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John Ortberg is a teaching pastor at Willow Creek Community Church in South Barrington, Illinois, and the author of If You Want to Walk on Water, You've Got to Get Out of the Boat (which won a CT Book Award in 2002 in the Christian Living category), The Life You've Always Wanted: Spiritual Growth for Ordinary People, and Love Beyond Reason. Dick Staub recently talked with him about his latest book, Everybody's Normal Till You Get to Know Them, which is also reviewed today on our site.

Why is it important for people to understand that there are no normal people and that everybody's weird?

There's a deep theological issue going on. We tend to think about normal in terms of statistical averages. So if something is common, we think it's normal. But there's deep sense in which, from God's perspective because of the Fall, nobody is normal. Nobody lives up to the norms that God had in mind when he first created human beings.

And yet we still want to connect with "normal" people.

The human longings that are deep inside of us never go away. They exist across cultures; they exist throughout life. When people were first made, our deepest longing was to know and be known. And after the Fall, when we all got weird, it's still our deepest longing—but it's now also our deepest fear.

You know, the old question, How do porcupines make love? The answer is, Very carefully. People who study porcupines say that when it's their mating season—which is quite a short season—they actually do a little dance. There's a love dance of the porcupines. Even for those creatures who can easily create such hurt, it is possible to experience intimacy and community.

Was there something that triggered your desire to write about this?

I teach at a church, but my background is actually in psychology. So I have spent so much time with individuals and with the congregation talking to people about relationships, hearing the same kind of desires and frustrations over and over again.

There are people that believe that if you've found Jesus, you're going to be fixed and then you're going have community. Once God is in your midst, all is going to be well. What's wrong with that thought?

It doesn't remotely resemble reality.

Isn't there supposed to be healing when people find God?

There's supposed to be. And I think for us to pursue it and be open to it and even expect it is a good thing. But in the church, we often confuse what we aspire to with what we've actually achieved. One of the bedrock necessities for relationships is just truth. You can only love and be loved to the extent that you know and are known by somebody. And I think because we want to be and to think of ourselves as people who are more loving and more joyful, often we end up pretending and hiding more in the church than folks do outside.

There's a kind of groupthink that goes on. And that's part of why I think one of the healthiest things for a Christian community is to make sure that there are folks who are not Christians. Otherwise we talk to each other we can reinforce the same thoughts.

What do you mean by that? What are you suggesting?

Sometimes we think about evangelism as a one-way street. But in a Christian community, we can end up reinforcing prejudices and poor thinking. We start to think in black and white terms, and talk about us as the good guys and them as the bad guys.

But when there's somebody in the group who is one of "them," [we notice] this real human being. In some ways they're smarter than me and in some ways they're kinder than me. It forces us to a level of honesty and reality that otherwise we could just ignore.

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May (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47