Paul VanderKlay: How to Strengthen Churches in The Age of The Internet

Malcolm and Simone interview Pastor Paul VanderKlay on why people are increasingly leaving faith traditions and how churches can adapt to strengthen communities. He sees Jordan Peterson as bringing meaning back for lost young men, but online spaces still lack the authentic bonds of real-life congregations. They discuss modeling values for children, the limitations of internet community, changes coming to old institutions, the importance of sacred spaces for honest dialogue, and more.

Paul VanderKlay: [00:00:00] Traditions of almost every kind are being tremendously tested and most of them are, are, are found wanting.

And this includes, now, every, all the Christians listening to this, I know a bunch of my people are going to find their way to your channel and listen to this. This includes the church, and what, so G. K. Chesterton talked about, I remember it was five or seven, but the five deaths of Christianity. He said basically Christianity has died five times, and I think that's true.

And I think the church, as most of us have known it, which, again, generalizations are really tough, but many of us have known churches that are Fundamentally modernist institutions sort of created around modernist assumptions, including my own denomination, many of these [00:01:00] churches are going away and they are going away fast.

Would you like to know more?

Malcolm Collins: All right. All right. So for any of our audience who does not know Paul Vander Klee, the man who is on the show here with us today you might be surprised to know that you're probably in the minority of our audience. Cause I just now was reviewing our most overlap channel subscribers.

And you are one of the most overlapped and I watch your videos. Pretty regularly. I, I, like, I haven't watched all of them. You produce videos almost as frequently as we do, which may be why we, you're extremely prolific. Yeah. Yeah. But they're actually really, really solid if you want to get I, I think one, like, insider politics of competent Protestant theology these days.

Oh, that's true. As, as well as what is, like, what do, like, competent Protestant theologists. think these days? How are they engaging? Because the truth is, is that if you are listening to, and this is something I always talk about, if you're listening to like the conservative [00:02:00] elite class, the vast majority of them are Catholic or Jewish in descent.

And so, you know, finding really good Protestant theologians who, who talk competently is, is, is much rarer within the current media landscape. And so I want to start with one. talking about how you came to the media landscape, because to me, you are somebody who is really I'd say almost the, , the paragon of an individual who is adapting new. technology and new social structures to serve an older religious position, which was the position of the preacher. How are you doing that? And how are you thinking about that right now?

Paul VanderKlay: That's a great question. I'm constantly thinking about it actually.

So I, I pastor a small dine church in Sacramento, California. Most churches, the size 60 year life cycle and. I would always have [00:03:00] interests beyond just the local church, and so I was involved with denominational things and all of this stuff. I blogged for years, just, just sort of playing with it, and then Jordan Peterson arose, and I thought this is probably the most important thing for me to pay attention to in my pastoral career.

Wow. And I looked around because, because, well, the reason was, I mean, you guys talk about this basically this monolithic urban culture. What, what, what this has done in churches is that people have sort of either strayed into new atheism or strayed into a light new, new ageism and everyone who's going down that road.

And what I saw happening behind Jordan Peterson were people coming back down that those roads and you hardly ever saw that before and significant numbers were doing it, listening to Jordan Peterson. He was reopening the conversation in a way that I didn't [00:04:00] understand, and so I wanted to understand it and the way I understand things is by talking to people, but.

People in my church weren't going to watch Jordan Peterson. They were all mostly older people. So then I looked to colleagues. Well, most of my colleagues weren't listening to Jordan Peterson and those who were, wouldn't admit it. So I knew I needed some new conversation partners. So I thought. I was reading, I was rereading.

I was real reading, I'm using ourselves to death at the time. And I thought there's something about this medium YouTube. And I had played with it a little bit with a member of my church, the Freddie and Paul show, you can still find it on my channel, but so if you want to get a sense of what my church is like, watch the Freddie and Paul show.

So, so I was seeing this and I thought I'll make a YouTube video. What can, what, what, what can it hurt? There are how many YouTube videos out there that have 10 to 20 viewers and that's, I just needed a few people to talk to. And then [00:05:00] something happened, which I didn't understand, which was this overwhelming response, emails coming to me.

And because I'm a pastor, I wanted to talk to these people. I wanted to hear from them. I wanted their stories. And so then I would zoom them or Skype them and have a conversation. And of course that didn't end the relationship that began the relationship. This was happening locally as well. So I started a Jordan Peterson meetup where before, you know, churches do all kinds of crazy things, try to get people through the door, you know, hot dogs, trunk or tree.

Um, You know, vacation, Bible school. And so I, and so a bunch of people, well, we should do a meetup. I'm like, nobody will come. So I did a meetup and a dozen people came who I had no idea who they were before. And the next month, another dozen came and it just kept growing. So this thing took on a life of its own pretty quickly.

And at about 2000 subscribers, I thought [00:06:00] seriously about just shutting the whole thing down because where's this going to go, but I couldn't shut it down because The conversations were too real and the people were too honest. And what I saw was that all real people really wanted was, can I, can I just talk about this?

Can I just process it with you? Let me know what you think. And I, my church is in a very distressed part of town. I'm always dealing with homeless people panhandling people who were right across the street from a gas station. So people, they want 20 bucks. They walk across the street, they knock on the church.

And I thought, Knock on the church doors looking for 20 bucks, but nobody knocks on the church doors looking for a reasonable conversation about what's most important and where they can actually be honest about what they think and believe. And I thought, I've always wanted a church that could do that.

And I'd be, I discovered, oh my goodness, that is exactly what we have happening here. So [00:07:00] I began to post with permission, some of the conversations that I was having with people. And then once people saw that I would talk to strangers, randos online, then the flood really started. Because then, you know, people just wanted to talk.

And so the, the local meet, then other people wanted meetup groups because they can't get to Sacramento. So I'm helping other people start meetup groups and other churches and in other places that became estuary, which is this whole, it's basically a conversation format where we have. Very open conversations with people.

And then the channel has just kept growing. It's grown slowly, which I'm grateful for. You know, I look at what happened to Jordan Peterson as kind of a cautionary tale, because when you