Essential Church: Recent Episodes
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On this episodes hosts Andrew Arndt and Daniel Grothe have a conversation with Jared Patrick Boyd, a pastor, spiritual director, and founding director of the Order of the Common Life. In this conversation, the trio dive into Jared’s complex origin story of church and the Christian ‘story.,’ as well as the topic of Christian deconstruction — and how a study of theology and contemplative prayer brought him back to a deeper need for the love of God.
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Co-Host: Daniel Grothe
Guest: Jared Patrick Boyd (see below for info on Jared’s upcoming book)
BOOK: Finding Freedom in Constraint
BOOK INFO: https://www.ivpress.com/finding-freedom-in-constraint
PRESS KIT: https://www.ivpress.com/Media/Default/Press-Kits/A0431-press.pdf
EXCERPT: https://www.ivpress.com/Media/Default/Downloads/Excerpts-and-Samples/A0431-excerpt.pdf
- Visit his website at jaredpatrickboyd.com.
- Follow him on X (Twitter): @BoydJared
- Follow him on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/jaredpatrickboyd/
On this episode of Essential Church, Andrew and Daniel sit down with Pastor Ian Simkins who joins us from Nashville. They discuss pastoring and how storytelling can shape how we pastor.
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Co-Host: Daniel Grothe
Guests: Ian Simkins
Producer: Briggs Boyd
On this episode of Essential Church, Andrew and Rory sit down with Eddie Hoagland, one of the Senior Executive Pastors of New Life Church. Eddie shares different ways to approach and have difficult conversations.
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Co-Host: Rory Green
Guests: Eddie Hoagland
Producer: Briggs Boyd
On this brief episode of Essential Church, Andrew and Rory sit down with Brit Windel a pastor and church planter from Kenosha, Wisconsin. Brit shares the story of Daybreak Church, a church that is ‘making much of Jesus’ and serving the city. Brit’s story is one of faithfulness, longevity and serving.
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Co-Host: Rory Green
Guests: Brit Windel
Producer: Briggs Boyd
On this week’s episode Andrew and Daniel are joined by Ken Tanner, Pastor of Church of the Holy Redeemer in Rochester Hills, Michigan. Ken takes the time to wade through his own story of life and maturity, as well as the complexities of living a life devoted to ministry(2:30). Much of Ken’s life and ministry is wrapped up in the great journey he took through traditional charismatic church, into the great traditions of the church across history (17:09). The episode wraps with ken sharing three words of prophetic encouragement for the American Church(36:33).
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Co-Host: Daniel Grothe
Guests: Ken Tanner
Producer: Briggs Boyd
Greg is a former university president and pastor, and Andrew and Daniel start a conversation around how to sustain longevity in ministry (01:18). The trio lean into a discussion around Sabbath and work, and the reciprocal relationship they hold for pastoral faithfulness (11:05). The pod wraps up with an emphasis on the pastoral relationships we need to carry (29:00.
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Co-Host: Daniel Grothe
Guests: Greg Waybright
Producer: Briggs Boyd
Andrew and Geoff Holsclaw sit down to discuss how the field of neuroscience and spiritual formation intersect in the life of faith (3:43). Andrew and Geoff go on to discuss how these new fields of combined study can actually help people who are beginning to wrestle with, or even deconstruct their faith (12:45). A rabbit trail about attachment theory and how it potentially relates to our experience of God, round out the episode (30:10).
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Guests: Geoff Holsclaw
Producer: Briggs Boyd
Andrew Arndt and Daniel Grothe are joined by a New Life congregation member and author Bri Stensrud to talk about the complexities and challenges of what it looks like to “meet the strangers at our gates.” (01:35) The trio discuss how this issue moves far beyond simply a social or political issue, Bri helps guide a discussion around immigration and caring for the foreigner and its biblical roots. (10:54). The last stretch of this episode includes both the practical and the personal ways we can all get involved in this conversation. (29:45)
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Co-Host: Daniel Grothe
Guests: Bri Stensrud
Producer: Briggs Boyd
For pastors/churches:
Evangelical Immigration Table
World Relief
For laypeople:
Women of Welcome
Books:
Start with Welcome
The Bible and Borders
Welcoming the Stranger
Find Bri: Instagram
Andrew and special guest, Derek Vreeland have a detailed discussion around Derek’s new book Centering Jesus: How the Lamb of God Transforms Our Communities, Ethics, and Spiritual Lives. One of the core values of Essential Church is that Jesus is at the center, and this is exactly what Derek’s book reveals — from the book of Revelation, the COVID pandemic, and the power of unity (02:22). At the crux of Derek’s book is the metaphor of Jesus as the Lamb of God, and the multitude of ways that metaphor is fleshed out through Jesus’ life (15:34). This conversation lands by discussing how prayer is the ultimate act of seeing Jesus at the center of all things (24:22).
