Drew Dick (2:09)

Canadian wisdom, I like that. And sometimes they're just kind of weird, offbeat stories, too, that happen to catch my eye. Cause you gotta keep it light. You gotta keep them engaged. Right.

Sky (2:17)

Well, and this is good. So many people are burned out on the news and the news algorithms and their social media feeds. Cable news, for sure. But they don't want to say completely out of the loop so Drew's newsletter, great way, free resource that we put out there.

Drew Dick (2:32)

You don't have to dive into the dumpster, fire the Internet every week to find the news. Right. This is the sell. I guess we're not selling anything because it's free. But this is the promise. I'll keep you up to date. I'll show you the stories that at least I think are important.

Sky (2:47)

In all seriousness, we've gotten incredible feedback from people who've signed up saying they love it and we're grateful you're doing it. So if you haven't signed up for it, go grab it. It's free. So today you're going to take on our own little kind of audio, Drew's news.

Drew Dick (3:01)

This is where we get to go a little deeper.

Sky (3:02)

Yeah, because we can talk about it

Drew Dick (3:03)

to kind of delve into it. Exactly.

Sky (3:05)

All right, Drew, so what's, what's at the top, man?

Drew Dick (3:08)

And I'm going to try to keep it light and happy, but we're starting on a grim one. Okay. I think you know what's coming. But this last week, actually Christian author Philip Yancy, whom we both know, confessed that he had engaged in an affair with a married woman. Yancey himself is married as well for eight years and would retire from writing and speaking. Probably a good move. And this understandably, because Yancy is a best selling author, has been for decades, sent shock waves, waves through the evangelical world. And this was just. For me personally, man, this was a hard one.

Sky (3:45)

I felt the same way.

Drew Dick (3:46)

Yeah, you felt it, I'm sure. I. I read the Jesus I never Knew one of his books when I was about 18 years old. And it had a huge impact on me, you know, not only spiritually, but just as far as giving me a love for the written word. And I just loved his approach to hard topics like doubt and disillusionment. He kind of approached as a seeker and as a journalist, and he was a great writer. Talking about him as if he's dead, but he is a great writer. So this was. This was rough. And the responses were interesting as well, which I hope we can talk about a little bit.

Sky (4:20)

We'll link to the letter he wrote and his wife also wrote a brief response. Couple things. Number one, I mean, apart from his writing, which I also found really compelling, he was sort of. And I told him, I interviewed him at least once on the Holy Post, and I think I told him this either on the air or maybe before or after we were recording. But in a way, he kind of blazed the trail that I've walked and you have too, honestly, for a little bit, because he started out as a journalist, though I didn't. But then he ended up at Christianity Today, where you and I both worked. And he was a writer there, an editor there, and a columnist there. Things that we've all done. And then he spun out from there to start writing books, which is, again, the route both of us have taken. And so I always admired that kind of career path he went on. And I didn't consciously be like, oh, I want to be Philip Yancey and follow what he did, but he showed me you could be done, basically. And so on all those levels, it was just really sad to hear and. I don't know. It's sad. And there's a number of weird things about all this because. How old is he? 75? 76.

Drew Dick (5:33)

76. 76. Parkinson's disease. And he's out there having affairs. It's wild.

Sky (5:38)

I know. And I think this is in a different category than some of the really grotesque predatory sexual behavior that we've seen from mega church pastors and the COVID ups in the sbc, all that kind of nonsense. As far as we know, this is a consensual relationship, adulterous relationship, and it's terrible for everyone involved in the families and all that. It's heartbreaking. But I think what grieves me about it as somebody far removed who was just an admirer of his writing and stuff, is just like, I want more stories of Christian. Influential Christian voices that just end well.

Drew Dick (6:16)

Right, exactly. And he was so close.

Sky (6:19)

Yeah.

Drew Dick (6:19)

It's like, come on, man.

Sky (6:21)

I don't know. Okay, so this. I don't want to. It's tragic. And I feel terrible for everyone who's involved in that. And I pray both for Philip, his wife, and everyone else who's involved in this, that they would, you know, experience God's love in a. In a profound way and in a way that brings healing and everything else that they need in. In the midst of all this. Putting all that aside, it raises this perennial question when these stories come out, which is, what do we do with the books?

Drew Dick (6:50)

Yeah.

