Congo war, which happened right at the end of the nineties into the two thousands, uh, it's one of the bloodiest conflicts in world history since world war II.
And it was something I had never heard of.
And his family was embroiled in this conflict.
They were ripped from their homes.
They were taken to a concentration camp for over a year.
They presumed that they were going to die in that process through a series of fortuitous events that if you pick up the book and read it, I won't spoil everything, but if you pick up a book and read it, you'll learn about these fortuitous events that actually enabled them to become refugees and escape out of the Congo to the U S and that's where he and his family have lived since.
(19:26):
And so the book tells his story.
And again, I mentioned it's a conversion moment for me.
I grew up in a family and in a culture that is largely antagonistic to outsiders, at least in the last few years, especially we're seeing this again on the rise in the United States today, that narratives about refugees and immigrants are not often charitable and are often animizing.
(19:47):
This conversion moment for me was seeing a good friend of mine relay his experience and realizing, Oh, maybe the way that I was raised to think about these things is incomplete or still needs a little bit more forming over time.
What I found in conjunction with my theological and literary studies is that God's heart all over the scriptures is for the immigrants and the refugee.
(20:07):
It is for the one who is outside and marginalized that he brings those people in.
You read laws in the old Testament.
They're all about caring for the foreigner and the stranger among you because you were one strangers in the land of Egypt.
And then in the new Testament, you see the ministry of Jesus constantly going toward outsiders and others towards the marginalized, the whole book of acts.
It begins in chapter one with Jesus telling the disciples that they will be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, all of Samaria and to the ends of the earth.
(20:36):
What that is, is, is an expansion geographically that it keeps going further and further and further that the kingdom of God in the church is always thinking about expanding itself beyond its boundaries and borders so that others might be welcomed in.
And then you see, over the course of the book of acts, you see African Christians and Asian Christians, you see men and women Christians, you see outsiders all over being welcomed in.
(20:59):
And so that seems to be the narrative of the scriptures.
And so that was sort of this light bulb moment for me, because it was a way of seeing, ah, I've maybe missed God's heart for the world in this.
And then the sort of aha moment for me came following that conversion.
It was sort of this opportunity when my friend, his name is Bakonzi, approached me about writing a book to tell his story.
(21:21):
He told me that he trusted me.
I said, look, man, I don't know that I'm the person to write this.
I've never been to the Congo.
This is all new for me.
He said, look, I trust you.
I've read your work and I trust you as a good friend.
I want you to write it.
That set us off on this journey of researching and interviewing and preparing and outlining and writing and rewriting into this ultimate finished product, cockroaches, God, death and mangoes, which tells the story from when his family was kidnapped from their home all the way to their resettlement here in the U.S. and the remarkable, remarkable events that happened in between.
(21:53):
You had already heard the story on those long drives and obviously in subsequent conversations.
But were there still things that as you were researching the book surprised you and even alarmed you?
Yes, yes, definitely.
What was most noteworthy, I think, was the ways in which many of the conflicts that we've seen much of the central continent of Africa embroiled in over the last few years have been, if not completely initiated, at least exacerbated by lots of Western colonization in those areas.
(22:25):
For instance, the Hutu and the Tutsi divide that has become infamous now through the Rwandan genocide that we know a bit more about in the West.
It actually leaked into the Congo as well and was connected to Bakonzi's story.
But much of the divide of those tribes actually had to do with hierarchies that were implemented during Belgian colonization in those areas.
(22:46):
And that these Westerners came in and actually instituted some of these ugly hierarchical ways of seeing one another in these tribes and then left.
Now those nations are still embroiled in lots of these conflicts.
It helped me see, man, the ethic of Jesus, the ethic of the scriptures, right, that all people are made in the image of God, is such a centrally foundational thing that if we desert it and if we build any sorts of hierarchies at all, it can lead to decades and to centuries of violence that is so embedded that people don't know anything different oftentimes.
(23:18):
It has further entrenched in me the importance of this picture of all humans being made in the image of God and being equal and sharing an equal dignity.
And then learning to tell stories that help remind us of that truth and that help pull on our heartstrings in order to communicate this divine thing.
Like we mentioned at the beginning, using stories to connect or be shadows or pointers or arrows to this much larger story.
(23:42):
We all love watching movies that tell a remarkable story and then sometimes at the end of that we see that graphic come up that says this was based on a true story and that makes it even more amazing.
And I suppose that's what's happening with this book.
You're drawing someone into this narrative and yet it's not fiction.
(24:04):
This is something that has actually happened to people and makes it even more remarkable.
What do you hope is the response from people as they read this book?
Is it just the retelling of someone's life story or is there a response that can come out of this?
Yes, this is a central thing that Bekansi and I have talked about since the origin and inception of this book.
(24:28):
One of the first things I asked him was, what are your goals?
What do you want to see happen?
What do you want to see come of the telling of this story?
And over the course of the years we've been writing it and working on it, a few different goals have emerged.
The first goal is a very personal one for Bekansi.
We want his future generations, he now has three little kiddos, he and his wife, we want his future generations to be able to connect this story to their own identity and be able to remember where they've come from and how that informs their own cultural identity and personal identity and so forth.