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Guests: Derek Vreeland
Producer: Briggs Boyd
Derek Vreeland’s books — https://derekvreeland.com/books
Andrew and Brady take the time in this episode to sit down with author Dr. Russell Moore to discuss his book Losing Our Religion, An Alter Call for Evangelical America. Russell shares the history that created a need for such a book, but also the weight of utilizing his prophetic voice in a time of need (3:36). Dr. Moore goes on to share a few key ideas and principles around how to better discern and live wisely when dealing with the great social challenges of our day (15:53). The trio then round out the conversation contemplating the moral fiber of future leaders as well as pondering what needs to happen in America for true revival to take place (24:06).
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Host: Andrew Arndt
Co-Host: Brady Boyd
Guests: Dr. Russell Moore
Producer: Briggs Boyd
Losing Our Religion, An Alter Call for Evangelical America by Russell Moore — https://www.amazon.com/Losing-Our-Religion-Evangelical-America-ebook/dp/B0BPWRF4C5/ref=sr_1_1crid=3I076VEZFKVJK&keywords=losing+our+religion%2C+an+altar+call+for+evangelical+america&qid=1696973367&sprefix=losing+our+religion%2C+an+alter+call+for+evangelical+america%2Caps%2C99&sr=8-1
In this episode we sit down with pastor and author Tommy Brown to talk about his new book The Ache for Meaningand how the temptations of Christ reveal who we are and what we are seeking. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected […]
In this episode we sit down with Michel Hendricks to talk with him about his book The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation.
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This book was written out of frustration and confusion… some pastors and I were talking about our frustrations with discipleship, and one of the pastors said, “Michel, I think we’re ignoring the neuroscience angle,” and I had no idea what he was talking about…
The left side of the brain is what in popular culture we think of AS the brain… it’s the problem-solving side… but the deeper, relational questions are handled in the right brain—it’s the more powerful side of the brain…
Before the left brain even kicks in, the right brain is asking, “Who are these people? Are these my people? Am I safe here?” Most of our discipleship is left-brain oriented and doesn’t take the right brain into account at all…
Our brains are designed to change us through love… our attachments and bonds with others are the strongest force in the brain for the formation of our character…
I’m not saying that we should drop left-brained discipleship skills, but that we ADD the right-brain relational skills… e.g., joy—are we creating environments where people are happy to see one another…? Joy is fuel for transformation… and when our joy is low, nothing really works…
For the Hebrew mind, the face and presence of God were inseparable… the face WAS the presence, like a baby looking into its mother’s face… that’s how a baby grows… and how we grow with God…
Our churches need to function much more like families than they do like religious organizations… families are primarily and fundamentally about creating bonds…
If our relational skills are right, we can do church discipline in a way that’s healthy… it’s about flipping on the self-regulating principle in the body of Christ…
There is a form of healthy shame and toxic shame… toxic shame is what most of us have experienced… healthy shame is deeply relational and helps remind us of who we are… it reinforces our good group identity…
Forming community this way makes us virtually immune to narcissism… if we are a deeply bonded family which self-corrects, we are creating a soil that narcissism can’t thrive in…
In this episode we sit down with Dr. Philip Cary to talk about unbiblical and unhelpful stuff that evangelicals believe and how the gospel liberates us. Grab his book Good News for Anxious Christians here.
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Good News for Anxious Christians came from my conversations with Christians who were anxious because of the ‘practical advice’ they’d been given about how to improve their lives…
When the Gospel is replaced by practical advice, before long you’ll get anxious about whether the practical advice is actually working…
Part of the reason that people are anxious is that pastors are anxious… the odd mistake that we make is by thinking that the way to change someone’s life is to tell them to change their life… but that’s the law… it’s the gospel that really changes us…
Consumerism has a lot to do with this… we’re competing in a spiritual marketplace, and the church feels pressure to say, “We have a better lifestyle/product than everyone else…” that’s the wrong incentive…
When I say, “You don’t need to hear God’s voice ‘in your heart’”, I mean that we need to listen to the words of God that come to us from OUTSIDE our hearts: e.g., the Bible, the words of the gospel when it’s preached, etc. …
What God commands us to do is to seek wisdom… that means that our hearts should be shaped by wisdom… when that happens, your heart will have some good voices in it—they’ll still be your voices, and they’ll be worth listening to, because they’ve been formed by God’s wisdom…
As the Word of God comes to dwell in us, the voice will be our own, but the word will be God’s… the Word of God shapes our hearts… when we hear the story of Christ and receive it by faith, our hearts get reshaped into the image of Jesus Christ…
‘Conscience’ is a word that has dropped out of our vocabulary… God doesn’t decide for us, but he has told us how he’d like to behave in his Word… as we take that Word into our hearts, our conscience will come to nag us when we don’t treat people properly…
We don’t have to find God’s will for our lives because God has told us what his will is… The Ten Commandments are God’s will… The Two Great Commandments are God’s will… God wants us to learn to make wise decisions ourselves as responsible adults…
When the Gospel is properly preached, it’s not about our feelings, it’s about Jesus… and precisely that is what builds up our Christian feelings… our job is to give people Jesus Christ…
In this episode (part 2 of 2) we continue our conversation with Pastors Brad Baker and Sarah Jackson to talk about some of the perils and pitfalls of working with a Rule of Life.
