Put a person in a bare room with nothing but their own thoughts and a button that delivers a mild electric shock they'd already said they'd pay to avoid. Leave them there for fifteen minutes. In a study published in the journal Science, a striking number of people chose to shock themselves instead of sitting in silence: two-thirds of the men, and a quarter of the women. When we've lost the capacity to be still, what happens to our prayer, and what happens to us?

In this episode, Graham explores contemplative prayer, the ancient Christian practice of silence and loving attention to God, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He traces the practice from Elijah meeting God in the thin silence at Horeb, to the stillness of the Psalms and Jesus rising before dawn to pray in a deserted place, to Mary sitting at Jesus' feet and the Spirit who prays within us in Romans 8, and he grounds the whole thing in the gospel of grace and the life of the Triune God. He engages with voices like Evagrius Ponticus, who named our distraction seventeen centuries early, alongside Augustine, Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Thomas Merton, and Simone Weil, together with the research of Timothy Wilson, Byung-Chul Han, and Cal Newport on attention, distraction, and the machine built to capture it. He offers practices you can start this week, from two minutes of silence to lectio divina, the Jesus Prayer, and the daily examen, and he looks honestly at the evangelical worries about contemplative prayer before answering them from inside the faith. And he asks what we lose when we can't be still, whether the God who spoke to Elijah in the thin silence is still speaking, and how a distracted people might learn to listen again.

Book recommendations: "Invitation to Solitude and Silence" by Ruth Haley Barton, "The Way of the Heart" by Henri Nouwen, "The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry" by John Mark Comer, and "Digital Monasticism" by Graham Joseph Hill.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

It's a Tuesday night in 2004. A pastor sits in his study with the door shut, a half-finished sermon on Isaiah 61 on the desk in front of him, freedom for the captives, release for the prisoners, and a glass in his hand. People in his church say he's the most spiritually alive person they know, and he's been drinking heavily every single day for years while almost nobody has the faintest idea. He's convinced himself that the day his church finds out is the day his ministry ends.

In this episode, Graham tells his own story of addiction and recovery, and builds from it a theology of grace and a picture of the church as a place where honesty is survivable. Unpacking the material from his book "Unshackled", Graham offers an account of addiction that holds four things together at once: a neurochemical dependence, an emotional refuge, a relational pattern, and a spiritual vacuum, and reads it through Augustine's restless heart in the Confessions, addiction as disordered love and a counterfeit sacrament. He works the Scriptures that recovery recognizes immediately, from the thirst of Psalm 42 and the cracked cisterns of Jeremiah 2, to Paul doing the very thing he hates in Romans 7, to the confession that heals in James 5:16, to grace made perfect in weakness in 2 Corinthians 12. He draws on Gerald May and Gabor Maté and the trauma research of Bessel van der Kolk, traces how Alcoholics Anonymous grew out of a Christian movement built on confession and surrender, and names the Australian picture with unusual candor, from the Rum Rebellion to a gambling economy that runs on the pokies and concentrates the harm in the most vulnerable communities. And he asks what it would take for a congregation to name addiction from the front, in the same tone it uses for grief or cancer, before anyone in the room has had to ask for help.

Book recommendations: "Addiction and Grace: Love and Spirituality in the Healing of Addictions" by Gerald G. May, "In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction" by Gabor Maté, and "Unshackled: Breaking Addiction's Chains Through God's Grace" by Graham Joseph Hill.

If you're struggling, please reach out. In Australia, Lifeline is on 13 11 14, the National Alcohol and Other Drug Hotline on 1800 250 015, and Alcoholics Anonymous on 1300 222 222. In the United States, call or text 988 for the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline, or 1-800-662-HELP (4357) for the SAMHSA National Helpline. All are free, confidential, and answered around the clock. Wherever you're listening, please find your local equivalents and talk to your doctor or a trusted person.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800

What happens when the church you can see is shrinking, and the church you can't see is the largest it has ever been? In a country town in New South Wales, Australia, a woman counts nineteen heads in a hall that once held two hundred and tells the story as though it were Christianity itself. On that very same Sunday, in Lagos and Nairobi and Seoul and São Paulo and Chennai, churches are packed to the doors and spilling into the street. The center of the Christian faith has moved, and most of us who grew up in Western churches were never told.

In this episode, Graham explores world Christianity, the astonishing shift of the faith toward Africa, Asia, Latin America, and the Pacific, through the lens of Scripture, theology, history, and cultural analysis. He lays out the numbers, from 381 million European Christians in 1900 to a Global South (i.e., Majority World) that now holds most of the world's believers and is projected to hold 77 percent by 2050, and the prediction that China will soon have more Christians than any nation on earth. He traces the long story, from Antioch and the African theology of Augustine and Athanasius, to the Church of the East reaching Xi'an in the seventh century, to the Thomas Christians of Kerala, and shows how the center of this faith has always moved. He grounds it in Scripture, from the promise to Abraham that all the families of the earth would be blessed, to Pentecost and the languages God multiplied instead of erasing, to the Jerusalem Council in Acts 15, to Paul's prayer in Ephesians 3 that we might grasp the love of Christ together with all the saints. He engages with voices such as Lamin Sanneh, Andrew Walls, Philip Jenkins, Kōsuke Koyama, Kwame Bediako, and Emmanuel Katongole, and he's honest about the hard questions, too: nominal growth, the prosperity gospel, and the danger of romanticizing the Majority World church. And he asks what all this means for a shrinking church in western Sydney, and for anyone who spent a lifetime assuming they were standing at the center.

Book recommendations: "World Christianity: An Introduction" by Graham Joseph Hill, "Global Christianity" and "Women in World Christianity" by Gina Zurlo, "Whose Religion Is Christianity? The Gospel beyond the West" by Lamin Sanneh, "The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity" by Philip Jenkins.

Email us at GrahamPodcast@icloud.com

See my Substack with an article related to this episode: https://grahamjosephhill.substack.com/

Podcast links: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@GrahamJosephHillPodcast Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/7aqTMTcoYPcvneL4xg4Ohv Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast/id1890838919 Podbean: https://www.podbean.com/pw/pbblog-tsqgs-1534f12 Amazon Music: https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/271b0dd3-990d-41e6-b4ba-3fd4bcf78cef iHeartRadio: https://iheart.com/podcast/329136112 Player FM: https://player.fm/series/3726148 Podchaser: https://www.podchaser.com/podcasts/the-graham-joseph-hill-podcast-6435212 Boomplay: https://www.boomplaymusic.com/podcasts/143800