Sky (6:50)

Like, I mean, this came up when. When Ravi Zacharias. And again, I think it's a different category from what we know about Philip's story. But what do you do? Like, Yancy was not a pastor. He was not putting himself out there as, like, I'm an exemplar of Christian faithfulness. You should follow me as I follow Jesus. He put himself out there as more of a Journalist and more as a truth seeker. And he's like, let me show you what I've learned kind of in his writing. But it wasn't like he wrote one memoir, which we had him on the show to talk about. But even that wasn't like, hey, check out How I follow Jesus and do it my way. That wasn't his posture. It was, here's a book about grace, and here's a book about doubt, and here's a book about who Jesus was. One of my favorite books he ever did was called Soul Survivor. Did you ever read that?

Drew Dick (7:44)

Yes. Where he talks about the 12 different characters.

Sky (7:47)

Yeah. So each chapter is a different synopsis of a biography of some Christian leader, author, thinker, whatever. Like, there's a chapter on Mother Teresa. There's a chapter on mlk.

Drew Dick (7:59)

Some weren't even Christians, if I remember.

Sky (8:01)

Yeah. But they're just inspiring stories that impacted his life. And it was a really great. I think I read it in high school. It was an introduction to me of, oh, these are other people impacted by the teachings and way of Jesus that I should live. So he was kind of a conduit for me to learn some of those stories. I've recommended that book so many times. Like, do I need to not recommend that book anymore? It's not about Philip Yancey. He's just the one who compiled the kind of. So I don't. I don't know.

Drew Dick (8:25)

I've already burned mine. Skype. But no, I'm. I'm. I'm totally on. I've got books from people that have been totally disgraced. I've got John Howard Yoder books on my shelf. I've got, you know, you name it. Probably Carl Barr, Bill Cosby. No. Yeah, maybe there's a limit. But you're right. It's like, if the books themselves are true and beautiful and helpful, now, am I going to be recommending them the same way? Probably not. Right. Because even though you're right, he's not a pastor, and he didn't hold himself up as a moral exemplar.

Sky (8:59)

But he was teaching. He was teaching.

Drew Dick (9:01)

He's teaching.

Sky (9:01)

Yeah.

Drew Dick (9:02)

And. And. And books are teaching. It's funny, because I remember one time Grace asked me, does that verse in James ever make you nervous that there'll be greater condemnation for teachers? And I'm like, I'm not a teacher. She's like, what are you talking about? You write books? I was like, oh, no, that had never occurred to me. So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, it's he's definitely sullied his legacy. Here's another thing that kind of. I think he did the right thing, obviously by stepping down. Yeah, that's. You know, some people go through something like this and they just try to make it another chapter in their story and they're going to reinvent themselves as. As something else. But it sounds like. Although he's 76, so makes sense. Anyway, the one thing that kind of, I don't know, made me a little cynical in the apology, though, is he said something about his actions run totally contrary to his beliefs about marriage. And I kind of go, well, if you're having an affair for eight years, first of all, wasn't like a momentary slip up. I think that actually revealed your beliefs about marriage. Beliefs aren't just mental furniture. And so you lived out your beliefs about marriage. Now you need to do some soul searching and figure out what was going on there. But that seems kind of like a glib thing. Like, oh, man, yeah, yeah, I messed up. You lived in eight years in a pattern of, like, public and private deception. I'm sorry, maybe I'm the legalistic Larry here. No, I'm going. This is pretty serious. And I don't think you can just chalk it up to like.

Sky (10:25)

I think it does speak to the. Our human propensity for self deception.

Drew Dick (10:31)

Yeah.

Sky (10:32)

And our ability to live in cognitive dissonance with our beliefs, to compartmentalize. Yeah, all that. So do I think that Philip Yancey believes adultery is completely okay? No, I don't think he does. And I don't know how he lived with the guilty conscience for eight years. I have no idea how that worked to my knowledge. I don't think he ever wrote. I mean, he wrote lots of articles and columns over his career. I don't know about all those, but he never wrote a book about, like, marriage, did he?