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RESOURCES:
- Seeking God (Esther de Waal)
- The Rule of St. Benedict
The rule of life goes back to the fifth century… a monk named Benedict put together a kind of code for himself and his followers… it helped them live out the gospel together…
It was developed in a time of great social and political upheaval and chaos… the rule was about arranging one’s life in ongoing transformation… it can provide structure to help us abide in God…
Behind Benedict stood the desert fathers and mothers… for them, the kingdom had a logic, a pattern, an order to it… the rule was an attempt to articulate the order of the kingdom and help people live into it…
For me, there was a split between my intentions and the direction my life was actually taking… the rule helped me acknowledge that and integrate the pieces of my life…
There’s no one right rule of life… each person’s rule of life ought to take into account things like life stage, age, etc… you need to find the rhythms that work for you…
For instance, I had a day getaway recently with a good friend that was full of spiritual conversation… I came back thinking, “I need to do this regularly…” That now is part of my rule of life…
The rule is about taking our place in the community of God… when you’re crafting a rule, you need to ask how it is serving your life with God and others… it’s very relational…
The rule of life is about managing myself in such a way that I’m showing up in my life in the spaces I need to be in in the WAY I need to be in them…
In this episode (part 1 of 2) we sit down with Pastors Brad Baker and Sarah Jackson to talk about what a ‘rule of life’ is, why it matters, and how to develop one.
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RESOURCES:
- Seeking God (Esther de Waal)
- The Rule of St. Benedict
The rule of life goes back to the fifth century… a monk named Benedict put together a kind of code for himself and his followers… it helped them live out the gospel together…
It was developed in a time of great social and political upheaval and chaos… the rule was about arranging one’s life in ongoing transformation… it can provide structure to help us abide in God…
Behind Benedict stood the desert fathers and mothers… for them, the kingdom had a logic, a pattern, an order to it… the rule was an attempt to articulate the order of the kingdom and help people live into it…
For me, there was a split between my intentions and the direction my life was actually taking… the rule helped me acknowledge that and integrate the pieces of my life…
There’s no one right rule of life… each person’s rule of life ought to take into account things like life stage, age, etc… you need to find the rhythms that work for you…
For instance, I had a day getaway recently with a good friend that was full of spiritual conversation… I came back thinking, “I need to do this regularly…” That now is part of my rule of life…
The rule is about taking our place in the community of God… when you’re crafting a rule, you need to ask how it is serving your life with God and others… it’s very relational…
The rule of life is about managing myself in such a way that I’m showing up in my life in the spaces I need to be in in the WAY I need to be in them…
In this episode we sit down with therapist and educator Chuck DeGroat to talk about the phenomenon of narcissism; what it is, how to spot it, and how to address it in our communities. Chuck is the author of When Narcissism Comes to Church. This is part 2 of 2.
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An emotionally intelligent leader is able to differentiate himself from you and doesn’t need to draw from you for his own ego…
We base our idea of narcissism on appearance sometimes… people use the word irresponsibly… confidence is not narcissism…
We need to understand the many faces of narcissism… sometimes narcissism can look like humility… for instance, an Enneagram 9 can be a narcissist… if you’ve ever experienced the quiet rage of a 9, you’ve felt it…
One of the things that happens to leaders is that we cut ourselves off from feedback… every pastor needs people in their life who can answer the question, “How do you experience me?” and do it without threat of retribution…
The higher up in the food chain you go, the more insulated you become and the more anxious you’ll feel… leaders often think that the higher you climb, the less anxious you’ll be… the more defended you become, the greater possibility there is that narcissism will evolve…
One of the big things we need to wrestle with is, “What is my shame wound?” A lot of people don’t think they have one—especially if they’ve been successful…
Our pain when we’re wounded by narcissists is often externalized by outing or naming people publicly… when it happened to me, I dreamed of ways to hurt the person who hurt me… we need the presence of a compassionate witness…
Oftentimes the way that people think they should heal from trauma is actually retraumatizing (e.g., confronting your abuser on social media)… that’s the wrong approach… you need to go to a good therapist to process what’s happening within you…
I want people to engage the work in an unhurried way… you need someone looking out for you who cares for you and who can help you step back from your unhealthy strategies for coping with the pain…
Metabolizing shame means going back into your story… people don’t want to do this work…
In this episode we sit down with therapist and educator Chuck DeGroat to talk about the phenomenon of narcissism; what it is, how to spot it, and how to address it in our communities. Chuck is the author of When Narcissism Comes to Church. This is part 1 of 2.