(25:00):
Well, that's a very personal goal for him, but at a deeper level, we both articulate the desire to see this book inform a Western audience about a part of world history that they're usually not very privy to and have not been educated on.
We kind of joke about how people will mention specific countries that they travel to, but then if they go to any country in Africa, they just say they went to Africa, which is a massive continent, right?
(25:23):
It's like, I went to the UK and I went to France and I went to Africa.
Where in Africa?
Because Egypt is in Africa, as is South Africa, as is the Congo and everything in between.
What we realize is that many people in the West don't have any framework for African culture broadly, the sub-Saharan African culture versus super-Saharan African culture, in particular the story of the Congo and these brutal conflicts in the 90s and that have persisted in various ways today.
(25:50):
So that's another thing.
Thirdly, and I would call this maybe the overarching or central goal, foundational goal for us, is to spark action in the West to help refugee neighbors, especially in the US right now.
There is, like I mentioned before, not only a linguistic opposition to outsiders and others, but there's also starting to become some policy oppositions.
I work with a refugee ministry here in Phoenix that just released an email that currently, because of policy changes that are being made, there's a pause on the movement of more than 10,000 refugees across the world into the United States that were in the process already legally and were just simply waiting for the opportunity to travel.
(26:31):
These are people who have their lives threatened because of the violence in their home countries that were already in the legal process that are now being prevented from coming.
There's been a stripping of billions of dollars to support humanitarian aid around the world for folks, even if they aren't traveling to the US, who just need help in war-torn nations or in really dire situations, and that humanitarian aid is being stripped.
(26:53):
Two of the largest aid agencies in the world, including World Relief, a Protestant agency, and then Catholic Relief Services, a Catholic humanitarian agency, they have seen billions of dollars of their funding stripped, which means it's now in many ways the role of the church and the followers of Jesus to be the hands and feet of Jesus and loving their neighbors around the globe.
(27:13):
We hope that this story would ultimately spark in folks an expanded vision of the world that would
give them a sense of deep compassion for their refugee neighbors, both in their neighborhoods,
but also for people who are in need around the world, and that they would choose to use their
time and their treasures and their talents to help care for those neighbors and have their hearts
changed by this story.
(27:35):
As you look back through the story of the world, we see in times of difficulty, it's generally been the Christians who hang around and help.
During times of sickness and of even plague, it's been the Christians that have stayed behind and put themselves at risk to help those who are ill or dying.
It must be disturbing for you to see the story come to the point where it's even large sections of the Christian church that are jumping on board with these ideas and saying, no, we don't want these people to come here.
(28:08):
No, we don't want to help.
No, this has nothing to do with us.
It's a real upturning of the traditional story of Christianity, isn't it?
It is.
It is in so many ways.
It's interesting.
I think one of the dynamics that I've seen in folks in my circles who have articulated that perspective, that we're kind of hands off or removing ourselves from responsibility in a variety of ways, one of the narratives is that we can't accept everyone all the time, right?
(28:37):
Which is true.
We ultimately, as a nation, have to consider practically what that looks like, right?
The thing that's missed in that is one, a greater allegiance to a kingdom that goes beyond our nation.
So even if policies here change, that doesn't change our obligation as kingdom participants who are part of this transformed universe that Jesus is initiating.
(28:59):
It doesn't change our responsibility for those folks.
I think what it actually does is force us to learn how to be creative, which is what the church has done throughout history.
When they've been prevented from loving their neighbors well, governmentally, they found other creative ways to do so, because that is the whole point of this kingdom is that it draws people in.
A second part of that too, is I think we just have in the West, again, because we've reduced faith down to this hyper intellectual, hyper rational or reason based thing.
(29:25):
It's an idea, I believe in my head.
It's actually prevented us more deeply engaging the robust kingdom ethic that Jesus has for us that involves every part of our lives, right?
That is the sermon on the mount.
That is what you've done for the least of these you've done for me.
We've missed those teachings because we've just claimed that faith is about what I believe in my head.
And as long as I believe the right ideas and get baptized, then I'm a Jesus follower.
(29:47):
And I think that has given us a little bit of tunnel vision.
I really think as a pastor, one of my primary goals is to help expand our understanding of this life of following Jesus.
It is so much bigger.
I would say more beautiful and more expansive than what we've been handed with just a thought in our head.
There are days to be fair where the inner cynic in me just thinks, ah, what's the point in any of this, right?
(30:09):
Which I think resonates with a lot of folks around the world right now.
What's the point in getting involved?
But I think the hope of the kingdom, the hope of Christ's arrival that is coming in the anticipation of that arrival is very much my inspiration and salve for continuing in this sort of work, because I really do believe that we are participating in something so much bigger than what a government or a state can say today.
(30:35):
My hope is to be involved in people's lives to help give them a picture of that kingdom.
In our short time together, we've been able to look at some very big concepts and very big stories, but I'm wanting to know one thing from you.
You are expecting a daughter very soon, and I'm wondering how much you're looking forward to sitting down with her as she grows and telling her stories.
(31:01):
Yes, I will do my best not to tear up in any way.
Yeah, it's been a remarkable journey for my wife and I.
We've actually struggled with infertility for a few years, which is something that we found to be much more common than is often talked about.
