Author: Aaron Olson

Episode 113: An Interview with Dee Wilson

In this episode we sit down to chat with the newest member of the New Life Worship staff, Grammy-winning artist Dee Wilson.

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A Grammy is really cool… but honestly, the coolest thing for me has been my daughter, who is so proud of it… to watch the lightbulb go on for her—that means so much to me…

I’ve been blessed to write with amazing artists that I love and respect… I don’t take it for granted…

The song I’m most proud of has to be between Rose Petals and The Medicine… I love it when a person says they felt something they never felt before because of the song… 

The first thing that you have to integrate isn’t the music, but the person… they have their own culture and view of the world… it’s not fair to invite my songs but not invite me…

So if you’re going to bring someone in, you have to know that you’re bringing in a person… you have to learn to love each other… and then the songs will come…

The church I grew up in was an anomaly among the churches in the area… we set the culture that worship isn’t about your preference but about giving glory to God… the sound of unity is so much more important than what the chord changes are… 

I’ve so appreciated being at New Life because we can do hymns and then go to gospel music… 

What keeps me ‘true north’ is my wife, who doesn’t care about Grammys… I’ve learned to lean on the relationships that don’t need anything from me other than for me to be whole… 

My wife and daughter don’t thrive from me being successful but from me being grounded, close to Jesus, and dedicated to his cause… 

If the things that are happening to me now had happened when I was 25, I wouldn’t have been able to handle it… I’m so glad to be surrounded by the people I’m surrounded by now…

Episode 112: An Interview with Tara Beth Leach – Radiant Church: Restoring the Credibility of our Witness

In this episode we sit down with pastor and author Tara Beth Leach to talk about her book Radiant Church: Restoring the Credibility of our Witness and what the church can do to recover a kingdom ethos. Grab a copy of her book 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! I am a daughter of evangelicalism… I wanted to be like Billy Graham when I grew up… the first time I walked into Willow Creek, I thought it was the epitome of what the church could be about… that’s just how I was formed…  It wasn’t until 2007 and 2008 that I began to look around and say, “Something isn’t right, here”… the first thing was women in ministry… so many women who were gifted to teach and preach didn’t have a role and they were leaving the church to take corporate jobs…  Later, seeing the church’s participation in Christian nationalism, racism, and success culture and the failure of many church leaders made me think that something wasn’t right…   It’s important that we love the church AND critique the church… we can be “all in” and still critique the church…  We have rooted ourselves in storylines that are not grounded in the grand narrative of Scripture… we have to go back and recover that narrative… our call to bear witness begins with Abraham where the Lord tells him that his descendants will shine like stars… we are those stars…  Let me be the first to confess that I am lured to success as much as anyone… I have always worked in the megachurch world, and it is so easy to pay attention to measurables like attendance and money… it’s easy to lose sight of the more important questions…   We have been hijacked by individualism in the church… it has distorted our witness… when faith becomes all about me, or all about a ticket to heaven, then we forsake the prayer that Jesus teaches, “on earth as it is in heaven” in which we participate as a PEOPLE…   We can’t talk about the missional crisis in the church until we talk about the formational crisis first… the gospel is about restoration, about the healing of all creation… the kingdom mission is about a partnership with the work that the triune God is doing to restore all creation…  We are called to be Great Commandment AND Great Commission people… justice and evangelism need to be reclaimed as the mission that we’ve been called to…   One practice we need to cultivate is a new kind of examen… we need to open ourselves to the Spirit by listening to our neighbors, women, people of color, and people that have been hurt by the church… not listening to prove a point but listening to receive…

Episode 111: An Interview with Lucy Peppiatt – Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women (Pt. 2)

In this episode (part two of two) we sit down with theologian and New Testament scholar Lucy Peppiatt to talk about her book Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Texts in which she unpacks why and how the biblical texts traditionally used to support the subordination of women to men might not be saying what we think they’re saying.

