An Evening with the Holy Post Detroit Event (Patreon)

Tim Alberta and Skye Jethani were in Detroit on May 3 to discuss navigating church leadership culture, journalism, and political polarization. Tim explains his path towards a career in writing, how he’s maintained respect with contentious figures, and why he believe’s there’s hope for revival—but the church may not be prepared to receive it.

A small disclaimer, the audio quality is a bit lower than our normal event recording. Skye’s microphone had technical problems around 41:54, so we’ve included the transcript from that segment of the video where Skye’s audio is hard to make out:

 “ We're gonna open it up to questions from you guys in minute, but I, I, thank you for saying. It is nice to get that from someone who's in that world more than I am. But I feel a little bit like what we have been praying for, (“We” I use broadly), like what the evangelical movement in America has been praying for throughout my entire life, I feel like we're on the precipice of that. We've been praying for the spiritual revival in this country, and more than any other time in my adult life, I'm seeing evidence of that beginning to happen. Ironically, it's happening at the moment when the Evangelical church is the least prepared to receive it.

And it seems to me a little bit like what was going on in Israel at the time of Jesus. For generations, the Jews had been longing for the coming of the kingdom of God, for the restoration of Israel, and its liberation from Pagan occupation. And Jesus appears on the scene and says, “It's here. The kingdom of God is among you. But the religious leaders weren't prepared to enter, and instead it was going to the tax collectors and the prostitutes and the sinners and the gentiles. And I feel like that's where we are. It's about to happen, and I don't wanna get too prophetic here, but I feel like there's a movement that is happening among secular people in this country that are hungry for what the gospel has to offer. And the church has probably been praying for that more than any other thing. And it has abandoned its birthright for porridge.”