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When we’re talking about narcissistic personality disorder, one of the things you see is an incapacity to empathize with others…
Some people say that narcissism is born in self-love… but that’s not true… narcissism is really born in self-contempt… they’re compensating with a grandiose part of themselves that has learned live life shielded and defended…
A narcissist fails to empathize with themselves first…
Some people will say that narcissists are evil through and through… that they’re born evil… but I think that there’s always a story behind a narcissist… if you’re well-loved when you’re young, you won’t need the narcissistic exterior later in your life…
The earliest warning sign that you’re in the orbit of a narcissist is your gut… there’s a stirring in your gut that something feels off… I can’t tell you how many people I know who have ignored their gut…
Narcissistic systems can often breed a sense of loyalty where the leader can’t be questioned… the leader needs to be large and in charge and is protecting their space and power at all costs…
Many of these leaders also have a sense of entitlement to success…
If you don’t metabolize shame in relational ways, you’ll find ways to protect yourself that will be harmful to yourself and others…
Metabolizing shame means going back into your story… people don’t want to do this work…
In this episode we sit down with author and pastor Steve Carter to talk about times of crisis and what it looks like to receive the good gifts of God in them.
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I wouldn’t wish what I went through on my worst enemy… but I also never had felt so close to God… the nearness of God was a surprising gift to me…
That season was bizarre because it created such cognitive dissonance… I’m a competitive person and it was hard to realize that I couldn’t make everyone happy…
I don’t know a meaningful human life where the deck hasn’t been cleared by God…
In ministry we often use our desire to influence as a substitute for paying attention to our elemental humanity… crisis taught me to tend to my foundations again…
For me, the gift in my crisis was that I started realizing that integrity and character is everything… as sad as it all was, God was building a new order in me through it…
In my 30s, I was so goals-driven… but the pace was unsustainable… I didn’t want to have to grieve or address my pain… I didn’t know how to wait, listen, or slow down well…
I was raised to channel my anger into competitiveness… my crisis taught me to realize that wasn’t working… I needed to learn to be driven by being in Christ…
My relationship with Jesus wasn’t affected by people’s behavior… my struggle was with a handful of people who had acted badly… but the crisis took me back to the Jesus way…
If you want to go through crisis well, you have to have a couple of values rise to the top to serve as a true north for the kind of person you want to be…
You also have to recognize that while it’s bad, it won’t always be bad…
Another thing I’d say is that you have to have mentors, counselors, pastors, and spiritual directors… you need voices who know you, can embody the ministry of presence for you, and can remind you of who you are…
In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Cheryl Bridges-Johns, author of Re-enchanting the Text: Discovering the Bible as Sacred, Dangerous, and Mysterious (releases May 16), to talk with her about what it means to read the Bible in the wildness and power of the Spirit.
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I’m a fourth generation Pentecostal… it was a safe and sacred place and people told me they sensed God’s hand on my life… I preached my first sermon at sixteen…
In the mid-80s a group of us Pentecostal pastors and theologians began to gather and ask, “Is there a hermeneutic of the Spirit, and if so, what does it look like…?”
The history of the modern world is a history of disenchantment… many Protestant forms of religion in the 20thcentury became disenchanted, full of “excarnation”—the absence of the sacred in the tangible…
In the Pentecostal tradition, we had a sense of the sacred in our bodies via the filling of the Spirit… but as we became more “evangelicalized”, we adopted some of the Protestant forms of disenchantment…
This included how we read the Bible… we were told that it was too mysterious and that we needed to do it another way…
The saints that I grew up with regarded the Bible as a presence, as a space of fellowship, and even an icon… it was a portal to God… whenever they sat down with their Bible in their lap, Jesus came and they had sweet fellowship… they ate the Word and it became them…
The critical thing is the sense of the “real presence” of the Spirit in the reading of Scripture… that the same Spirit who inspired it was also there in the reading of it… that’s not necessarily subjective; it is mysterious…
One of the marks of the saints I grew up with was their ability to live in the paradox of pain and suffering, knowing and not knowing… they didn’t have to settle everything…
We don’t need to gloss over the trauma and abuse recorded in the Bible, because it’s not a final word… it’s moving in a redemptive direction… we are led by the Spirit to grieve the trauma in the text… that grieving transforms us…
We need to let the text call us out beyond ourselves, into spaces that are not safe, that are scary… like Job who encounters God in the whirlwind and realizes that he is no longer in control…
In this episode we sit down with Sharon and Ike Miller, co-pastors of Bright City Church in Raleigh-Durham, Carolina to talk about life, ministry, and what they’re learning about leading well together.
