A Better Place Than Here (TAW055)

The Apprenticeship Way with Marc Alan Schelske

Episode 054 – A Better Place Than Here (With Jennifer Knapp)

What would you learn if you had the opportunity to go back and revisit your spiritual journey of twenty-five years ago? What if that experience happened in community, with folks who were there with you, when it happened? What would you learn? How are you different? What losses and what growth would you notice? The release of Kansas 25, a re-recording of her award-winning album, Kansas, gave singer songwriter, Jennifer Knapp, just that experience.

Show Notes

• Get Kansas 25
  • Digital, CD & Vinyl
  • Streaming on all major services.

• Scroll down for a full transcript of this episode.
• You can also watch and share the video version on Youtube.

More about My Conversation Partner

Jennifer Knapp is a Grammy-nominated singer-songwriter, author, speaker, and advocate whose two-decade career has significantly impacted the music industry. With over one million albums sold from her first three releases—”Kansas” (1998), “Lay It Down” (2000), and “The Way I Am” (2001)—Knapp achieved Gold certification for “Kansas” and earned four Dove Awards along with two Grammy nominations. Originating from Kansas, she has performed globally alongside artists like Jars of Clay and participated in the Lilith Fair Tour in 1999 and 2010. Known for her poignant exploration of human experiences and spirituality, Knapp took a seven-year hiatus in 2002, returning with the album “Letting Go” in 2010, which debuted at No. 73 on the Billboard Hot 200 Chart. Beyond music, she is a pioneer in LGBTQ+ advocacy within Christian communities, being the first major artist to openly discuss her identity, which sparked national dialogue and led to appearances on platforms like Larry King Live and TEDx. In 2012, she founded Inside Out Faith, a non-profit organization advocating for LGBTQ+ rights in faith contexts. Recently, she completed a master’s degree in theological studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School, reinforcing her commitment to social justice through music and advocacy. Jennifer Knapp’s diverse talents and dedication to inclusivity continue to inspire audiences worldwide.

• Find Jenn at https://jenniferknapp.com
• Facebook: JenniferKnappMusic
• Instagram: @JenniferKnappMusic

Today’s Sponsor

• The Apprenticehip Notes Newsletter – Monthly-ish writing just for you on spiritual growth in the other-centered, co-suffering way of Jesus.

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Transcription

Marc Schelske 0:00
Hey, friends, I’m Marc Alan Schelske, and this is The Apprenticeship Way, a podcast about spiritual growth, following the way of Jesus. This is episode 55: A Better Place Than Here.

THIS WEEK’S SPONSOR
Today’s podcast is made possible by The Writers Advance. I’m a writer. I love supporting writers. Five years ago, I created The Writer’s Advance. It’s exactly what I needed–A writing weekend that has been crafted to be precisely what writers need to push forward their current project. It’s not about networking or listening to experts speak or trying desperately to get an agent or editor to notice you. Nope. It’s about writing and reconnecting with why writing matters to you.

At the end of every writing weekend, I send all the participants an anonymous survey to get feedback so that I can improve the experience. You can read their words on the event website, but I wanted to just read a couple of their comments to you right now, because they really tell the story. This is an anonymous feedback from the retreat two years ago.

“This was an amazing weekend. The hosting was on target. The venue was peaceful and offered more than I expected. I loved the pacing. Marc is a great host and guide, and provides just the right amount of encouragement and accountability. So looking forward to the next one.”

Here’s another. This is a comment about last year’s event. “This weekend reenergized my commitment to my writing craft. It was an excellent blend of accountability, flexibility, creativity and guidance. I felt supported as a human and a writer the whole time I was there.”

One last one. This is from Tara Rolstad, a professional speaker who has attended The Writer’s Advance multiple times. Now, she won’t be there this November, because she is going to be busy launching her new book, a book that came to life at the writer’s advance! This is what she said. “I’ve come to see The Writer’s Advance as a gift I can’t afford not to give myself. I got more work done this weekend than I have in months, and to do it in a gorgeous, peaceful, comfortable location in the company and support of smart, quality people? Invaluable! I’m deeply grateful.”

Maybe that is the sort of thing you need, or maybe you love a writer and want to give them an incredible gift. Well, the next Writer’s Advance is just around the corner, November 7 – 10, and registration closes on October 5. So I would love to see you there and support you and your project. All your questions are answered on the website. What are the accommodations like? How much does it cost? What’s the food like, and can they handle special dietary needs? Yes, they absolutely can. All that at www.thewritersadvance.com for more details. I hope to see you there.

INTRODUCTION

In the late 90s, I was a fresh-faced youth pastor with a guitar, doing all the things that line of work requires. Youth group events, silly games and small group meetings at Denny’s, and leading energetic songs with hand motions, planning summer camps and passionately preaching the gospel, all with the hope that kids might have an encounter with Jesus. And I remember in 1998, an album came onto the Christian music scene that just captured my mind. It was called Kansas.

It was the debut album of a young singer songwriter named Jennifer Knapp. The tracks are fantastic, but what caught my attention most were the lyrics. Outside maybe two other musicians I had never heard Christian songs that felt this honest to me. There was a yearning I felt in the lyrics. In one song, Whole Again, she said, “If I give my life, if I lay it down / can you turn this life around, around / Can I be made clean by this offering / of my soul? Can I be made whole again?” There was this sense of being drawn by Jesus and at the same time feeling in exile. Another song, Refine Me, says “You’re my God and my father / I’ve accepted your son / but my soul feels so empty now / What have I become?” I’d felt that. I’d done all the things I was supposed to do, and yet many of the things my church promised me weren’t happening. What was going on? Knapp’s songs contained authentic declaration of real struggles. Sometimes those struggles were internal feelings of inadequacy, even sinfulness. Other times, those struggles were with the accepted preconceptions of Christian culture. In her song, In The Name, she wondered honestly, “To each his own / won’t lead you home / and probably never will.” That hit hard. The whole album carried this deep sense of standing on the edge of something bigger, and that something felt like the presence of God too me.

I followed Jennifer’s next few releases, and then in 2010 she just disappeared, at least from the perspective of my small Christian world. What happened? Well, Jennifer came out, and the Christian music industry that had celebrated her, and the Christian community that had commended her thought and bought her concert tickets just didn’t have room for a Christian musician who was openly gay. In the 14 years since, so much has happened. Jennifer found new community. She had to. She found new fans. She had to. She got on with her life. She found a partner. She wrestled with what it means to have faith and have had a real experience with Jesus, and then, at the same time to have been excluded from community by some of Jesus followers. And then a couple of years ago, the idea surfaced for her to re-record her seminal album, Kansas. The support that welled up for this project was, I think, beyond Jenn’s expectations. She did it, and that album is now available.