Drew Dick (11:01)

No, no, of course he wrote about marriage, like, indirectly. And someone dug up an article I guess he had on his blog I'd never read about sexual sin. But yeah, he was never the kind of. Which is probably good, especially considering this failing. He was never the finger wagging, you know, coming down on sinners really hard. He was all about grace. Right. He wrote a book. What's so amazing about grace? So that makes sense. But anyway, and then. Okay, so some of the responses were interesting because there's the. Look at this man of God, Satan poached another one, which I always find so silly. It's like, okay, let's not give. Let's not give Satan too much Credit here. Okay.

Sky (11:37)

Yeah.

Drew Dick (11:38)

We can do that kind of stuff without. Without Satan's help. And then you get what some people have called sin leveling, where it's like, we've all done bad things. One person, I think it was Tully and Chavidjan actually, who had his own failing with adultery, said something about, like, we're all just a day or two away from doing the exact same thing. And I actually rejected.

Sky (12:00)

Or eight years.

Drew Dick (12:02)

Yeah.

Sky (12:02)

It's not exactly the same. Yeah.

Drew Dick (12:04)

Splitting hair. No, but I. And this isn't like a pride thing. I don't think that everyone is up one bad day away from having an affair.

Sky (12:12)

Yeah.

Drew Dick (12:12)

You know, I think. Anyway, not that we aren't all fallible and finite and need to be vigilant. I get that. But there is this sort of tendency to kind of excuse these kind of failings by just saying, hey, we're all human. What can you do? And throw up your hands? So. And then the other thing, and this is something I've said before to you, I think, is that it just exposes a persistent myth in the church that giftedness equals spiritual maturity. That if you can write beautiful books, preach powerful sermons, sing beautiful songs about God, people just assume that that correlates with spiritual maturity. And it doesn't. Those are things that people are good at. Okay. And when they mess up, that gift doesn't go away. And so it's really dangerous. And it should be a moment of soul searching for the total. We're gonna look at character, not giftedness.

Sky (13:02)

In the book I've been writing that's going out on Holy Post, plus chapter by chap. Chapter. The last book, the last chapter of the World Born in youn. I wrote about this, like, when I was a college student. I had throughout my high school and college years just because of the peculiar. The peculiar circumstances of my family and diversity and all that. I had studied a lot of different religions. I was reading the Bhagavad Gita in high school and the Quran and the Bible. And I just knew more than the average young adult about different religions, and I had some natural talent at communication. You put those two things together and then you put me on a secular campus in a campus ministry environment. And because I could speak fairly articulately about things that other people didn't know very well, people just assumed I'm spiritually mature, that I must be more mature in my Christian faith than other people. And they kept handing me a microphone and kept giving me more opportunities. And it's just. We do it all the time is we mistake knowledge or skill with spiritual maturity and depth, and it's never good. And we do it over and over and over again. And Philip Yancey, a very gifted communicator, brilliant writer, sharp mind, and I'm grateful for all those things, and I still remain grateful for a lot of things he wrote. But we just have to be careful we don't extrapolate too far and mistake, as you put it, gifting for maturity. And we don't know everything that's going on in other people's lives. And I'm not saying we shouldn't ever allow voices or resources outside of our personal knowledge into our lives to influence us. I mean, people are listening to you and I right now and they don't know who we are. But it's a reminder that the people who should have the most influence on our lives, especially our spiritual lives, should be people that we are in incarnate relationship with, whose lives we know inside and out. Spiritual fathers and fruit of their lives. Yes, spiritual fathers and mothers in our own communities and families. And yes, many of them are going to have failings too, but we'll be able to see the fullness of their life, including what happens after they fail and all the. Yeah, so this gets back to the evangelical industrial complex, where we just give way too much authority to people that we have no contact with because they're a best selling author or they have a huge church or they've got whatever, you know, number of followers on Instagram or TikTok or whatever. And I just think that's foolish and unhealthy.

Drew Dick (15:33)

Yep. And it doesn't end well. Another interesting phenomenon every time something like this happens is you see the reactions, like if, if someone doesn't, if someone fails, has a dramatic moral failing and you didn't like their theology, you're like, oh, yeah, that's what happens. There's gloating, then, yeah, there's a. Yeah, schadenfreude. Is that the word where you're like, yeah, that's what happens when you embrace a theology I don't like. And then, I mean, and I do, I'm not immune from this. I've totally done that. At least I haven't maybe said it, but thought it. And then something like this happened. And I've saw people doing it with Yancy, they're like, yeah, he's been drifting to the left for years. This is no surprise. And I don't even know is that true. He's been drifting the left.