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I didn’t think I was going to be a pastor… but Ike kept saying to me, “I think God wants us to do something together…”
Leading together is a constant learning process… when we launched, we were so driven by adrenaline and were ultimately running at a pace that wasn’t sustainable…
We’re learning a lot by making mistakes, because there aren’t a lot of couples that are doing quite what we’re doing… and even where they have, if their personalities are different than ours, it won’t work the same way for us…
It was really important for us as copastors to figure out what our lanes are… we broke that down by giftings and passions…
Even though we’re in the Bible Belt, we’re in a very progressive area… it’s a weird demographic… lots of people have church baggage and are very cynical… we have realized that a big part of our call is to be a sensitive, safe, and healing place for people…
At the same time, we want to help restore people to the capital ‘C’ Church, not just Bright City Church… the Church is God’s Plan A for people…
Consumerism is also shaping us in profound ways… every week people are coming to church with their list of demands… consumerism is bad for the consumers, but it’s also chewing up and spitting out pastors… it’s commodifying the pastorate…
We’ve discovered that it’s critical for us as leaders to be vulnerable with our struggles… it communicates a sense that it’s okay for us to come in and not have it all together…
Listening well is critical as leaders… so much of the hurt that people carry into church was that they never had spaces where they could be heard…
You can be in control or you can be in community but you can’t be both… to be in the Body is to be interdependent with others… when a desire for absolute autonomy and control leads the way, it severs us from the Body…
In this episode we sit down to talk with Katelyn Beaty about her book Celebrities for Jesus—on the perils of celebrity in the evangelical world and what we can do to counteract it.
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My goal in writing this book was to help the church heal and better reflect the integrity and wholeness of the gospel…
I’m tired of seeing the headlines of celebrity pastors failing and the damage that does to people… I’m trying to help people see the dynamics of celebrity so that we can better guard against it…
As someone who grew up in an evangelical context and is very grateful for it, it’s important to say that we tend to be kind of pragmatic in our approach, which usually means that we’re early adopters for the use of media in sharing the gospel…
In that milieu, celebrity has been seen as a neutral tool for sharing the gospel… if we can turn our pastor into a celebrity, maybe we can reach more people… I’m trying to argue that while celebrity an EFFECTIVE tool, it’s not a NEUTRAL tool…
The quest for celebrity and platform can (and has) shaped us from the inside out, often by drawing more attention to the celebrity than the person of Christ…
Celebrity has a way of creating distance between the person on the platform and the crowds… but as Christians we know that we’re called to live in proximity to one another… people knowing the good and the bad about us isn’t always fun, but it does lead to our flourishing…
Celebrity is sought and garnered for its own purposes, using the tools of mass media to project an image of importance… it becomes social power without proximity… we ought to be able to know the people who are shaping us week in and week out—celebrity makes that impossible…
People who have celebrity talk about the loneliness and isolation at the top… it’s not good for us… I’m trying to caution people not to seek celebrity status… if you end up famous for doing something good—fine; but don’t seek it out…
I’m a millennial and totally get the allure of screens and the desire to build platform… one of my “checks” is asking, “How much time am I spending in front of a screen?” vs. “How much time am I spending with real people in my church?”
We need to be surrounded by people who are not impressed by me and can speak the truth in love, asking hard questions about motives… we all have blind spots, and we need those people in order to stay in the process of transformation…
In this episode we sit down with writer and teacher Marilyn McEntyre to talk with her about why our speech is so important and how sanctified speech and sanctified lives are connected. Check out her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.
