Author: Aaron Olson

Episode 153: The Ache for Meaning – An Interview with Tommy Brown

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. 

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I was more depressed than I realized and was at a near crisis in ministry… I had lost touch with what it meant to be a pastor…

Reading through the temptations of Christ one day, I knew I was on the scent of the trail that I needed to be on… it really started a seven-year journey for me of learning to name my ache and my questions as a pastor…

The temptations are symbolic… the devil didn’t make them up on the spot… they’re each an echo from Israel’s wilderness wanderings… and they speak to our perennial needs for security, significance, and control… 

You can boil them down into questions: Will I have enough? Am I enough? And do I matter? In any given situation, we can ask ourselves those questions to see what’s driving our anxiety…

For pastors, it’s a deep seduction to get the deepest needs of our lives met by the church… which means that when things aren’t going well at the church, it strikes at our identity… our identity can’t be based in externals but in sonship…

Jesus is the already the Son of God by nature as the second person of the Trinity and by gift as the Spirit descends upon him… and so the devil is trying to get Jesus to do something that doesn’t need to be done… 

The enemy plays with our minds trying to convince us that there’s something to be done to achieve something that’s already been given… and that’s where we get screwy…

There’s an over-functioning in ministry that comes from the fact that we haven’t settled ourselves into our “aready-ness” as sons and daughters of God… 

As you grow in your faith, the tests don’t stop… what I’ve learned is to spot them and respond to them earlier… the space between stimulus and response is the place where our freedom lies… 

The higher you go in leadership, the more sophisticated and nuanced the temptations become… in every moment there’s an opportunity to respond in one way or another… 

Episode 152: Neuroscience and Spiritual Formation – A Conversation with Michael Hendricks

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… 

Episode 151: Good News for Anxious Christians – An Interview with Philip Cary

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… 

Episode 150: The Rule of Life Part 2: Perils and Pitfalls

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…

Episode 149: What is a Rule of Life (Pt. 1)

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.

Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week!

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…

Episode 148: When Narcissism Comes to Church with Chuck DeGroat (Pt. 2)

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.

Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week!

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… 

Episode 147: When Narcissism Comes to Church with Chuck DeGroat (Pt. 1)

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.

Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week!

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… 

Episode 146: Steve Carter – The Gift of Pain

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… 

Episode 145: Re-enchanting the Text – A Conversation with Cheryl Bridges-Johns

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… 

Episode 144: A Conversation with Sharon & Ike Miller

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…

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