Sky (16:09)

Yeah, because we haven't seen any fundamentalist pastors.

Drew Dick (16:12)

Exactly right.

Sky (16:13)

They never succumb to adultery or sexual slavery. Of course not.

Drew Dick (16:18)

So, yeah, it's. It. Yeah, it doesn't matter. Philip Yancey or Mark Driscoll or John Howard Yoder or Bill Hybels. They're all human, all right? It happens. And so. And it's not an excuse or necessarily a reason always for why it happened. So. So the first three books I read as a young Christian were by Ravi Zacharias, Philip Yancey, and Max Lucado. Hang in there, Max. Hang in there, okay? Oh, I'm sorry. You got it. It's gallows humor, man. You gotta laugh.

Sky (16:54)

It is a little gallows humor. And I don't want to discourage people from being blessed by reading books or the content from whoever that they have found really helpful in their spiritual life. However, just don't put your allegiance in these authors or people you know, as far as they are able to direct your vision towards Christ and deepening your communion with him. Wonderful. Great. Amen. But sometimes I think we stop short of building our allegiance and affection for Jesus through these resources, and it only builds our affection and devotion to the source of those things, the author or the influencer, whoever it is. And that's where it gets really, really creepy. Don't do that.

Drew Dick (17:41)

Just don't. Don't do that. And you know what? Like, I wrote about this in. In the Drew's newsletter this week, but, like, maybe when something like this happens, it does shake you, right? But maybe spiritual maturity on our part is you keep stumbling after Jesus even after all your heroes are gone. So, yeah, it's. It's a test of your faith for sure. All right, let's move on. This one's sad too, but in a funny sort of way. The worship leader, Sean Fouch. Am I saying his name right?

Sky (18:14)

Fuched. Fuch.

Drew Dick (18:17)

F E U C H T. I should know that.

Sky (18:20)

I know it's Fuke. I think it's Fuch.

Drew Dick (18:22)

Oh, really?

Sky (18:23)

Yeah.

Drew Dick (18:23)

Okay.

Sky (18:23)

Fuked.

Drew Dick (18:24)

Like, I've read it a lot, but I've never said it. That's a helpful reminder. Okay, so he is a controversial worship leader. Is that fair?

Sky (18:35)

Well, he's very much bought into the Christian nationalist mega, dude.

Drew Dick (18:40)

Yes.

Sky (18:41)

He performs at MAGA rallies, does all the Christian nationalist stuff. Anti progressive, anti liberal, anti woke, anti black lives matters, anti lgbtq, all the, like, everything Codes very right wing politically. During COVID you know, anti anti Covid

Drew Dick (19:02)

worship services where he refused to do any of the protocols and stuff. Yeah. So he's been very. He's a lightning rod for controversy, for sure. He Posted recently on x.com A prayer, a beautiful prayer, really, for the persecuted church around the world. And in part it read, strengthen the weary, protect the vulnerable, comfort those who mourn. But the weird part about this prayer was the last line, and it read, if you want it shorter, more prophetic, or that was it. And the reason I know you're laughing, sky is because you'll recognize the language. If you know anything about ChatGPT or other chatbots, that's what it says to you after you have asked it to create some copy for something like an email or a letter or something like that. And then it asks you, do you want me to make it more humorous or more, in this case, prophetic or shorter? And so basically he was, as far as we can tell, using ChatGPT or something like it to create a prayer. And he got busted because he just copied and pasted without reading it carefully enough. And he put that little prompt from the chat into his.

Sky (20:09)

I'm so glad you picked this story because I think we could spend honestly an hour just talking about this. I'm not joking because I think it raises.

Drew Dick (20:18)

I was wondering if I should even bring it up.

Sky (20:19)

It raises so many different issues for me, and I don't even know where to begin. Here, here. Okay. First of all, I remember when I was a seminary student, I was a hospital student, chaplain at a hospital with a bunch of other seminary students, some of whom came from different seminaries. So they're from different Christian traditions. One of our advisors was Lutheran, and another advisor was Greek Orthodox. There were students there who were Roman Catholic, Episcopalian. I forget what other traditions were there. And then there were two of us who were more kind of evangelical in our training and background, and. And we had an interesting conversation one day around how different Christian traditions pray. I'll never forget one of the guys from one of the other more higher church traditions said to us, oh, I know how you evangelicals pray. I can always tell when it's an evangelical who's praying. And we're like, how do you tell? And he said, because you use the word just all the time.