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Some of the urgency of this matter is self-explanatory at this point… I don’t know anyone of any theological or political persuasion who doesn’t recognize that our public discourse is in trouble…
There are some bad habits of speech that are pretty widespread… one of them is the tendency to fall into abstractions rather than particulars…
The scandal of the gospel is the scandal of particular… God came into a specific place and time… but in a lot of our public speech, we resort to abstraction…
Abstractions enable us to avoid responsibility… they allow us not to look at THIS person who has been begging on THIS particular street corner and has been unhoused for THIS MANY particular months… to go “deep” is to go particular…
One of the ancient meanings of the word conversation is “to walk with”… when you have a conversation with someone, you walk with them and come in parallel with them… but in our world, this can be hard to come by…
We need to quit trying to win… a lot of conversations in public speech turn into arguments very quickly because we’re trying to win… it sets up a kind of defensiveness that truncates exploratory conversation…
There’s a layer of accountability in our speech that is only available to us if our bodies are in the same room, in the vulnerability that face-to-face interaction makes possible…
One of the things that I would say to preachers is that if you’ve gone to seminary and have studied the ancient languages, hand ‘em over! Some of my favorite sermons have been when a preacher took time to explain the nuance of a word…
Sometimes I think that pastors are so desirous to be “pastoral” that they dumb down the content of their messages… you can simplify without dumbing down…
When I was a young adult I began worshiping in a church that featured written prayers… I loved stepping into words that had been carefully crafted and prayed for generations… written prayers help us step into the communion of saints to join them…
In this episode we sit down with Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt to talk with him about his book The Love That is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week! God is love is the […]
In this episode we chat with Greg Stier, the founder and CEO of Dare to Share, which equips youth leaders and students in relational evangelism. We chat with him about best practices for doing just that. You can learn more about Greg HERE. And also download a free copy of his e-book “Gospelize Your Youth […]
In this conversation we sit down with Sean Morgan, founder of The Ascent Leader, to talk with him about some shifts he’s seeing in the landscape of church leadership over the last few years. You can check out Sean’s work with The Ascent Leader HERE. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us […]
In this episode we sit down with pastor and author Chase Replogle to talk about his book The Five Masculine Instincts. For more on Chase’s book and extra resources click here. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week! First […]
In this episode we pick up our conversation with Dr. Chris Green on discerning Christ in the Old Testament. This is part 2 of 2. If you missed last week, catch it HERE. You can follow Chris on social media – @cewgreen (Twitter and Instagram) and cewgreen.substack. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel […]
In this episode we sit down with our friend Dr. Chris Green to talk with him about what it means (and how!) to discern Christ in the Old Testament. This is part 1 of 2. Be sure to catch part 2 next week! Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on […]
In this episode Daniel and Andrew sit down to talk about Andrew’s recently released Streams in the Wasteland: Finding Spiritual Renewal with the Desert Fathers and Mothers. Grab your copy on Amazon! Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week! We […]
In this episode we celebrate Pastor Brady and Pam’s 15 year anniversary at New Life Church by reflecting on some keys to finishing well. You can download the full list HERE. You can also purchase Brady and Pam’s devotional Oceans of Grace HERE. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on […]
In this episode we take you to a conversation New Life Midtown’s Jayde Duncan and New Life Friday Night’s Jordan Victoria Lewis recently had with our ministry staff on the challenge of cultivating unity in the church in a culture that is very often divided over issues of race. (This conversation is based in part […]
In this episode we sit down with Dr. Kyle Strobel to talk about the nature of power via his book (co-authored with Jamin Goggin), The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb? Grab it here. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to […]
In this episode we sit down with one of the most prolific authors of the last hundred years, Philip Yancey, to talk with him about his new memoir Where the Light Fell. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the […]
In this episode, we share six rules for the art of having healthy conflict. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week! I wish leadership was just sitting around reading your Bible, praying for a few people, and going […]
In this episode Glenn and Andrew sit down with Dr. Michelle Anthony to talk about the why, what, and how of developing good study habits. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week! I was fortunate to have lifelong […]
In this episode we pick up the conversation on attracting strong and capable leaders by talking about just what we mean by “strong and capable”. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week! Regardless of if you’re pastoring a […]
In this episode we sit down to talk about the kind of environment that allows leaders to flourish. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week! These principles apply not only to the church but also to the corporate […]
In this episode we sit down with Dr. Chris Green to talk about how Jesus reveals himself to us through the arts. This conversation is an engagement with Chris’s book All Things Beautiful. Grab a copy here. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay […]
In this episode we sit down with the president of Integrus Leadership, Lyle Wells, to talk about “empire vs. kingdom” leadership and what it takes to remain resilient as leaders in a challenging environment. You can learn more about Integrus at www.integrus.org and by following @leadwithlyle and @integrusleadership. Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and […]
In this episode Sarah Jackson sits down with Glenn and Holly Packiam to talk about having intentional rhythms as a family. (Watch for the book Glenn and Holly are writing on this subject—releases next year!) Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with […]
In this episode Glenn sits down with Sarah Jackson and Holly Packiam to talk about Pete and Geri Scazzero’s Emotionally Healthy Discipleship curriculum and how it can help churches lead people on a path towards spiritual and emotional maturity. You can find out more about the entire EH curriculum series here. Be sure to subscribe […]
In this episode we pick up our conversation with Dr. Gregg Okesson to talk with his book A Public Missiology: How Local Churches Witness to a Complex World and what it looks like for local churches to witness to the reign of Jesus Christ in all of life.