But we found great companions in the journey who have grieved and walked with us and prayed with us along the way.
(31:22):
And so one, we get that journey for those who are listening and struggling.
It is a brutal, brutal challenge to kind of be waiting for this thing and not having it.
And then also to have this amazing gift on the other side is something that my wife and I are just giddy about, really, really excited to have this opportunity.
And I think in many ways, that waiting has led us.
That doesn't mean the waiting is justified or that it becomes easier, but it has prompted in us a deeper appreciation for the gift of new life and the ways that God is giving us this gift to steward.
(31:53):
One of the best things that I was told by a mentor of mine as I was getting into ministry was, if you can't communicate scripture stories in the gospel to a child, then you have no right to communicate it to adults.
That is, if I can't understand the core of this story of Jesus and learn how to communicate it to the little ones around me, I probably need to do a little more work before I get to communicate it to adults.
(32:16):
That has led me to say, man, I just can't wait to tell stories for her, both the shadows of the gospel story that we talked about earlier, but also the gospel story itself to invite her into this kingdom narrative where she, as Dallas Willard put it, is an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God's great universe.
That is my hope that she would know that from day one and that I would get to walk with her in that as she figures out how her story intersects with that much larger story of God's.
(32:45):
Clint, it's been a delight to talk to you.
If people are wanting to connect with you to find out when that book is going to release so that they can get a hold of it, where's the easiest place for people to find you?
Yes.
Easiest place to find me is clintlevitt.com or thelevittlens.com.
As far as the book goes, it's actually available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble right now.
(33:08):
You can go online, pre-order it.
That's actually a huge gift for us to know and anticipate where this book is going ahead of time so we can continue to think about getting the story more expanded beyond just our local context here.
Clint, I just want to say once again, thank you for sharing some time with us.
Thank you for spending time on Bleeding Daylight.
(33:28):
Yes.
Thanks for having me, Rodney.
It's been great to get to know you.
Grateful for the work you're doing and yeah, for the audience out there, keep Bleeding Daylight.
Keep fighting against the darkness of the world in all of the myriad ways that you are gifted.
You're part of something much bigger, even though sometimes that's easy to forget.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
(33:49):
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
Wherever there are shadows, there are people ready to kick at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.
This is Bleeding Daylight with your host, Rodney Olsen.
Welcome and thanks for listening today.
Bleeding Daylight is a place to encounter stories filled with hope and inspiration.
Dozens more episodes are waiting for you at bleedingdaylight.net.
(00:31):
Please share this and other episodes with others through your social media and word of mouth.
Do we underestimate the value of story?
Whether they're fact or fiction, stories have a way of drawing us into something bigger, something that can help us experience more of life.
(00:52):
Today's guest helps us unlock that power.
I'm absolutely thrilled to welcome today's guest, Clint Leavitt.
He's the pastor of Midtown Presbyterian Church, where he's creating space for folks who might feel spiritually disconnected but are searching for meaning.
(01:15):
When he's not at church, he's teaching at Grand Canyon University, writing as a Tomatometer-approved critic.
And somehow, he's found time to write his first book, Cockroaches, God, Death, and Mangos.
Beyond all that, Clint's about to embark on his biggest adventure yet, becoming a parent alongside his wife, Emily.
Clint, welcome to Bleeding Daylight.
(01:37):
Yeah, thank you so much, Rodney.
It is a joy to be with you, and a joy to hear you say tomato instead of tomato, as we say over here in the States.
I think I need to be careful with my first question, because I get the feeling that you have such a passion in this area, I might not be able to stop you, but I'm going to jump in anyway.
Tell me about your love for the power of stories.
(02:01):
Yes, yes.
Thanks for asking.
Yeah, I can trace my passion, my love of stories, about as far back as my memory can go.
I have thought of it this way, sort of as breadcrumbs that God has kind of put along my story over the years.
For instance, in early elementary school, I would compose and write flip books and sell them on the playground to my classmates.
(02:23):
My teachers eventually shut down my industry, but that didn't stop me from continuing to write and create.
So I made movies growing up, and screenplays, and we'd have these sheets of paper that we'd like scroll down in front of our old camcorders, like the Star Wars scroll, right?
A story has always been kind of central to the way that I've understood myself and the world, and how I want to show up in that world.
(02:44):
As I got older, that became more and more clear to me, that that had a real intersection with the story that the scriptures are telling.
The story of God's creation of heaven and earth, and the unity of heaven and earth, and the fracturing of that, and his bringing of it back together.
That became abundantly clear for me in my own personal story.
My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer at the end of my high school journey.
(03:05):
That produced in me this real kind of bringing to the fore, bringing to the surface of, and what is the true story of the world, and how does that affect how I show up?
How does that affect my personal story or particular story?
That's the way that I've kind of made sense of it since then.
I have chased after finding the truth of the story of the universe, and trying to figure out compelling ways to communicate that creatively.
(03:29):
I'm a C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien and Frederick Buechner junkie.
Those are my kind of folks, and love literature.
That's what I studied in my undergrad, and then in grad school, brought those things together, studying theology and culture, and how we meaningfully communicate our own stories within the framework of that larger story.