Drew Dick (21:18)

Guilty.

Sky (21:18)

Oh, God, just da, da, da, da. We just pray for.

Drew Dick (21:21)

We just come to you today.

Sky (21:22)

But there's actually something deeply rooted in the evangelical tradition there. And that is. I forget when it was, but there was a whole book around this. There's this idea within evangelicalism that spontaneity is somehow more authentic. And so in a lot of evangelical communities, churches, whatever, they tend to shy away from using written prayers, especially like a Book of Common Prayer or any early church prayers. Very few evangelical churches even recite the Lord's Prayer, for that matter. They forget that the Psalms are all prayers. They just don't do. And it's much more common to find people at a microphone or leading a group, whatever, to just spontaneously pray whatever's coming into their head. And we think that it's more authentic and holy for some reason. And yet I don't see any evidence of that. So what's interesting to me is that Sean Fught, whatever his name is, chose. He wanted a written prayer for this thing, but he went to ChatGPT, apparently, and said, hey, I want a prayer about the persecuted church, and it came up with it. So my question is, is this actually more evangelical because it's spontaneous, or is it more traditional because it's written but yet not written? He could have gone. I mean, I have a whole shelf of prayer books in my office that have written prayers, including whole sections of written prayers for persecuted Christians. Like, he could have easily drawn from one of those or even googled and searched for it online. He could have gone to ChatGPT and said, Find me a historic prayer from a.

Drew Dick (22:56)

But then he couldn't take credit for it.

Sky (22:58)

Right, well, that's interesting, because it was written. So that's my question. If you want credit for it, it needs to be spontaneous. If you want it rooted in church history and tradition, then you say, well, this is from Augustine or this is from, I don't know, Athanasius or Anselm or whoever. And. But he wanted it. I don't know. It's just so interesting to me that here's an evangelical relying on a written prayer, passing it off as spontaneous, when in fact it was ChatGPT. So that's one level of this discussion, but here's the other one, and maybe this is where you wanted to go with it.

Drew Dick (23:30)

Is it?

Sky (23:31)

What is the deal with using AI for a sermon or for a prayer? Like, I have an opinion, but I don't know how other people feel about this. What do you think if you found out that the sermon you heard on Sunday was significantly written by AI, would that change something for you?

Drew Dick (23:56)

Yeah, well, yeah. And is it worse than plagiarism, which happens a lot too. Oh, yeah. I don't know. I actually think it's a different question.

Sky (24:03)

I think it might be worse.

Drew Dick (24:04)

Yeah, I agree. Well, and I know you're in a moment of temptation because you're preparing a sermon.

Sky (24:08)

I am, yeah.

Drew Dick (24:09)

Don't do it, Sky. Hold fast.

Sky (24:11)

Well, I got my.

Drew Dick (24:12)

I got.

Sky (24:12)

I got a whole story about that in a minute, but I want to hear your thoughts on this.

Drew Dick (24:16)

No, it's. It's fascinating. Okay. Back to the spontaneous thing, too. It's really interesting because if you grew up in the evangelical church like I did, you know that even though. Yes. We didn't have anything to do with those high church liberals that, you know, pray the same prayers and read prayers, heaven forbid that we just spontaneously make our petitions to God. If you spend any time in churches, evangelical churches, you realize that there's a lot of repetition because Gary will get up and he pretty much says the same thing every time with the justs and shield of the same thing. Anyway, it's funny because we all kind of revert to a script, even if it is spontaneous. And I like both, by the way. I like liturgical prayers. I like spontaneous prayers. I think you should. Sure. That's just my opinion. You get it, Sky? Got it.

Sky (25:06)

Got it.

Drew Dick (25:06)

Yeah. Okay, so, yeah, maybe I'm dodging the question here. No, I'm totally against it. I think it's ridiculous. And maybe I'm a dinosaur. Maybe people will look at that opinion in 10 years and just go like, dude, everyone uses this as easy as breathing, and you're going to fall way behind. I've never used it other than to ask if my dog's going to die after I eat some chocolate or something. But as far as using it to write a book or a sermon or certainly a prayer. My goodness. The other question. Does God hear a chat GPT prayer? I don't know. That's a weird thing.