It’s called Kansas 25 and I’ve been listening to this album over and over since it came out, and it has been such an interesting experience for me. The lyrics of the song are the same, the arrangements are similar, but I’m listening as someone who has spent twenty-five years going deeper in my pursuit of Jesus in the way that some characterize as deconstruction. In the same way, the songs are also being sung by an artist with twenty-five years more life experience, and those years include pain and joy, exclusion, new community, letting go of old and unhelpful theology and embracing new things that are life giving. And so for me, as I was listening to this album, those songs, they just hit so differently with the weight of twenty-five years more lived experience and more theological exploration.

As I realized what was happening in me as a listener, I thought, “Man, I would love to talk with Jennifer about what happened for her as she did this.” What was it like to re-record these songs, what was it like to face who she was as a young singer, a young writer, and what did she learn about her own spiritual development? Well, I reached out and I asked her, and she said, Yes! Jen’s official bio says she’s a Grammy nominated singer songwriter, author, speaker and advocate known for her musical talents and commitment to social causes. With a rich history spanning over two decades, Knapp has left an indelible mark on the music industry. Her career includes the remarkable achievement of selling over a million albums with her first three releases, the Gold Certified Kansas (1998), Lay it Down (2000), and The Way I Am (2001). Alongside this commercial success, Knapp has been honored with four Dove Awards and garnered two Grammy nominations.

I started my conversation with Jen by asking her what it felt like when she discovered that there was this whole community who wanted to revisit the Kansas album with her.

THE INTERVIEW

Jennifer Knapp 7:35
Really, the journey back into Kansas, for me, is a story of coming back to music in 2010 and taking a big, long break away from Christian music. For sure, I knew I was never going back to that place, and I was also simultaneously coming out, and I have to be absolutely honest and say that I was completely ambivalent about, if not resistant to, in any way, engaging in faith conversations with people in public. For sure, private. It’s, you know, private’s another question. Also, in that my own discomfort of playing that older material for a variety of reasons. When I look back, you know, I was hurt by my religious experience. I was at a crossroads deciding how much of that I would engage in public or not, and also just getting new and back to music and really looking forward to doing the music that was ahead of me and not behind me.

All that to say is that show after show after show that I’m playing, even after I came out, were people talking so much, you know, “Please play this song.” And you know, one of the famous stories that I tell is a lesbian bar I was hanging out in Philadelphia. It’s probably the first six months of me getting back out on the road and touring. And I might have come out after that, I can’t remember, but it was inside the first year or so. And here I am on a Sunday night, and it’s packed out, and there had been a few drinks happening about an hour or so into the show. The the gals in the bar were like, “Play Martyrs and Thieves,” which is one of the epic songs off of Kansas. And I didn’t want to play it. I was afraid to play it. I didn’t know if I would perform it well. I didn’t know if I was just going to be mad by the end of it. It’s six minutes long, so it’s a little bit of a commitment to to like have to pretend you care if it turns out I didn’t, but the crowd was just really begging me to play this, to the point that I understood something about the fact that my resistance to it was starting to very much be inhospitable.

That was a very uncomfortable feeling for me. I just remember this moment. I ended up playing it and the whole bar starts singing. And there are these, you know, women holding each other. There are former Youth group group, kids that are now adults that are just standing on top of the bar singing at the top of their lungs. And I looked around this room going, “My gosh. If, if this obvious group of human beings can somehow not give up a song that means something to them, Why am I giving up something that came from me and out of me?” remember that moment kind of opening the door up to my previous catalog.

What was amazing to me, and this is kind of in the vein of what happens when you’re a singer-songwriter. I felt that from my body. I play with my guitar. AndI wrote these songs a long, long time ago in a room just by myself, and I could tell that these songs came for me. So even the parts of me that might have felt, you know, intellectually alienated from them, or spiritually alienated from them, I could tell when I put them on. They were my shoes, you know what I mean?

Marc Schelske 11:11
Interesting. Wow.

Jennifer Knapp 11:12
Yeah. And that, that story… I mean, that’s a story like about… that started about 15 years ago, but throughout the course of that time, like, it was… I feel like it was the people who had had owned and listened to this music. And as so many people have described it to me as this is the soundtrack of their experience, when somebody said that to me, it’s like, I didn’t want to be a person that took that away from them. I didn’t want that because at the heart of what I do as a musician, and the way I go out into a public space, it’s a gift. It’s sharing, it’s community, it’s positive, it’s affirming. So I don’t want my shit to go on everybody else’s table. I mean, that’s mine to work through…

Marc Schelske 11:55
Right!

Jennifer Knapp 11:55
You know? And if I’m going through something or whatever… I mean, I’ve worn my heart on my sleeve from the day that I walked out on stage. And so it’s not that I’ve ever kind of tried to veil that or hide that from my audience, but I don’t necessarily think that sharing something means assuming that the rest of the room will take on, you know, your level of frustration or anger, but to if I ever confess them out loud, it’s a sense of help me release this. And so in a way, like the story of Kansas kind of flips a little bit on its head for about 10 years, because it’s my audience now giving that record back to me.

I’ll fast forward 25 years ahead, by the time we get to this celebration, I realize that, you know, there are a couple of things that have happened in the lifetime of this record, and not the least of which is a narrative for LGBTQ community inside of faith circles, right where we come out and we have been forcibly exiled or marginalized, or even completely erased from narratives. And that is one of the things, not all the things, but one of the things that’s kind of tempted to have happen with this particular record, to act like it didn’t exist, or that it wasn’t a significant record in the history of contemporary Christian music. And it’s not that I felt like I needed to do that for myself, but it was literally over the last fifteen years hearing people talk about how critical these particular songs had been to them in their journey, and even when I wasn’t there. I didn’t have anything to do with it, but it’s a part of our spirituality, a part of our community, a part of the fabric of who we are, and we collectively share what now exists out there, and no one can take that away. I know that people know the songs. I don’t have any need to sell more copies of this record, but what I really wanted to do was give that gift to say, “Thank you. I heard you. I know that this song has journeyed with you, and I bet that we have all changed a little bit in that 25 years, you know, we’re the same people, but the experience has changed, the filter with which we see the world.”

And I thought, wouldn’t it be an interesting artistic experience to go back and record this record and see what that sounds like, to see if we can actually get… if this record has been doing what it’s been doing, will it do a new thing and reflect the journey of all of us that have kind of been through that space? It’s an acknowledgement, at the very least, that we’re all willing to understand our own evolution, our own journey, within our faith tradition, within our theology, within our community, and all the things good and bad that come with it. And yet somehow, you know, even when we’re frustrated with where maybe our particular faith community may or may not be, or whatever the church in air quote is or isn’t, we’re somehow persisting in some way. And, not, you know… for me, that’s kind of the strange thing. I didn’t really want to make another Christian record, but it’s also part of my story, and it’s a part of our story, and so no matter where we kind of end up with it, it’s still reflective. I think when you, when I meet the audience of people that I hang out with all the time, I mean, I’m struck by how genuinely affirming human beings they are, how amazingly integrated into their communities they are in terms of, you know, positive influences inside of their inside of their worlds. And not everyone is still persisting in practicing Christianity, but they’re all extraordinary human beings who have lived examined lives and challenge themselves to be still pursuing the hopefulness of their best selves. This happens to be where I started, and to be able to celebrate that a lot of us took a lot of positive things out of that was something that I thought was really important to not necessarily erase, but to actually celebrate.