Most of what I get to do professionally is talk about the story of Jesus, and talk about stories in general.
(03:53):
I get to, like you mentioned, write film reviews and write books.
This latest and first book for me is a story of a good friend of mine, and it's really a privilege to get to bring together these little breadcrumbs of my, what I would call vocational journey, together in life.
We have stories that are a shadow of reality, in that they're fiction, but they shine a bit of a light onto what's really happening.
(04:16):
Then we have the story of scripture, that right throughout we see that thread that carries on.
Oftentimes, the scriptures have been used really as a textbook, that we get down and we study verse by verse, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Sometimes I think we lose the thread of story that goes throughout scripture.
Is that something that you've seen, and something that you've tried to rectify in the way that you teach?
(04:40):
Yes, yes, definitely.
I'm glad you brought that up.
You know, it's funny, speaking of C.S. Lewis, who obviously has been an example of this in the Western world over the last 120, 130 years.
He, in his conversion story, tells of a long conversation he had with a couple of buddies of his who were literary experts, philologists, and mythological experts and academics.
(05:01):
He was an atheist, a devout atheist.
He felt that the stories of scripture were lies breathed through silver.
That was his phrase, that they were somehow false stories that still communicated something deeply human.
Through these conversations, he actually found
that the true story of Christ was ultimately being echoed by all of these other stories,
that in every story we've been trying to tell of sacrificial love and of redemptive goodness
(05:26):
and of care for enemy and peace among men and all those different kind of central Christian
themes, all of our great narratives, all of our great myths have been capturing bits and
pieces of that.
Over time, that idea got ahold of Lewis, and eventually he converted precisely because he saw, all these stories that I love have come to their fruition or have come to their completion in the person of Jesus and the story of Jesus coming into the world.
(05:52):
It was so captivating that it took him.
For me, similarly, I found this deep spiritual and emotional resonance when I get glimpses or you mentioned shadows as a picture.
These glimpses or shadows of the Christ story in film and in literature.
They have moved me and stirred me in the deepest parts of who I am.
(06:12):
I regularly, when I teach, try to weave my story together with the story of Jesus, try to weave different stories together.
I'll often tell expansive stories.
A couple of weeks ago, I told the myth of narcissists to start our time together to kind of engage people when it comes to understanding the self and how we relate to the self, those sorts of things.
Yeah, it's been a central part of how I think about my own ministry and my own speaking.
(06:36):
I think in particular for the people we tend to reach in our church community, skeptics and deconstructors and question askers and those sorts of folks, stories are a primary way to kind of pierce through the purely rational and logical part of us, which is a part of us, but it is only a part of us.
And we need to be able to get at, I think, a deeper thing that connects to our hearts.
You've touched there on the fact that you do like to reach out to people who don't have a faith or people that feel disconnected from faith and using story to do that.
(07:06):
How do we do that?
I mean, you've touched on it a little.
We hear a lot about deconstruction and those sorts of things.
How do we reach out to people who are in that place?
Yes, yes, it is a good question.
It's what we have been trying to figure out over the last few years in our church community in Phoenix.
Phoenix is an urban, bustling and expansive city in the US.
(07:26):
We're the sixth largest city in the United States.
And what that means is there's an urban young core based upon stats in urban environments, both in the US and across Europe and Australia.
Urban cores are just oftentimes where faith goes to die for people.
There are more people who have left the church in the last 25 years than people who came in, more people who left the church in the US than people who came in during the first Great Awakening, second Great Awakening and Billy Graham revivals combined.
(07:54):
So we are experiencing the largest religious demographic shift in American history right now.
And the vast majority of those folks are Gen Z or millennials.
So urban centers are usually not places where at least Christianity is considered a viable option for people.
And so naturally, I would say as missional people, it's our job to go to the places where the message is most needed, where it might not be heated, but where it's most needed.
(08:20):
To do that, we have found that the arts have been especially helpful and storytelling through the arts has been especially helpful.
So for instance, we have a part-time staff member who's a local artist.
She trains and teaches students and works at local gigs here.
And then she works part-time for us, not only leading gatherings together musically and developing a team to do that, she is creating connections with the local arts community in central Phoenix, open mic nights and storytelling opportunities.
(08:48):
We actually hosted just last night, we've been doing a week over week film screening at different coffee shops and beer and wine bars in our neighborhood, just as a way to get to know the people around us and to engage in some really compelling and thought-provoking stories with the primary agenda of just seeing how stories move and shape us first as kind of an entry point.
(09:11):
For many of those folks, a Sunday gathering is not going to be the most effective or the first way that they want to interact with some of these spiritual conversations.
They need to develop years-long relationships of trust around tables and around artistic mediums like this.
And so that's kind of in the way that we have pursued that.
We also have a skeptic study that we host in our community that is specifically designed for people who are not already connected to our church.
(09:36):
So people who have what I like to call questions, comments, rebuttals, or angry diatribes about faith, the Bible and the scriptures.
And I use that fourfold phrase kind of humorously to kind of invite people into it, but also to say like, Hey, there is room for every bit of your experience.
There is space for every bit of your challenge that you've had when it comes to walking this life of faith.