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Sending is an important function for the church… but historically one of the most radical things that Christians have done is to gather… we need to think of local congregations as people who gather in ways that are different from the world…
People talk about the problems of people bringing their politics and ideologies to church… but that happens all the time… we need the sacraments, worship, and preaching to challenge those ideologies…
This is where we need to be a people of difference—we worship the King of the universe… all ideologies need to be challenged at the foot of the cross and the resurrection of Jesus Christ…
One of my heroes is Lesslie Newbigin, who said that the cross is a profound “no” to all ideologies… they all need to come to the foot of the cross and die… just like individuals, even “publics” need to come and die…
But Newbigin also said that the resurrection is a glorious “yes” to God’s creating and reconciling work… we need to go out into the fullness of God’s world saying “yes” to politics and economics…
If we take public witness seriously, we will discover the gospel of Jesus Christ… there’s a lot of preaching out there that has nothing to do with the gospel, or is so thin that it has no ability to speak to the public realm…
To preachers I would say that while it’s wonderful to get into all kinds of exegesis, we need to tell the full story of the gospel over and over again… the world is “storying” us one way, and we have the greatest story of all… we need to tell it to our people…
Every congregation is different and pastors need to know their congregations… they need to know where and how to affirm the good… but if we are not regularly calling into question the reigning assumptions of our day, we are not fulfilling our role as preachers of the gospel of Jesus Christ…
Pastors need to spend time with people and live in the “publics” around their congregation… we need to do strong biblical exegesis and strong cultural exegesis at the same time…
In this episode we sit down with Dr. Gregg Okesson to talk with his book A Public Missiology: How Local Churches Witness to a Complex World and what it looks like for local churches to witness to the reign of Jesus Christ in all of life. This is the first of two episodes.
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The challenge for me while planting churches in Tanzania was trying to witness not just to individuals but to large, complex social needs…
In the process of allowing my understanding of the gospel to enter into the day-to-day public realities, I actually found the gospel…
Christ is reconciling all things to himself… so the challenge for us is to enter into complex public spaces with a gospel of salvation that is big enough for the whole world…
The gospel is good news, but we’ve often made it bad news… it’s about the inauguration of Jesus Christ as king and lord of the whole universe…
Historically, evangelicals have opted for simplicity over complexity… but when you look at the story of God, it is a complex story… across time and space and ethnicity…
I use the language of “thickness”—God is weaving a “thick” witness in a “thick” world and too often we have tried to witness to the thickness of the world with a too-simple gospel…
We need to start to practice the discipline of intentional inconvenience in our churches… if we’re not inconvenienced in our churches, the gospel will become captive to our culture…
The public realm is drastically shaping the way that we live… from cell phones to music to television to streaming video… we are immersed in it…
“Publics” are spaces of togetherness where humans form life and build community that also have “open weave” in them…
We tend to think of these “publics” or “domains” as discrete, but they are actually overlapping each other every day of our lives…
The problem that we face is that we don’t realize how all of these overlapping “publics” are impacting us… it is forming us and shaping us… we need to spend more time exegeting the ways that it is forming us…
In this episode we pick up our conversation with Dr. Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer to discuss their book A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing.
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The first thing I would say to young leaders is that every pastor needs to become self-aware through a battery of psychological tests, to try to expose traits of narcissism…
We also need to restore to the pastoral calling the centrality of character… just like culture eats strategy for breakfast, so character eats culture for breakfast… a bad character will form the culture…
We have so valued the platform and performance gifts… pastors on the platform exude a persona… people think that is the real person… they are responding to a persona…
We need to start putting persons of character on the platform more than just persons of gifts…
TOV is the Hebrew word for good… God created everything good… this word is used in the Old Testament hundreds of times… it is master moral category… God is TOV, everything he makes is TOV, and he wants us to be TOV…
We found seven elements of TOV that flipped the script: empathy, grace, putting people first, telling the truth, nurturing justice, nurturing service, and nurturing Christlikeness…
We could do ourselves a world of good by giving our budding pastors a test, for instance, on how empathic they are…
Power physically changes the brain… all of us have power at some level… when we have unbridled and uncensored power, it is damaging to the person who has it along with those who are on the receiving end of it…
The people that have wrecked churches and ministries over the last twenty years had power without boundaries… it never ends well…
Leaders need to learn the habit of being in touch with people in pain, and watching how they are responding to them…
If power is something that changes the brain, we need to practice the habit of losing power and having people over us who have more power than we do…
We also need to learn to invite people to the platform who are better than us… the pain of wondering if people like someone else better than you is a good thing…
In this episode we sit down with Dr. Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer to discuss their book A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing. This is a two part episode.