Marc Schelske 16:01
That’s really interesting on so many fronts. One front is just, you know, most creative people that I know kind of have this drive to keep moving forward, and the idea of going back and revisiting creative work of yours from a previous era of your life–I would say most creative people I know are not really excited about that. They want to move forward to the next thing. They’re not the same person that they were when they made that previous thing. When I go back and look at a sermon that I wrote 25 years ago, I’m like, ugh.. I’m so sorry that I did this to people…

Jennifer Knapp 16:31
Yeah, we don’t really want to reread it or…

Marc Schelske 16:33
Right!?

Jennifer Knapp 16:34
It kind of falls short. I would say that that’s true. I mean, I think for… in coming up to the twenty-five year anniversary of the record, I’d had, a lot of close friends going, “We ought to do something. We ought to do something.” I’m like, I don’t know. it took me a while to kind of get enthusiastic about it. It wasn’t a given that I was going to re-record this record. I’ll put it that way. And it wasn’t until like, that narrative that I’ve just kind of come across had kind of illuminated itself and started to realize is like, I don’t need to do it. I have no personal stake in going back to it. But fueled with making a gift? That was a project I’d never really done before. Because if you think about an artist, most of the time, we’re creating new stuff all the time, right? And then you go into the studio and you go and record it, and you’re, you know, you’re going out, and it’s always a new thing. You make it and then you wait to see what life extends out from it. There’s very few opportunities that I get to know what you like…

Marc Schelske 17:42
Yeah, right.

Jennifer Knapp 17:43
…how it will touch your heart, how it has touched your heart. And that I can give you a gift that I know will hit you like, right in the center. I mean, I haven’t talked about any of these… like, before we released this project out to the masses, I hadn’t given a lot of lip service to what was happening with the re-recording. So it was just, “Hey, it’s twenty-five years. We’re going to re-record it. It’s going to be really great.” It wasn’t till after it released that everybody starts chatting, you’re listening to it, right, sharing your stories about listening to this record, that I was like, my gosh, it actually happened like, the gift of this, the reminiscing, the the ability that people had to see themselves and and even rescue some of their own soundtrack in ways that they’d never imagined, was such an honor to witness. To hope that a project can do that. I mean, I’ve never… that’s so weird. I mean, it’s a strange kind of ministry. It’s not really recording project. And in a weird way, I can’t use believe, I just used the “M word…”

But in a lot of ways, right? Like the first record, the first time I recorded this record, I’m a new kid. I’m a new kid on the block. I know nothing about contemporary Christian music. We’re sitting down. These are songs that you never heard. So in some way, every performance is trying to woo you into liking me, liking the song. You know, hoping that it just hits some deeply spiritual mark. And it’s all bullshit, because at the end of the day, all we can really do is live authentically and hope that it arrives at the spot. You know, that who we are or what we offer as a gift. You don’t know that the first time through. And I think that’s the same way with other projects now like this. Will this experience turned out to be a completely unique experience for me, because then it opened me up to like, I don’t have to woo somebody with this recording. I just had to sit down and live with it. I had to live with what I’d written. I had to write with the body that I had now. I had to build a new relationship with these songs. Like, people are going, “Oh, when are you going to rerecord, you know, “Taylor Swift” your other records?” And I’m like, I don’t I know that I’ll do that. This was a different mission. It wasn’t just re-recording a project.

Marc Schelske 19:58
Seems like there’s this completely unexpected thing that happened, right? So you had this moment in time where, because of coming out, that era of your music career, and the community and the audience that existed at that point in time was brought to a close. You didn’t do it, but it was kind of done. And then you go on in your own journey, and you do the things that you do as a musician, as an artist, you take time off. Now, you’re on that train. This album still exists separately from you, having interactions with people, and something that you planted in that album grew separately from you. You were not watering…

Jennifer Knapp 20:39
Absolutely.

Marc Schelske 20:40
…You were off doing other things,

Jennifer Knapp 20:42
I would have told you that I would have really loved it if it died. There were points in my experience where I was so frustrated by where conservative Christian culture was going, that if I could have taken my name out of it and taken any role that I had in… I would have loved to have had that happen. As you were kind of speaking, I was like, This is what happens when we accept the truth of our journey, when we acknowledge where we’ve been and what we’ve done. That’s what this project really is. And, you know, I can’t take away the fact that I’ve had a significant experience inside of my faith community. Yeah, now, where I go from here and what my future looks like is anybody’s guess. You know, I’m I’m still on a journey forward as much as I’ve ever been. But there’s a part of us, especially when we’ve been harmed or we’ve been frustrated, or we find a level of disagreement or a conflict… the idea that exorcism works, or excising something is the way that we will find healing and hope. I’m not saying like… you know, some things are bad. Take them out. You know, cancer is not a good thing to leave around. But at the same time, like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, as I say… you do that, you get a wet, critically injured baby.

Marc Schelske 22:05
Right, right! Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 22:06
You throw a portion of yourself out. Is that really what you want to do? Whether one chooses to do that or not, my point has been, don’t just do that, but think first. Really examine it, be able to live in those things. And sometimes you will find that the some of the pain and suffering that we experience through those types of journeys, is about leaving things behind that are actually uniquely ours, a fabric that’s interwoven into who we are. When I talk about these songs, like when I talk about playing them, and I feel that I know they came from my body and my person. Every time I play them, I cannot deny it. When I play them again, I am reconnecting, in a weird way, with something that is of me, that is honest. And I think in that I realized in feeling that physical sensation and playing that music, I realized that faith for me was a really important thing that I didn’t want to have lost in the conflict, that I was actually willing to fight for that and through that.

Or maybe, not fight, but to be at peace. Like to “be still and know that I am God.” I use that so much to myself, going, Why am I fighting a battle that… you know… Am I worried about what everybody else thinks about my faith? Am I doing my faith the right way so I’ll be qualified to be called Christian or not Christian? Frankly, I don’t care what you call me anymore. I really, genuinely don’t. It doesn’t mean that I don’t have a discipline. The more secure that you get in an understanding of who you are and what you’re trying to accomplish, it’s amazing how quickly the external voices and critiques and judgment become disempowered to have influence. Like, to kind of knock you off your your mission and where you want to go, like, the confidence you have to choose your path.