(09:59):
I actually just started a new cohort for the skeptic study recently, five new folks who were connected to in central Phoenix who are not connected to a church and have found this narrative of Jesus in some way to be challenging or unbelievable or difficult to enter.
And so we're spending the next few months chatting with them through a variety of topics that they chose.
I've actually got a whiteboard here right in front of me that we filled up this last week.
(10:22):
I roll out the whiteboard and I say every question, comment, rebuttal, and angry diatribe about faith and Christianity and the Bible.
Let's get it all out there.
And then I write it down and then I build a kind of topical curriculum for us to go through, engaging the arts, engaging some of these big thoughtful questions.
That's been our means or medium to start to build these bridges to folks.
(10:43):
Do you think we're sometimes afraid to open ourselves up to those bigger questions from skeptics?
I know that for a lot of young people, they grow up in a church where it's wrong to question and then they hit the big wide, wonderful world.
And suddenly there are questions and many are turned away from faith.
How important is it that we actually give people license to ask the big questions, knowing that we have an even bigger God who can answer them?
(11:10):
Yes.
Yes.
Well, well phrased and well said.
It's funny.
I think in our Western world, maybe not reduced, but at least contained faith down to a purely rational and intellectual ascent to an idea, right?
And when you do that, what that accidentally does is it means that any questioning rationally or intellectually means you've left faith behind.
(11:34):
But that idea that faith or belief is something that is intrinsically intellectual or rational, that's actually not how the scriptures understand belief.
In fact, belief according to both the old and new testaments has much more to do with how you integrate the rest of your life with some of these intellectual ideas.
And it means getting your body and mind and spirit and soul all involved in the process, which means that there's actually room all over the scriptures for intellectual or rational doubt to go right alongside faith.
(12:05):
Doubt and faith are not actually opposites.
I think they are supplementary.
And I think you see examples of this.
For instance, in the gospel of Mark, there's a man who approaches Jesus, whose son has been struggling since birth with what we would read as possession, possibly mental health challenges, right?
Whatever that looks like, independent of how you want to interpret possession.
His son has been struggling his whole life, physically, emotionally, spiritually.
(12:27):
And this father approaches Jesus and said, will you heal my son?
And Jesus gets into a conversation about faith with him.
And he says, well, look, if you believe I can heal your son, if you really believe.
And the man says, I believe help my unbelief.
And then Jesus heals his son.
He doesn't rebuke him for saying your faith isn't strong enough.
He doesn't rebuke him for having that doubt.
He actually responds to this man's faith, which was loaded and caked with doubt.
(12:51):
He responds by healing his son.
There's all sorts of examples like this, right?
Thomas is not condemned for his doubt.
Jesus simply says, blessed are those who have not seen and believed, but he still responds to Thomas.
Then even in Matthew, the resurrection narrative, this is so often overlooked at the end of Matthew 28, the disciples are told by the women who witnessed the resurrected Jesus to make their way outside of the city.
(13:15):
And there they will find Jesus.
And as they're walking, they encounter the resurrected Jesus, which was a remarkable, transformative experience for them.
And then Matthew goes out of his way to say, they worshiped, but some doubted amongst the disciples, these people whom the church is built on.
They see the resurrected Jesus and said, you know what?
Are we sure about this?
Like, are we positive this is real?
(13:37):
In the middle of worshiping, there is doubt.
And so I think there is room enough in God's grace to respond to our human capacities for doubt.
And I think creating space for that, what we've seen in these skeptic studies has deepened faith.
And I can speak from my own experience that when I have entered into some of those doubts, when I've done that wisely and in community, when I've trusted people, both in the Christian tradition throughout history, in understanding the ways people have reckoned with these questions, but also in my own time and with trusted relationships today, I have found a deepened belief, a deepened faith.
(14:09):
I found myself actually more integrated as a Christian, the more that I've pressed into those doubts and sought trustworthy sources to navigate them and to reckon with them.
And so that's actually one major reason why we created this group, because I think it is in many ways missing in the Western church, given that a reduced picture of faith being down to something that's just intellectual or rational.
(14:30):
And certainly in the Western world, we've become more polarized, whether it's our politics or our beliefs or whatever it is, and we either believe one way or the other, it's black and white.
Do you think that that's part of the reason that so many people have abandoned faith?
Because there are those doubts and they don't believe that they have the license for that.
Therefore, if they can't fully explain it, if it's not black or white, but there is some gray that they feel that they just have to walk away from that.
(14:59):
Yes.
Yeah.
I think certainty has become a bit of an idol in our culture and I think it's often misunderstood.
There's actually a great book by a guy named Leslie Newbigin who talks about this.
The book is called Proper Confidence, but it kind of critiques the notion of certainty.
The reality is that the certainty that we crave is actually not something that we as humans in our epistemological position.
(15:20):
That is our position of knowledge.
Certainty is not something that we can guarantee.
All you got to do is watch the matrix to understand it, right?
Neo in the matrix has a great pop culture example of this lives in a world that is an illusion that he doesn't even realize until he's exposed to that illusion.
He ultimately does not have certainty on the life that he leads.
(15:41):
And then he's got an option to either we'll take one pill that would expose to him the real world or continue to live in the illusion that he currently lives in.