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It was a disorienting experience to have our church covering up the truth… it launched a series of conversations about how Scripture was not being interpreted the way it should…
Around the same time, I read a book on the German pastors and how they responded to the Holocaust that shocked me… it showed the power of sinfulness of Christian leaders… when confronted by the truth, they didn’t confess their sins…
Pastors have an enormous power over people… and have the capacity to assume a platform and narrate a story that trusting people are going to believe… when the narrative is distorting, cynicism arises in the church…
I found the way that Matthew 18 was being used irritating… they were using that text to say that if a woman thinks that a leader abused her, she has a responsibility to tell him… that will protect a pastor every time…
We need to ask, “Who has the advantage?” when Matthew 18 is being used… it is never appropriate to require a victim of abuse to confront their abuser privately…
A sign of institutional narcissism is when you shift from thinking that your church is helpful to thinking that your church is the best church in the world and where you think that all other churches are inferior…
This isn’t just an issues with megachurches… small churches are impacted by it too… thinking that you are the true people of God is insidious and dangerous…
Since writing this book, we’ve gotten tons of letters from people who have been impacted by power-through-fear cultures…
Power is a very interesting phenomenon that is wielded wisely and recklessly by the same people in the same churches, and we need to be more conscious of it…
There’s such a thrill for people to be in the pastor’s inner circle, that it becomes like a shield of pride… but it’s a double-edged sword—you can both welcome people in and kick them out… it’s like a drug for many people…
In this interview we sit down with Daniel Grothe and talk about his new book The Power of Place: Choosing Stability in a Rootless Age. Snag a copy of The Power of Place HERE.
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The question of “what is the good life” has bugged me for a long time… as I pay attention to people who are living good lives, all of them have lived lives of stability in place…
This was actually the first book I wanted to write… I think that wisdom looks like a rooted life in place…
Summers in my childhood were spent in Idaho with my family… they worked the land hard and were tired at the end of the day… I don’t get to live exactly like that, but as a pastor I’ve tried to live that way…
With the Gerasene demoniac, this is the first time Jesus tells someone, “You can’t follow me…” Jesus sends him home… when Jesus finds him, he is on the fringes, he is place-less… Jesus heals him and sends him back into his life, to live settled…
When we look at the Bible, see that place helps us find security… place helps us find identity… and place helps us learn skilled mastery…
God is not the God of abstraction… he doesn’t bless us out in the ether somewhere, but he blesses us in place… the story of God ends with the new Jerusalem descending to earth which gives life and security to the nations… creation itself is re-placed, re-homed…
We need to remember that Jesus is Jesus OF NAZARETH… he comes to us in our particularity… he comes into the story to put together heaven and earth, flesh and spirit…
Adam and Eve started wondering what they were missing out on, and it led to their looking outside of the limitations of the good life that God had given them… when we live at the edges, we miss out on the gift at the center…
When people leave our churches for silly reasons, I always think to myself, “You’re going to have a stranger bury you? I should be burying you… or if I go first, you should be at my funeral… you’re going to throw that away?”
Sometimes you can’t stay in a place… even then you can live by certain principles… Jeremiah 29:1-10 helps us… wherever you are, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which you’ve been sent into exile… God will bless you there…
Online church is a great tool, but it’s not a congregation… it will never replace the body of Christ, the local congregation of the saints…
In this episode we sit down to talk about how leaders should think about responding to local and global crises when they arise, and about how they care for their own souls in crisis.
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The fatigue is real… we got into ministry because we care for those who are hurting, and over the past year and a half, that’s been put to the test…
We don’t have an endless supply of empathy… you can run out… one of the things I’m concerned about for my own soul is if I ever stop feeling [what I should feel for crises]…
The first lens on how we should spend ourselves is this: what are your people talking about in the lobby? If they’re talking about it in the lobby, we should be talking about it in the pulpit…
One of the problems with social media is that our awareness outpaces our agency… one thing we could do as leaders is to spend more time following what our people are talking about on social media and less time following what everyone else is talking about…
Jesus commissioned his disciples into Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and to the ends of the earth… Jesus seems to be calling them not just to their neighborhood or region, but also to places that would test and stretch them…
Your time can’t be spent evenly in these four quadrants… we need to understand that we need to allot our time in a way that is sustainable…
We don’t invest our money anywhere where we don’t have trusted relationships… it’s not a matter of “if” but “when” we are going to have opportunities, and the worst feeling is having resources but no one to call [to deploy those resources to]…
Many people in the church want to be “special forces” missions people… but if we’re only focusing on those people, we’re ignoring the vast majority of our people who need to catch a heart for global missions…
For a lot of pastors, loneliness is their greatest enemy right now… many pastors are just looking for friends… this is one of the reasons we created the Essential Church Learning Community… we’re trying to create space for that…
Sometimes the best thing I can do is just rest… there’s no substitute for good food, getting exercise, and going to bed…
In moments of crisis, clear decisions and quick adjustments are crucial… but we also need kind hearts…