Marc Schelske 24:08
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 24:09
Most of the time, like, when we’re uncertain, It’s really easy to knock us off when we’re not as certain as what we want to accomplish or where we want to head. So, yeah, it’s, one of those things that it just amazed me that by just being able to accept, like, yeah, that’s where I was at, these are the things that I did, and you know what? Darn it, that really changed my life in some really remarkable and profound ways that I don’t want to lose. I don’t want to lose my ability to reach back and touch that memory, to be connected to that memory, because I realize that no matter what I do, I’m really actually not going to be able to disentangle myself from it. It is a part of me. It is part of my journey.

Marc Schelske 24:52
Yeah, so this is the weird gift/torture, then, that your audience handed you, right? They like said…

Jennifer Knapp 24:58
It was a weird torture!

Marc Schelske 25:00
“Jennifer, we would like you to go back into a room with your younger self, half your age, and just hang out together and see what what happens. What do you learn? What threads remain important? What needs to be set aside? What happens when you go back into that room with your younger self and face who she was and what her hopes were?”

Jennifer Knapp 25:24
Well, I’ll tell you, one thing I didn’t do is I didn’t go back and listen to the original recording. That I put on to Steve Hindalong’s shoulders. Steve is the producer of this record. I put this on Steve to listen to the old the old stuff, because I didn’t want to have it in my head. I wanted my voice of today to be able to carry it. I neither wanted to copy it, nor did I want to be intimidated by it. I wanted the song as it sat with me today. I knew things had changed a lot. I’m a different guitar player now. I sing differently now. And, on a weird note, like there’s some like archeological differences… archeological? I don’t know. There are, like, some actual tangible material differences in the record. This record is six minutes longer than the original…

Marc Schelske 25:29
And you cut a song?

Jennifer Knapp 25:51
Well, on the on the vinyl, I had to drop one because vinyl is like a finite… right? It’s a finite space. So because of the length of recording, I had to drop Refine Me, so it’s only on the digital versions. But I also changed… and I was adamant to have the acapella piece, the song called Faithful To Me, I was adamant that I wanted it intact. So the way that I sing it live has always been a verse and a chorus and a verse and a chorus. It’s just those two sections and on there’s no recorded version of it in that form. So those were really the only things that I had. But yeah, between tempos and the way that we just played these songs, and even strangely, I cut some… I did some arrangement where I did cut, like, some bars from songs in an attempt to make them shorter, just because of form, just an artistic decision that I just had. But even with those cuts, it’s strange, yeah, we ended up having a materially longer record than we did. Sort of like age does? It kind of gets us all sagging…

Marc Schelske 27:26
Yeah, right!

Jennifer Knapp 27:27
It gets us longer, in a lot of ways. A little grayer. I need a little bit more time to do the record. Like, the idea of going a hundred and eighty beats a minute was not really on for me at this point. It was intriguing that, you know? It would have been fascinating to see. It was kind of a weird science experiment in that way. You know, we just play these songs, will they be the same as the other one? And clearly they weren’t. And it was fun to see that kind of show itself.

Marc Schelske 27:58
When you went, metaphorically, back into that room with your younger self, what are you noticing? Spiritually and personally? You talk about how these songs feel like they came from your body, and they feel deeply connected to you, but you’re also in many ways different. Or I should say, you’ve been through a lot since then that has shaped who you are. So when you’re in this dialog–who you are now, in the journey that you’ve had, in the spiritual journey that you’ve had, with your younger self, who’s right at the beginning of the career, who’s a fairly new Christian, who’s in this brand new, burgeoning industry, CCM, with all kinds of new pressures–when you’re in dialog with that person, what did you notice?

Jennifer Knapp 28:45
Well, it’s interesting that you say the younger self, because… Singing is such a physical thing, like singing and playing. And it was really in the performances of these that… I mean, it began in the physically aware spaces. Like when I’m holding my breath for a really long phrase, I’m like, “What was she doing?” I would literally be talking out loud, going, “That young whipper snapper.” Or, if I was frustrated with a turn of phrase or a chord or arrangement… I mean things that I wouldn’t do now, for better, for worse, right? It was amazing that physically performing the songs made a connection to realizing I am not in the same body that I was, you know, 25 years ago. And, to start talking about myself, I would like, literally, yeah… “that girl, young Jen, is so full of herself. What was she thinking?” But, that physical connection really gave me pause to think back, in connecting and seeing her in that way. This was going to sound weird and so dissociative. But being able to see and watch yourself, kind of in your imagination, be able to look back, look at her, see what she was doing, bewildered, enthusiastic, in no way deceitful. It was lovely to be able to look in on her and in a weird way, and go, “Wow, she was really just genuinely doing her thing.” And at times that I was critical, even in the process, in the present day, kind of going back and recording something, I would go, “You know what? You gotta hand it to that kid. Don’t take anything away from her.” I don’t think I had given myself a level of grace in this time of my life, not as an apology, but to not be embarrassed about my my sold-out-Kool-Aid-drinking-years of Christianity. I think that was a part of it.

Marc Schelske 30:52
It was earnest!

Jennifer Knapp 30:54
It was earnest. It really was. Now, I think that same spirit of that young person still lives in me today. I love being earnest about my work. I’ve never regretted being honest and authentic and wearing my heart on my sleeve. I’ve regretted when I knew I went against that. I’m more than happy to take responsibility for who and what I’ve been and what I’ve done throughout my life. I prefer that to denial or to trying to twist myself into something that’s not seeking what my heart really, truly longs for. Which is a weird thing to say in a Christian environment, and still a hard thing for me to say now, because I think oftentimes, particularly with Christianity, there’s a lot of conversation in and around the denial of self…

Marc Schelske 31:48
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 31:49
…and a mistrust of our inner voice. To seek something from our own hearts [is seen as] as genuinely corrupt, as opposed to replacing our inner heart and our inner voice with the voice of God, right?

Marc Schelske 32:03
Yeah, right.

Jennifer Knapp 32:04
I don’t know how we know the difference of that. To be honest, to me, I know when I’m lying to myself and I know when I’m not. I mean, I sometimes find out later. But, you know, I think it’s been a really easy thing for the church to take away our trust of our own self and an autonomy away from us, and which–I would put in a theological position as the temple of the Holy Spirit being in our hearts. If the sanctuary that is within us isn’t trustworthy, and we don’t trust that sanctuary, then where do we begin? Because that is the temple. If anyone’s concerned that that is some way of a denial or an opening to a dark space, I would say quite the opposite. I think it raises the ante for our responsibility to know that we have a discipline and a practice and a care and an awareness and a will to create in ourselves a holy sanctuary…

Marc Schelske 33:14
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 33:15
…to be responsible for the care of that. That’s not accidental. That’s not just simply trying to set everything on fire, but to actually build something mindfully, you know, with purpose. That, to me, has done exactly the opposite. It wasn’t setting the foxes loose at all. For me to be able to go, “No, this is my voice, and this is my heart.” And that included days where I was like, “Screw you God. This is where I’m at.” Seriously. Like, this is what everybody else says, or this is what my church says, or this is what you know, this is maybe where I feel like God might, may or may not want me to go. And I have said, “No, I’m not willing,” you know, and just being honest with myself about, like, whether I’m resistant. I’m more Jonah than anything. I have sat under a withering vine for more hours than I cared to confess.