There's not a guarantee that we aren't in a matrix right now.
There's not a guarantee that this isn't all a robotic simulation, which there actually are some pretty high up people in the world who affirm that sort of thing, who play around with that sort of idea.
And in a world where many of our movies focus on the sci-fi dystopian reality, it's actually doesn't seem all that farfetched to us today.
(16:07):
And so the pursuit of certainty I think leads us to this black and white thinking.
I think a better question, and this is what Leslie Newbigin would propose as well, is what is the thing that we can place the most confidence in?
What is something that is worth placing your confidence in?
What is the big overarching story that is worth being confident about?
(16:28):
And then how do you establish confidence, right?
Where does that come from?
Does it come from lived experience?
Does it come from reason and rationality?
Does it come from a combination of a majority of those or a few of those?
That's a, I think a better question to ask.
And what I found in my own kind of testing, I get to teach world religions as well.
And I've spent a good amount of time with the different spiritual narratives that our world gives us.
(16:51):
And I have just found nothing that instills more confidence than the person of Jesus.
That is something that is worth placing my confidence in.
And then by extension, the things that have kind of been articulated by the church who has followed him over the centuries.
So I think confidence over certainty allows us to say, you know what, I'm not going to have all the answers.
As a human, I'm on a need to know basis.
(17:13):
Black and white thinking is not going to resolve my problems.
And certainty is not an attainable possibility.
So what is the thing I can put confidence in and know and trust from that perspective?
You've been all about other people's stories and following them and seeing where they lead.
And now you've had the opportunity to write your own story, even though it's the story of a friend in the book, cockroaches, God, death and mangoes.
(17:38):
Tell me a little about that, because obviously it's an intriguing title.
And I know that you would have worked hard to come up with something that is going to draw the reader in with that title.
But tell me about that book.
Yeah.
I hope people are thinking like, what are the dots that connect here between these four words that are draped across the cover?
I had what I would call a sort of conversion moment my freshman year in university year, my undergraduate degree.
(18:03):
I met a good friend.
We met on the basketball court at an intramural sports.
We were both equally competitive.
And what I found is I liked being on his team because I could just stand in the corner and he would drive and kick to me and I could shoot wide open three pointers.
So that worked out pretty well for us relationally.
Beyond that, we started to develop just a budding friendship, had a spring break trip together in the car, driving from Arizona, where we went to school to California, a few hours away to the beach.
(18:28):
We started asking each other a bit more about our history and our stories.
For three hours, he went on this incredible tale of his experience as a refugee.
He grew up in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which actually in my own understanding of history, my own telling of history and classes and my educational journey, Congo had never really been included or talked about at all.
(18:49):
What I learned is that the second Congo war, which happened right at the end of the nineties into the two thousands, uh, it's one of the bloodiest conflicts in world history since world war II.
And it was something I had never heard of.
And his family was embroiled in this conflict.
They were ripped from their homes.
They were taken to a concentration camp for over a year.
They presumed that they were going to die in that process through a series of fortuitous events that if you pick up the book and read it, I won't spoil everything, but if you pick up a book and read it, you'll learn about these fortuitous events that actually enabled them to become refugees and escape out of the Congo to the U S and that's where he and his family have lived since.
(19:26):
And so the book tells his story.
And again, I mentioned it's a conversion moment for me.
I grew up in a family and in a culture that is largely antagonistic to outsiders, at least in the last few years, especially we're seeing this again on the rise in the United States today, that narratives about refugees and immigrants are not often charitable and are often animizing.
(19:47):
This conversion moment for me was seeing a good friend of mine relay his experience and realizing, Oh, maybe the way that I was raised to think about these things is incomplete or still needs a little bit more forming over time.
What I found in conjunction with my theological and literary studies is that God's heart all over the scriptures is for the immigrants and the refugee.
(20:07):
It is for the one who is outside and marginalized that he brings those people in.
You read laws in the old Testament.
They're all about caring for the foreigner and the stranger among you because you were one strangers in the land of Egypt.
And then in the new Testament, you see the ministry of Jesus constantly going toward outsiders and others towards the marginalized, the whole book of acts.
It begins in chapter one with Jesus telling the disciples that they will be his witnesses in Jerusalem, in Judea, all of Samaria and to the ends of the earth.
(20:36):
What that is, is, is an expansion geographically that it keeps going further and further and further that the kingdom of God in the church is always thinking about expanding itself beyond its boundaries and borders so that others might be welcomed in.
And then you see, over the course of the book of acts, you see African Christians and Asian Christians, you see men and women Christians, you see outsiders all over being welcomed in.
(20:59):
And so that seems to be the narrative of the scriptures.
And so that was sort of this light bulb moment for me, because it was a way of seeing, ah, I've maybe missed God's heart for the world in this.
And then the sort of aha moment for me came following that conversion.
It was sort of this opportunity when my friend, his name is Bakonzi, approached me about writing a book to tell his story.
(21:21):
He told me that he trusted me.
I said, look, man, I don't know that I'm the person to write this.
I've never been to the Congo.
This is all new for me.
He said, look, I trust you.
I've read your work and I trust you as a good friend.
I want you to write it.
