The Love Shack

Last Friday, my friend Pam had the opportunity to be on a radio program featuring Paul Young, author of The Shack. The program is a regular part of OPB called Think Out Loud, and the episode is titled "Relationships and Religion".

The program also featured, as part of the conversation, local pastor of The Evergreen Community and blogger Bob Hyatt; as well as James Wellman, author of Evangelical vs. Liberal: The Clash of Christian Cultures in the Pacific Northwest.

This program can be found as a podcast on iTunes, (look for a date of August 1st, 2008, "Relationships and Religion") and I highly recommend listening to it. I took copious notes so I could impart to you some of the gems of the conversation, but it's well worth a 53-minute listen in its entirety.

(All quotes are Paul Young speaking.)

"All the religious stuff in my history, as much as I pursued God looking for a way to please him and get the affection of the father...none of it healed the stuff. It didn't change me on the inside. It wasn't until bad theology fell away and a relationship opened up and then I began to find out God had been there the whole time and waiting for me to be ready to deal with [the stuff]."

...

"For me, religion and relationship are very very contradictory ideas; you can come up with any religion you want that posits either an impersonal or personal God at a distance, and now it's up to you to find your way there through a series of steps or finding the right road or something like that, rather than a God that knows how lost we are and then pursues us. That's the incarnation to me, that is God becoming flesh in the person of Jesus Christ and that that then becomes all about relationship and relationship destroys religion.

...

"Any conversation about life is theology. It's going to permeate everything you do. Music, acting, nature. You are having a theological conversation on some level."

...

"When someone asks me "Paul are you a Christian?" I say, "Well tell me what one of those is and I'll tell you if I'm one of them".