Marc Schelske 34:07
Yeah!

Jennifer Knapp 34:08
But at the end of the day, none of us change, none of us do work, none of us go down a road at some point, unless we get the full enjoyment of that journey, unless we, at some point, have acknowledged our choice and our free will to go down that road. Yeah, so, it’s not that I want to be in contest with that, but the joy and the raised responsibility of saying I will be responsible for my heart and I will do the work to know what is the voice of my heart and to do the work, because what I want is to be an affirming human being. I want to live a life that when other people around me, they experience a sense of affirmation, that they know that I will love them, that they know that I’m a person who is interested in the liberation, that I’m interested in life over death.

Marc Schelske 34:58
Yes.

Jennifer Knapp 34:59
I’m less interested in religion. What I’ve found through music in this process of creativity is it being able to go, No, that is in me. It really is in me. I really do want to sing. I really do want to sing this song. I really am angry–whatever it is. That earnestness of that young girl, I think, is something that I’m so grateful to see still lives in me. Yes, even though sometimes she embarrasses me.

Marc Schelske 35:26
That’s so wonderful. There’s a line in in Visions that has stayed in my brain ever since hearing the first album, and it is this line that I think speaks to that continuity you just mentioned, which is” They say that I am much too demanding to want a better place than here.” There’s so much in that, because there’s the “they,” whoever they are…

Jennifer Knapp 35:55
Right.

Marc Schelske 35:56
There’s all these voices that are telling you, you know, “Don’t feel how you feel. Don’t want something different. What we tell you is right is what’s right. Just buy the line that we’re giving you.” So, you’ve got the whole “they” and and you’ve got this heart, this little heart that’s saying, “No, there’s gotta be more than this. Don’t you see how this is not enough? Don’t you see how this is leaving something important out. Don’t you see how we’re not loving in the way that Jesus taught us to love?” That heart is crying out, “There’s gotta be something better than this, isn’t there? Come on guys.” And that tension between the voice of the “they” who’s saying, “No, no, this is really all there is. How we are telling you it needs to be, you just need to get it. You’ve got to get on board.” right? That yearning heart, to me, that’s not demanding. That, I feel, is the Spirit of God at work in us, wanting to see the life, wanting to see the fulfillment of liberation, wanting to see grace really be grace, instead of just a branding on another set of standards for who gets to be in and out of a community, right? That’s there, and I feel like, as I hear you talk today, I hear that same continuity to that earnest kid on stage.

Jennifer Knapp 37:17
Yeah, I think for me, it definitely channels the direction of keeping hope. It’s more about the foolishness that I have in persistently hoping and persistently challenging myself to do better and to seek better, and to have an imagination. You know, I don’t want to get into the weeds or stress anybody out, but heaven, heaven for me, is a very hard thing for me to imagine in the ways that it’s typically been described to me.

Marc Schelske 37:49
Sure.

Jennifer Knapp 37:50
That’s the thing I’m working for, right? I’m going to be rewarded by choices that I make in this life, by living in some, to me, imaginary space in the future, that’s just grand up in the sky somewhere. That’s not what I mean by the better place.

Marc Schelske 38:10
Right!

Jennifer Knapp 38:11
I’m demanding of myself the imagination. I’m demanding of myself the courage to maintain hope. It’s not a pass or fail. But it’s completely saying, “don’t give up.” Every single day that I am going to drive to be heading in the direction. That isn’t trying to attain… You know, I’m not trying to attain or get or be rewarded. It’s a different type of thing that hope does. It is our aspiration to live into and unto the heights of what love and grace and liberation can be. And I don’t even fully know what all of those things are yet, but as I’ve continued to be demanding of that…I mean, at the time that I wrote that I was single, celibate, and had no hopes or prospects for love in the future. In fact, a lot of this record, I was just beginning the journey of figuring out how to love myself, because if we’re to love the Lord God with all your heart, mind, your soul and your neighbor as yourself? Well, I was like, I can’t love my neighbor because I don’t know anything about how to love myself.

Marc Schelske 39:20
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 39:21
That’s where I started, and if a lot of my early work seems narcissistic, it’s because I didn’t know how to love myself. I was trying to figure out and work out what God saw in me that was loving. As I started to piece that together–fast forward ten years into the future, until when I met my partner–I was starting to understand something about love enough to then now come in contact with my neighbor or somebody else, like somebody I wanted to love, and somebody whose love I wanted in return. That like another way out from my narcissistic center, going out and stretching further and further and further you, and to see how much–to be demanding of that.

Marc Schelske 40:02
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 40:03
I don’t need to prove anything, not in that sense. But to be open and aware and and continually willing to learn something about and a new area of which I may find to love that I didn’t before, to let go of something or to discover something, just constantly kind of looking for an opportunity to grow. I see it in there. I’m like, “Oh, that kid. She probably didn’t know what the hell she was talking about!”

Marc Schelske 40:29
Of course! Of course, yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 40:30
But it’s still in me. That is the root, and that’s when I look at her and go back to the baby in the bathwater, or even the grace, going if I just shut her down, then that theology wouldn’t have grown from a seed of what that was to what it is today. I can think of twenty more examples of where that is a root of something that I can see connected to its growth in me today, and I’m so grateful for her enthusiasm and her earnestness, like I said, even though sometimes she embarrasses me.

Marc Schelske 41:02
That’s so rich, I feel like maybe that’s part of the thread in this conversation of deconstruction. For some people, deconstruction is about tearing down, or needing to tear down structures that have been unhelpful. But my experience has been that there’s been a continuous unfolding that has taken me deeper in ways that the community that raised me didn’t expect or prepare me for, and that yearning that you talk about–that maybe the young Jennifer with that yearning, maybe she’s naive, maybe she’s a little bit narcissistic. I mean, we all are at 25, right? Maybe her vision is limited–but that yearning for what I believe is the fullness of life that we were made for, that yearning is the thread that has taken me into the places that I’ve gone that look externally to some folks like deconstruction. When I listened to Kansas 25 the first time, I felt that same thing. Some part of this, obviously, is my own projection. I have no idea what’s going on inside of you, your life and experience…

Jennifer Knapp 42:14
You can have it. You have your own life and experience. I want to take it away from you.

Marc Schelske 42:17
Thank you so much. But I hear you [singing Kansas 25] and it just felt like a richer, deeper experience that had spaciousness for the painful, the uncertain. It seems like the longing is for something that’s bigger than that, a life that has space for all of that, even when it doesn’t fit on a stage or inside someone’s preconceived expectation of what you need to be.