That set us off on this journey of researching and interviewing and preparing and outlining and writing and rewriting into this ultimate finished product, cockroaches, God, death and mangoes, which tells the story from when his family was kidnapped from their home all the way to their resettlement here in the U.S. and the remarkable, remarkable events that happened in between.
(21:53):
You had already heard the story on those long drives and obviously in subsequent conversations.
But were there still things that as you were researching the book surprised you and even alarmed you?
Yes, yes, definitely.
What was most noteworthy, I think, was the ways in which many of the conflicts that we've seen much of the central continent of Africa embroiled in over the last few years have been, if not completely initiated, at least exacerbated by lots of Western colonization in those areas.
(22:25):
For instance, the Hutu and the Tutsi divide that has become infamous now through the Rwandan genocide that we know a bit more about in the West.
It actually leaked into the Congo as well and was connected to Bakonzi's story.
But much of the divide of those tribes actually had to do with hierarchies that were implemented during Belgian colonization in those areas.
(22:46):
And that these Westerners came in and actually instituted some of these ugly hierarchical ways of seeing one another in these tribes and then left.
Now those nations are still embroiled in lots of these conflicts.
It helped me see, man, the ethic of Jesus, the ethic of the scriptures, right, that all people are made in the image of God, is such a centrally foundational thing that if we desert it and if we build any sorts of hierarchies at all, it can lead to decades and to centuries of violence that is so embedded that people don't know anything different oftentimes.
(23:18):
It has further entrenched in me the importance of this picture of all humans being made in the image of God and being equal and sharing an equal dignity.
And then learning to tell stories that help remind us of that truth and that help pull on our heartstrings in order to communicate this divine thing.
Like we mentioned at the beginning, using stories to connect or be shadows or pointers or arrows to this much larger story.
(23:42):
We all love watching movies that tell a remarkable story and then sometimes at the end of that we see that graphic come up that says this was based on a true story and that makes it even more amazing.
And I suppose that's what's happening with this book.
You're drawing someone into this narrative and yet it's not fiction.
(24:04):
This is something that has actually happened to people and makes it even more remarkable.
What do you hope is the response from people as they read this book?
Is it just the retelling of someone's life story or is there a response that can come out of this?
Yes, this is a central thing that Bekansi and I have talked about since the origin and inception of this book.
(24:28):
One of the first things I asked him was, what are your goals?
What do you want to see happen?
What do you want to see come of the telling of this story?
And over the course of the years we've been writing it and working on it, a few different goals have emerged.
The first goal is a very personal one for Bekansi.
We want his future generations, he now has three little kiddos, he and his wife, we want his future generations to be able to connect this story to their own identity and be able to remember where they've come from and how that informs their own cultural identity and personal identity and so forth.
(25:00):
Well, that's a very personal goal for him, but at a deeper level, we both articulate the desire to see this book inform a Western audience about a part of world history that they're usually not very privy to and have not been educated on.
We kind of joke about how people will mention specific countries that they travel to, but then if they go to any country in Africa, they just say they went to Africa, which is a massive continent, right?
(25:23):
It's like, I went to the UK and I went to France and I went to Africa.
Where in Africa?
Because Egypt is in Africa, as is South Africa, as is the Congo and everything in between.
What we realize is that many people in the West don't have any framework for African culture broadly, the sub-Saharan African culture versus super-Saharan African culture, in particular the story of the Congo and these brutal conflicts in the 90s and that have persisted in various ways today.
(25:50):
So that's another thing.
Thirdly, and I would call this maybe the overarching or central goal, foundational goal for us, is to spark action in the West to help refugee neighbors, especially in the US right now.
There is, like I mentioned before, not only a linguistic opposition to outsiders and others, but there's also starting to become some policy oppositions.
I work with a refugee ministry here in Phoenix that just released an email that currently, because of policy changes that are being made, there's a pause on the movement of more than 10,000 refugees across the world into the United States that were in the process already legally and were just simply waiting for the opportunity to travel.
(26:31):
These are people who have their lives threatened because of the violence in their home countries that were already in the legal process that are now being prevented from coming.
There's been a stripping of billions of dollars to support humanitarian aid around the world for folks, even if they aren't traveling to the US, who just need help in war-torn nations or in really dire situations, and that humanitarian aid is being stripped.
(26:53):
Two of the largest aid agencies in the world, including World Relief, a Protestant agency, and then Catholic Relief Services, a Catholic humanitarian agency, they have seen billions of dollars of their funding stripped, which means it's now in many ways the role of the church and the followers of Jesus to be the hands and feet of Jesus and loving their neighbors around the globe.
(27:13):
We hope that this story would ultimately spark in folks an expanded vision of the world that would
give them a sense of deep compassion for their refugee neighbors, both in their neighborhoods,
but also for people who are in need around the world, and that they would choose to use their
time and their treasures and their talents to help care for those neighbors and have their hearts
changed by this story.
(27:35):
As you look back through the story of the world, we see in times of difficulty, it's generally been the Christians who hang around and help.
During times of sickness and of even plague, it's been the Christians that have stayed behind and put themselves at risk to help those who are ill or dying.
