Writer, speaker, teacher and pastor Jeff Chu takes a turn at the ‘Around the Table’ podcast

LOUISVILLE — When he stopped by the “Around the Table” podcast to chat with hosts the Rev. Cliff Haddox and the Rev. Michelle Thomas-Bush, the Rev. Jeff Chu had just completed a 3,000-mile automobile journey with his 17-year-old nephew.

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“My prayer life has never been so vigorous as in the last few days,” said Chu, a writer and pastor who came to “Around the Table” to discuss faith formation and other important matters. Listen to the 36-minute conversation here.

Chu writes for secular publications, including “Travel + Leisure,” as well as Christian audiences. “The one thing I hope ties everything together is my desire to point people toward beauty, goodness and possibility,” he said. “We have so much [other] content that highlights the ugliness, the polarization, the grief, the sorrow, and it matters to name those things. … We need to be reminded of good news.”

Telling the good news is the mission statement of anyone who claims to be a follower of Jesus, he said, citing as a favorite healing story the Gerasene Demoniac. “At the end, Jesus says, ‘go and proclaim how much God has done for you,’” Chu noted. “He doesn’t say, ‘go and name all the horrible things people did to you when you were isolated and marginalized.’ He doesn’t say, ‘go and identify all the sins in the community around you.’ He says, go and declare your gratitude for what God has done to heal you.”

“I wonder what the world would be like if the church had done a better job of that over the last couple thousand years,” Chu said. “It’s partly a spiritual discipline for myself as well. Every single day I find myself sucked back in the same anxiety spiral because so much is happening in the world that is hard and painful and worthy of our grief. I need reminders of what the center is supposed to be … our belovedness to God and our sharing of that love with each other.”

“Life is hard enough as it is,” Chu lamented, “without us adding layers of hardship.”

Chu is a pastor and speaker who in 2014 published “Does Jesus Really Love Me? A Gay Christian’s Pilgrimage in Search of God in America” and, earlier this year, saw his “Good Soil: The Education of an Accidental Farmhand” described as “a profound meditation on nature, heritage and belonging.” His more recent book is based on his experience at the Farminary at Princeton Theological Seminary.

‘Your belonging matters’

“I come from a communal culture. Chinese culture is communal,” Chu said. “Your individual flourishing is only possible in the context of a family. Your belonging matters.”

“You’re primarily defined by who you belong to — whose son you are, whose grandson you are — and I’ve always been deeply shaped by that.” But he also realizes “how countercultural that is in wider American society, which is not collective; it is individualistic.”

Thomas-Bush, whose ministry at Myers Park Presbyterian Church in Charlotte, North Carolina, includes young people, said several of them “have families whose views are different from where they are. They are gay and lesbian and trans young people who have claimed who they are as beloved children of God, but their family sees it differently.” She asked Chu: How do we help in that communal flourishing when your community doesn’t believe the same thing?

That young person “who’s been reminded and believes they are a beloved child of God, the primary communal identity might not be family in the natural sense, but in the godly sense,” Chu said. He said when given the chance, he asks queer young people, “how much power are you going to give those voices who diminish and demean you over the power of the voice of God, who says over and over, ‘I love you.’”

“That is our superpower, our belonging to God,” Chu said. Even during his years away from the church, “the verses that stuck with me were those beautiful reminders from Paul in Romans 8, that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”

While many churches are focused on the programs they offer, “the harder work happens during coffee hour and those other days of the week when people aren’t in the pews,” Chu said. “One of the best gestures of love is just to ask someone something about their story rather than keeping them in the box you’ve already constructed for them.”

When Thomas-Bush asked Chu about “Good Soil,” he said his work in the garden “is some of the best faith formation work that I do.” Integrating faith formation into daily living can be as simple, Chu said, as asking someone, “what are you noticing? Where are you finding beauty? Where is there a sign of hope in your afternoon” or even “where is there a marker of death?”

“So much of faith formation isn’t about formation as it is paying attention to what’s already happening,” Chu said.

At the Farminary, Chu learned that “there’s a lot that we can’t control.”

“I can’t make the seeds grow. I can help. I can water and make sure it has the right coverage of soil,” he said. “I can do the things that point it toward flourishing, but then I have to step back and say, ‘you gotta do what you’ve gotta do.’ Be attentive for sure, but I can’t make the potato grow.”

The Letter to the Hebrews calls followers of Christ to “consider how to provoke one another to love and good deeds,” Chu pointed out. Sometimes, that’s “processing the bad things together. Sometimes it’s reminding your neighbor the sun is still shining and you can begin to feel the crisp autumn, or sharing a bouquet from your garden or laughing over the fact that the flowers have failed.”

“I think there’s something to be said for wisdom and moderation in all these things, so we can carry it together and embody good news to each other.”

The Around the Table podcast is a production of the Around the Table Initiative and the Office of Christian Formation. Listen to previous editions here.