Jennifer Knapp 42:47
It’s interesting, because when I go back to that time, one of the one of the details of my experience at the time that I was writing that was very much attached to my coming into Christianity and having an experiencing a profound culture shock with the church community. So unlike a lot of a lot of my peers and my friends who had essentially evangelistically witnessed to me and I converte. I accepted Jesus Christ, and I… That’s so weird every time I say that, because it’s not, you know… I remember… I can’t believe I did that, even to this day. I can’t believe that I actually did that. At the same time, it profoundly changed my life! So, how do I make sense of that?

Marc Schelske 42:58
Right?

Jennifer Knapp 42:58
I was so earnest, like I genuinely wanted to be a new creation. I didn’t even know what that meant, but I wanted, and I understood something needed to do an about face in my world. I wasn’t wooed necessarily by religion. I was even rolling my eyes at the time, going, “What am I doing here in this space with these folks?” But, there was something there that had sparked in my heart, a hope that I hadn’t yet seen in a possibility of loving and caring for and being connected to something greater than myself. That’s the best way I know how to describe it. And so here I am, like basically, a hot mess, not having any tradition or experience inside of the faith community at all. I was walking into church on a Sunday morning, smoking, putting my cigarette butts out right on the church steps, walking into church, dropping a few F bombs, coming right back out and lighting back up. And was pretty rough for the Baptist contingency around me, and they were so excited that I was there. But, you know, a few months into it, they’re like, “Okay, we need to talk about your becoming that new creation. Now, you need to start putting things away.” It was conversations about not cussing anymore, conversations about not having sex, conversations about not smoking. What was I going to do on the outside to start looking like what God wanted my heart to be on the inside?

In some ways, I think that that landed with me okay. I was starting… I was definitely reading my Bible. Like, I read that sucker. I mean, I was diving into it. I was taking my discipleship seriously. I was going to Bible study groups and learning, mostly in a Baptist feel but I’d had other groups as well. =I was definitely trying to become a Christian, because, again, in earnestness, I made this decision, and I meant my decision. So when everyone around me is saying, “This is what a good Christian looks like,” then this is a good heart of mine that wants to make good on the discovery of this profound joy and free new grace that I’m experiencing my life. I wanted that to be evident. So of course, that was helpful in some ways, to have my community go “This is the way. If you look and act and conform in this way, you will be celebrated.”

But the side of that–and even though I was going into discipleship and Bible studies, one of the critiques I have in this is part of that thing is this idea that we’re not necessarily… where the rubber hits the road sometimes is what we are imagining is that we’re shaping ourselves into a conformity to look like something that looks like Christianity. And a lot of the deconstruction space where we’re calling upon what many people are telling us in good ways and bad. There’s some positive to that. I mean, there are people who’ve been living this journey long before I have or long before we find it and we get into it. So we always begin to a certain degree–and this is where I say we can be a little bit graceful–we are relying on the stories that are told to us.

Marc Schelske 46:56
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 46:56
…and the flame that we as moths were drawn to. But the difference in this, at some point, is our level of autonomy and engagement, our development of our own–and I would again, go back to that kind of sacred temple in ourselves–of the part where we begin to be part of living out that faith, to be able to have a… You know, quiet times were a thing. I don’t know if that’s still around. It was like, “Oh, you have to have a quiet time every day,”

Marc Schelske 47:25
Right.

Jennifer Knapp 47:26
And so what that was… I’ll say it was told to me as a discipline that it was my obligation as a good Christian to spend an hour a day reading my Bible, praying, and I would journal. So I did those things “religiously.” I was glad I did that discipline. I enjoy that time. I enjoy reflection. But I also hated that somebody would ask me, “Did you do your quiet time?”

Marc Schelske 47:57
Right?! Yeah, for sure.

Jennifer Knapp 47:58
it’s this box or this thing that we’re doing, rather than… So on one hand, I had a discipline that gave me an opportunity to practice and began to engage in the care and the awareness and my own practice of of developing my spiritual life. But weirdly, no one actually taught me how to develop my spiritual life. They told me to have a quiet time and if I didn’t check off with my accountability partner, and said that I’d only had three quiet times in seven days. And you know, there was a judgment about whether or not that was fruitful. That wasn’t helpful,

Marc Schelske 48:33
Right.

Jennifer Knapp 48:34
But, what was more helpful is that I actually didn’t have time for quiet time because I had three other hours of completely obsessing about this other issue that I’ve been thinking about. I didn’t want a quiet time that was an hour. I wanted a life that was contemplative. The whole life.

Marc Schelske 48:49
Right? Yeah, yes!

Jennifer Knapp 48:53
I didn’t want to do what Christianity told me; I wanted to live my faith.

Marc Schelske 48:59
Yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 49:00
I don’t want to knock the community, because we do need that, and we do need the witnesses, and we do need to be connected to one another to help and share and tell these stories. But it’s a difference between sharing a story and witnessing that information and then telling somebody that this is what you should conform to. You should look like us, instead of having collaborators that are seen with you as you live your life. And so for me, discipleship taught me what conformity looked like in a lot of ways. You know, these are the things that Christians do, say and act, and if you come out the other side, you will be a good Christian. But, nobody actually told me that if I have a contemplative life I engage, I will ask at least this one question, “What does it mean to live in the Spirit of Christ?” That is a question that I’ve been working on for thirty-five years.

Marc Schelske 49:53
Right, yes.

Jennifer Knapp 49:54
What is the Spirit of Christ? If I say, what’s the spirit of Marc? What’s the spirit of Jenn? I have to spend time, you know… you have to spend time with somebody else. You have to look at what they’ve done and what they do and stop talking and start watching. You know, live with and be around. It’s not just spirit as in fantasy. I think we know what we mean. You can write a song in the spirit of Jenn Knapp. There’s people out there who do it. My spirit isn’t doing it. So far as I know, I don’t have my own unique Holy Spirit that’s going out and doing that. But I wanted to understand that question. And as I read the whole text, as I looked around my community, as I looked around the world in what this meant, I began to say, “These are the things I want to be propelling me to the future.”

So, the idea of being told what to do so quickly felt like I was supposed to be conforming to something, and that’s not what drew me in there. It was a spirit and longing to know what the Spirit of Jesus was. I’m like, “Well, okay, great. I said the F bomb three times today in church. I’m sorry. Here’s a dollar for the the jar.” But I wasn’t cruel to anyone today, and I genuinely become a lot more hospitable to myself and to other people. I’m becoming more compassionate as a human being in my life in ways that I never even thought was possible. I don’t care what I get credit for or don’t, but my life has changed because of that, and the people around me’s life has changed. And that’s the true test of it. So that kind of “undoing,” I was already starting there and I think that’s that’s held up in kind of trying to go, I know, I mean, told these things, but there’s also a Spirit of to this that seems more, it seems wider. It seems not conforming. It seems rebellious in its nature.