Sky (25:36)

I think he. He definitely hears it.

Drew Dick (25:38)

Well, he hears it as in it registers, I guess. Oh, my goodness. Because he's like, you know, it's like, omniscient.

Sky (25:46)

Okay. A lot of people.

Drew Dick (25:47)

Yeah, I'm definitely down on it.

Sky (25:49)

Hopefully by now a lot of people know that. For many, many, many, many years, I've been writing a daily devotional called With God Daily. Get it at withgodddaily.com five days a week and two things. First of all, every one of those devotionals at the end has a prayer of the week, which is some historic prayer of the church that I've drawn from one of those many prayer books I have on my shelf. And the whole point of using those. Those written prayers from some point in church history is I think it teaches us how to pray. And that's what the Psalms are For right. They're prayers of God's ancient people that they continue to use, including. Jesus cited them many times, including from the cross, because they articulate something of our human experience to God. When we are lost for words and we need help articulating, I think the same thing happens with the prayers that we've inherited from generations gone by. It brings articulation and grounds our, our own communion with God when we need someone else's words to help us. I mean, goodness gracious, we all buy Hallmark greeting cards for like our moms and wives on Mother's Day and stuff. Most of us don't buy blank cards and write our own notes.

Drew Dick (26:59)

Speak for yourself.

Sky (27:00)

You use someone else's words to articulate what you can't quite articulate yourself. That's number one. But here's the more relevant part of this. I think it was about two years ago, I had a meeting with some folks about AI and they were showing me all the new capabilities that AI has. And they flat out said to me, hey, sky, you don't need to be writing this devotional anymore. Good news, you've written so many thousands of them over the course of years. You can just upload your library of content so that AI can learn your way of writing and your tone and all that kind of stuff. And you can say, hey chatgpt, here's a biblical text. Write me a thousand word devotional in my, in the style, in my voice.

Drew Dick (27:48)

Right?

Sky (27:48)

Yeah, like you can just do that now. And I was just like, okay, I'm not doing that. But what did pique my interest is when they showed me that. And I'm sure it's even better now that AI could replicate my voice, like my speaking voice.

Drew Dick (28:01)

Right, right.

Sky (28:02)

And because in every one of my daily devotionals there's also an audio version. So I write the whole thing and then I record the audio version. And that takes some time every day for me to do that. So I thought, oh, wait a minute, I'm absolutely never going to let AI write the content. I want that to come out of my own self, right in my own reflection and my own whatever. But I thought if I could not have to record the audio anymore, that would be a time saver. So I actually experimented with it. Anybody who's a subscriber to withgot Daily, don't worry, I've never used it. Everything you hear is genuinely me reading it. But I did experiment with it, like on my own to see could it work. And I was pretty blown away by how accurately it sounded like it was me. So I would put my devotional in there and it would create the audio version. Now, the reason I've never used it is because I didn't think it quite got the inflection right.

Drew Dick (28:56)

Right.

Sky (28:56)

You know, you could tell this wasn't it was probably 80, 85% there, but not to the point where it was indistinguishable in its inflection, in the way it read. Even if it sounded just like me, you could tell it wasn't me. So I've never used it. And I don't think I have a moral objection to AI reading the content. And I know like some, some folks are taking their sermons or content and having AI translate it into other languages in their same voice. So I'm like, that. That's a pretty remarkable tool. Yeah, I'm not doing that, but I would. I just the problem with having AI write the prayer or write the devotional or write the sermon don't worry, this is not the end of the episode. There's actually plenty more. But to listen to the rest, you need to be a Holy Post subscriber. So head over to holeypost.com skypod and sign up. For just $5 a month, not only will you get uninterrupted episodes of the Skypod, which means you'll never have to hear this dumb announcement again, but you'll also get access to everything else at Holy Post, plus including episodes of Getting Schooled by Caitlin, Chess, bonus interviews, live streams, the Holy Post Book Club, exclusive merchandise, and a whole bunch more. And you'll get the warm fuzzy feeling of knowing that you're supporting our work of creating smart, pro neighbor Christian content. So head over to holypost.com skypod and subscribe today.