It must be disturbing for you to see the story come to the point where it's even large sections of the Christian church that are jumping on board with these ideas and saying, no, we don't want these people to come here.
(28:08):
No, we don't want to help.
No, this has nothing to do with us.
It's a real upturning of the traditional story of Christianity, isn't it?
It is.
It is in so many ways.
It's interesting.
I think one of the dynamics that I've seen in folks in my circles who have articulated that perspective, that we're kind of hands off or removing ourselves from responsibility in a variety of ways, one of the narratives is that we can't accept everyone all the time, right?
(28:37):
Which is true.
We ultimately, as a nation, have to consider practically what that looks like, right?
The thing that's missed in that is one, a greater allegiance to a kingdom that goes beyond our nation.
So even if policies here change, that doesn't change our obligation as kingdom participants who are part of this transformed universe that Jesus is initiating.
(28:59):
It doesn't change our responsibility for those folks.
I think what it actually does is force us to learn how to be creative, which is what the church has done throughout history.
When they've been prevented from loving their neighbors well, governmentally, they found other creative ways to do so, because that is the whole point of this kingdom is that it draws people in.
A second part of that too, is I think we just have in the West, again, because we've reduced faith down to this hyper intellectual, hyper rational or reason based thing.
(29:25):
It's an idea, I believe in my head.
It's actually prevented us more deeply engaging the robust kingdom ethic that Jesus has for us that involves every part of our lives, right?
That is the sermon on the mount.
That is what you've done for the least of these you've done for me.
We've missed those teachings because we've just claimed that faith is about what I believe in my head.
And as long as I believe the right ideas and get baptized, then I'm a Jesus follower.
(29:47):
And I think that has given us a little bit of tunnel vision.
I really think as a pastor, one of my primary goals is to help expand our understanding of this life of following Jesus.
It is so much bigger.
I would say more beautiful and more expansive than what we've been handed with just a thought in our head.
There are days to be fair where the inner cynic in me just thinks, ah, what's the point in any of this, right?
(30:09):
Which I think resonates with a lot of folks around the world right now.
What's the point in getting involved?
But I think the hope of the kingdom, the hope of Christ's arrival that is coming in the anticipation of that arrival is very much my inspiration and salve for continuing in this sort of work, because I really do believe that we are participating in something so much bigger than what a government or a state can say today.
(30:35):
My hope is to be involved in people's lives to help give them a picture of that kingdom.
In our short time together, we've been able to look at some very big concepts and very big stories, but I'm wanting to know one thing from you.
You are expecting a daughter very soon, and I'm wondering how much you're looking forward to sitting down with her as she grows and telling her stories.
(31:01):
Yes, I will do my best not to tear up in any way.
Yeah, it's been a remarkable journey for my wife and I.
We've actually struggled with infertility for a few years, which is something that we found to be much more common than is often talked about.
But we found great companions in the journey who have grieved and walked with us and prayed with us along the way.
(31:22):
And so one, we get that journey for those who are listening and struggling.
It is a brutal, brutal challenge to kind of be waiting for this thing and not having it.
And then also to have this amazing gift on the other side is something that my wife and I are just giddy about, really, really excited to have this opportunity.
And I think in many ways, that waiting has led us.
That doesn't mean the waiting is justified or that it becomes easier, but it has prompted in us a deeper appreciation for the gift of new life and the ways that God is giving us this gift to steward.
(31:53):
One of the best things that I was told by a mentor of mine as I was getting into ministry was, if you can't communicate scripture stories in the gospel to a child, then you have no right to communicate it to adults.
That is, if I can't understand the core of this story of Jesus and learn how to communicate it to the little ones around me, I probably need to do a little more work before I get to communicate it to adults.
(32:16):
That has led me to say, man, I just can't wait to tell stories for her, both the shadows of the gospel story that we talked about earlier, but also the gospel story itself to invite her into this kingdom narrative where she, as Dallas Willard put it, is an unceasing spiritual being with an eternal destiny in God's great universe.
That is my hope that she would know that from day one and that I would get to walk with her in that as she figures out how her story intersects with that much larger story of God's.
(32:45):
Clint, it's been a delight to talk to you.
If people are wanting to connect with you to find out when that book is going to release so that they can get a hold of it, where's the easiest place for people to find you?
Yes.
Easiest place to find me is clintlevitt.com or thelevittlens.com.
As far as the book goes, it's actually available for pre-order on Amazon, Barnes & Noble right now.
(33:08):
You can go online, pre-order it.
That's actually a huge gift for us to know and anticipate where this book is going ahead of time so we can continue to think about getting the story more expanded beyond just our local context here.
Clint, I just want to say once again, thank you for sharing some time with us.
Thank you for spending time on Bleeding Daylight.
(33:28):
Yes.
Thanks for having me, Rodney.
It's been great to get to know you.
Grateful for the work you're doing and yeah, for the audience out there, keep Bleeding Daylight.
Keep fighting against the darkness of the world in all of the myriad ways that you are gifted.
You're part of something much bigger, even though sometimes that's easy to forget.
Thank you for listening to Bleeding Daylight.
(33:49):
Please help us to shine more light into the darkness by sharing this episode with others.
For further details and more episodes, please visit bleedingdaylight.net.
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