Marc Schelske 51:49
Yes.

Jennifer Knapp 51:50
People will be confused. People will say that you’re going out on a limb. People will say, people will say, they will say. And you still have to go out there and live it. The thing that you hear in your heart, whether it’s contemplative or prayer or God–I don’t know how we say that–but if whatever that still small voice is, it’s a voice that you want to follow for whatever reason, and you go to follow it. Then test it. The next step is to take it out of that place where you discovered it, hopefully in a contemplative place, and to go out and test it and to see if it is something that is actually honest. Will this bring life? Will this discovery or this longing that I have to be compassionate mean that I talk more or talk less when I leave my home? You have to go out, and sometimes I’ve been wrong. Sometimes, I did not get that right. I have to go back. I didn’t understand that. It’s not working because I I’m not getting it. I’m not hearing it yet. So more work for me, but that that kind of going back to those spaces. [Kansas], it was written by a girl who didn’t want a less life, didn’t want a constricted life. I read the Scripture, “You shall have life, and you should have it abundantly,” and I read that in a way that I wanted that…

Marc Schelske 53:22
Yeah…

Jennifer Knapp 53:23
…and I want that now to this day. And every time that I took that out, I would have somebody else come over the top of me saying, “Be careful about that abundant life, because you can have too much Liberty in your life.” I’m not asking to sample every drug out on the street. I’ve done that. I know that kills my body and that’s not good and I make poor choices. I know I want abundant life. I want my hand to be open. I want to be non-threatening to other human beings. I want to not be jealous of you. I want to be invested in your life, and want you grow and flourish, and I want you to not be an enemy, and I want you to be a partner with me. Let’s start there. That’s what abundant life is. All I can do is try and take care of my my space around me.

When I started looking at things like that, I would find myself in contest and being pushed back inside of some of my faith communities, like, “No, it’s doing it the way this looks.” I know that I can do the thing that looks that way. And right now I’m angry because I’m doing the thing, and I’m getting credit for doing the thing, but I’m an asshole on the inside. I don’t want to be doing this. I don’t agree with this. And you know, that went on to be a breaking point with me for some things, at the point where I kind of… there’s part of… some of the spaces, some of the reason why I didn’t work inside of Christian music anymore. There are those things that they do feel like we’re deconstructing and we’re having to undo those voices, you know.

At the same time, give the community a little grace. We do have to share our experience by telling and allowing people to witness our stories. But the I think, if there’s a difference at all, I would probably say there’s the spot of authority inside of that. Looking at people we know and reliably trust more on a lateral plane, rather than an up and down plane, rather than a plane of people telling us what we can do–kind of up and down and where you succeed and you rise, or you know, kind of how you the membership is counted–but rather, who are the people who are willing to collaborate with you, the people who are willing to witness as you experience and test and build your faith and and exercise the will, the free will that we have to be able to actually be participants in–and joyfully so–the journeys that we are taking.

Marc Schelske 55:51
That was good, and I feel like it really captures a practical picture of what the better place is that we’re longing for. That that kind of life is the better place that we’re demanding. And you were doing it then, and you’re doing it now, and you’re living in that, and it’s really encouraging. I mean, I was floored by how deeply Kansas 25 impacted me and spent time…

Jennifer Knapp 56:20
You and a lot of other folks! It’s nuts.

Marc Schelske 56:22
Yeah, and I had to spend some time trying to understand. What has happened here for me in this? And it was deeply– is still deeply meaningful. And so I just am so grateful that you chose to enter into the difficult space to give that gift to all of us, and hopefully, in some way to yourself, because it’s been quite impactful, and I’m just so thankful to have that as part of my journey.

Jennifer Knapp 56:49
Well, thank you. I would say, thank you for that. I mean, that is its gift. There are moments, and I’m sure as you’ve had years of the ministry, the times you look back on on your influence or your participation inside of faith communion, and probably go, “Why am I here? And have I done anything? Or what’s it mean?” And the older I get, legacy is not quite the word I’m comfortable with, but I me an, I think we all kind of hope that the trail behind us isn’t a path of devastation.

Marc Schelske 57:22
Right! At least.

Jennifer Knapp 57:24
So, that’s all to say that I genuinely have felt so honored to be able to witness folks take a moment… and just give them, like you were saying, like to sense… like the the response that a lot of people have had to Kansas going, “Wow, I really had to take more than a few moments, like a day or two,” and some people are still a little bit longer, depending on where they are on their journey. But that kind of pause–I think, particularly in our current climate where we’re so pressured by the tyranny of the urgent, with social media and phones and alerts are going off all the time and demanding our attention–to take a minute to be able to check in with your own self and your own journey in your life, to have offered a gift that allowed someone to do that? For me is, it’s just out… I can’t even get my head around it. Like, I wish I could have said, Yeah, that’s what I meant to do. Like, that’s a total lie. Like, I can’t claim that, but it’s beautiful to witness that. And to know that when I look back on on my experience in the last twenty-five years, in the weird way I kind of connect back to the earnestness of that young gal and go, “Wow, she really did demand that, and she hasn’t stopped.”

To be able to to know that… I like playing and I like making records. It’s fun. But I also… when I came back to career 2.0, as I’ll call it, I really wondered, “Is this going to be meaningful to me in any way?” Because I don’t really care about money, and I like playing and performing, but believe it or not, as self centered as I may sound and contemplative I may be, I’m actually not interested in all the praise. I don’t really want to be a rock star. Why am I doing this? Why am I coming back and playing? Like, if I’m just going to go to bars and play music for money and just do all the miles on the road, is this going to be a meaningful life to me? I had no idea that… because I was like, I’m not, …There’ll be no ministry in front of me. There’ll be no reconnecting. There’ll be no public dialog in and around faith, because the last thing I want people to do is put a “Christian” in the headline with my name.

Well, I can’t get around that anymore. People still do it, even no matter how much I cuss and no matter how far I’ve gone out. And I’m not writing specifically about Christianity, and this blows my mind. All I ever wanted to do in my work was to just leave a good path, like to offer… to open the door up to something that… I don’t know, but something I have. I didn’t write the rules of love. I just know that when you love people and you hope for people, and you go into a room and you want to offer a gift to people, and you offer it, and you don’t expect… Career 1.0, it’s more like propaganda. You constantly have to be a representative of Christianity all the time. And now I’m not trying to represent Christianity. I’m trying to offer a gift. It’s strange. Like, doesn’t it blow your mind?

Marc Schelske 1:00:42
Right! No, what you just described is what it ought to be. Like that ought to be Christianity, not the image management, just the offering the hospitable gift.

Jennifer Knapp 1:00:51
Who are you? Who are you, Mark, and what is the gift that you have?

Marc Schelske 1:00:55
Yeah…

Jennifer Knapp 1:00:56
What is the holy gift of you that you offer and present to the world. What do you work on? What do you uncover? How do you spend your time? How do you raise the bar to be the fullest you, the best you. And I’m not talking best, like the best abs, the best beard and goatee. That’s not what I’m talking about. How do you really make a mark, to let the people you know love them and literally change their lives forever?

Marc Schelske 1:01:26
Yes, Yeah!

Jennifer Knapp 1:01:28
If there is a Spirit, a Holy Spirit, a love of God, that’s permeating through and in all things, how–and in this space that I have found myself in this moment–how do I know how to recognize that? How do I get in rhythm with that? How do I be the unique me in this space that adds to that space? It is the thing that I will say, regardless of where I have found it to anyone I speak to., You know, I’ll be talking to a cabbie or talking to somebody who goes, “Oh, I heard this about you, that you’re a Christian.” I’m like, okay, that’s fine. That’s where I learned that, and that’s where I practice that. That’s fine. But here’s the thing, I’m here for you right now. Like, I’m not trying to sell you something. I don’t want anything from you. I just want to be with you and witness you. How can I help you today? Like, what do you need? How do I be a friend with you? To me, that was… and then, this goes back to an early beef I had with evangelicalism. Like, man, don’t just try and sell! Guys on a street corner, standing on soap boxes yelling, “turn or burn,” telling you that you’re going to go to hell and you’re going to be punished unless you accept Jesus Christ as your Lord and Savior. Today, I’m like, that’s not a witness. It’s not a witness. What changes people is that you actually connect to them.

You know, I was, in some ways, critiquing my own experience into Christianity. What got me here was more about the spirit of the people that I was with than any of the talk of the Spirit that those people did. Does that make sense?

Marc Schelske 1:03:02
Yeah. Yea, yeah.

Jennifer Knapp 1:03:02
Like the coercion, like the kind of coercive nature. It was the relationships that I built, the participation and community, the understanding and being able to step back and be able to see and witness something good and something holy. I am amazed that I get to do that to this day. Every day I go, even if I’m bored and I go to a show, and I’m like, “Oh, I’m tired now. All my gear weighs really heavy. I can’t believe I have to drive six hours today. I get up, and I think, “I wonder who I will meet today?” I wonder what they will teach me today. I wonder what they will show me, and I wonder what I will show them. And just waiting for that to just happen, I wonder what fragrance the room will have when we get there. Oftentimes it’s beer and body odor. Every day is unique, because human beings are extraordinary. And if you tell another human being that you see their extraordinariness, it’s amazing to see how their faces light up and how extraordinary they really do become.

And that’s what I think about my audience, which is just weird. I say… people around me all the time know this about me, that I really hate saying “fan base” or “audience,” or any of that, because it’…s I just, I feel like I’m going out and connecting, and it’s been probably, more strangely, more of service and more of a gift than I would have ever have imagined in my previous days in Career 1.0. Not to say that it wasn’t earnest then, but it’s just a whole other level. It’s good because the money’s crap and the venues sometimes are crap too, but, but Yeah, the people are here, even though we’re not necessarily doing like I was told originally when I quit contemporary Christian music. “Well, you’ll never have a platform again because you aren’t doing the work for the Lord.” And I’ll be like, well, you should maybe come out and hang out with some people, because you just threw off a whole lot of people who are kind of having church. We didn’t preach, we didn’t treat… we were just gathered. We were two or more there, gathered in the Spirit. And, I shudder to thank anybody who doesn’t understand that thinks that I’m speaking religiously. I’m not. People are amazing human beings, and I am so grateful that those amazing human beings have continued to keep me standing up and have never mocked me for my earnestness.

Marc Schelske 1:05:29
So good. Jennifer, thank you so much for this conversation. Thank you for spending this time with me. Thank you for this album and the long, long road of work that you’ve done getting to it. It’s an honor to spend this time with you and to be one of the recipients of how you’ve shared your journey.

Jennifer Knapp 1:05:51
It was a privilege, Marc. I appreciate it, and thank you very much for asking me.

REFLECTION

Marc Schelske 1:05:55
At first glance, this conversation is an interesting window into the life of a creative person who had the unique opportunity to go back and reflect on who they were twenty-five years ago. But that’s not all this is. There’s something important here, I think, for all of us, even if we don’t have a body of work to look back on.

Jenn’s story is a story of growth. Now, that doesn’t mean every part was fun. Growth means change. Change always means loss, and loss means there’s going to be grief in the story. But that process of changing, growing, losing, and grieving allows us to let go of what came before that was limiting or unhealthy or just plain wrong, so that we can embrace the good, the new, that perhaps God is setting before us. In my own story, there have been times when my life of faith was really all about security. It was a kind of faith that longed for certainty, that demanded certainty from teachers, from scripture, from sermons, from precise step-by-step methods for prayer or evangelism or church growth. Well, that kind of Christianity is about making us feel okay, making us feel that the uncertainty of life can be managed by a God who turns out to be more like a wish-granting Genie.

But then life happened. There was change, loss and grief and growth. And instead of yearning for security, I now long for transformation. Like Jen–you heard her say this–I don’t want to do devotional times; I want to have a contemplative life. I don’t want to do church authorized service projects. I want to be the kind of person who is generous to those around me and and steps in where necessary, to bear the burden of others who are suffering. I yearn for a life that reflects a place that is better than this.

Young Jenn’s yearning and her earnest heart inspired me twenty-give years ago, and the journey that Jenn has been on since challenges me today in a different way. Can I persist in faith even when the calling of Jesus doesn’t look like what I was taught? Can I grow in my pursuit of God, even if it takes me beyond the safe borders that I was trained as a child in, or that I learned as a young pastor? Can I continue, step-by-step, to follow the Spirit of Jesus wherever that guidance leads, even if other followers of Jesus don’t understand?

There was a moment in the interview where Jenn spoke right to me by name, and I wanted to pass her challenge on to you, because I think this might be an invitation from the Spirit. Who are you? What is the holy gift you offer and present to the world? And as we reflect on that, I wonder if we, as followers of Jesus, can let go of those motives that lead to exclusion in the pursuit of certainty and security and rather embrace the other-centered, co-suffering way so that we can participate in God’s work to love the world toward healing.

May you sense the holy yearning for a better place than here and trust the better way of Jesus to lead us toward others and toward God.

Thanks for listening. You can check out what Jenn is up to on her website, which includes tour dates and much more about her music. Www.jennifernapp.com. And of course, she’s got a bunch of great albums on all the streaming services.

Notes for today’s episode and any of the links that have been mentioned you’ll find at www.MarcAlanSchelske.com/TAW055.

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Until next time, remember: In this one present moment, you are loved, you are known and you are not alone.