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With Genesis 2, people will say that because the woman was made after the man, she is subordinated to him… but I don’t think that’s warranted by the text… 

But with Genesis 3:16, it’s very interesting… human beings have eaten of the fruit, and God speaks over them the world that they have now created for themselves… God is revealing to them what they are going to have to live with… 

There are traditions that would say that God is speaking curses over them, but I see it as God saying, “This is what I told you would happen…” So his words to the woman encapsulate the dysfunctional relationship that now ensues between the man and the woman… 

Household codes were a normal part of the ancient world, and were normally addressed to men… Paul is making any great and different claim by calling the male of the household the “head”… it is descriptive not prescriptive… 

But what is fascinating about the Christian household is that the texts address the woman directly… women, slaves, and children are all addressed, along with the men… this is really powerful, subversive teaching…  

The apostles are saying to the men that their wives are their only sexual partner, which is radical for the ancient world… the men are called to a much higher standard than any other men of their time… they are called to a monogamous, loving relationship with their wives, in front of everyone… 

We might have wanted Paul to go further in overturning oppressive systems, but when we look at his letters, we can see that the seeds of revolution are planted… 

Ephesus was a place where the cult of Artemis was central… many wealthy women in Ephesus were priestesses in the cult, and it seems that some converted and came into the church, and became the false teachers…  

Once you realize this, you can construct a picture [of what Paul was addressing in 1 Timothy 2]… it helps make sense of Paul’s words…

Episode 110: An Interview with Lucy Peppiatt – Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women (Pt. 1)

In this episode (part one of two) we sit down with theologian and New Testament scholar Lucy Peppiatt to talk about her book Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Texts in which she unpacks why and how the biblical texts traditionally used to support the subordination of women to men might not be saying what we think they’re saying.

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In my twenties I made a commitment to Jesus and married an Anglican clergyman… I was busy with church and kids but felt like God was calling me into a ministry and teaching… and loved it… as I sought more training in theology, I found that I loved that too… I did a masters and halfway through was encouraged to do a PhD…  

Instead of “complementarian” I use the term “mutualist”… I was drawn to this term because when I first heard the term “complementarian” I assumed it meant someone who believed that male and female complemented each other perfectly…  

When I later learned what “complementarian” meant, I realized it assumed a power structure between men and women and that is not what I thought… I think men and women are different and those differences are good, but I don’t think “complementarian” best describes what I think… 

These issues are not cosmetic for the church, but they strike to the core of the church’s understanding of salvation…  

My experience of coming to know God in my twenties was uncompromisingly affirming… it built me up as a person… encountering the love of God was really life-changing… when I discovered [subordinationist theology] I realized that kind of setup of relationships hinders or blocks the revelation of God to a woman of who she is in Christ… 

I think that it prevents her from understanding that before Christ she can come into the fullness of who she is, without needing a man to mediate that to her… it’s a distortion of the gospel because it is a distortion of what Christ says to a woman… 

Genesis 1, 2, and 3 are seminal texts… we know based on Genesis 1 that male and female together are made in the image of God…  

Old Testament scholars make a very clear case for the phrase “helper suitable” connoting strength and mutuality… for the Hebrew phrase to be translated “helpmeet” when the word itself [Hebrew: ezer] has been used for God, it is disingenuous…

When the man cries out “this is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone”, he is saying that she is his perfect counterpart who will be with him and is his substance and equal… that she comes from his side denotes equality and mutuality…

Episode 109: Developing Preachers and Teachers

In this episode we sit down to talk about some of the ins and outs of intentionally developing preachers and teachers in our congregations.

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Our conviction is that the word of God has to “go”, but we need to train people up to do this… 

A lot of churches depend only on seminaries to train preachers and teachers… but it’s not until you’re in the soil of the local congregation that you really develop your voice in preaching and teaching… 

The Bible is full of stories of God putting his hand on people, and the church’s responsibility is to call that out of them… 

Developing preachers and teachers need both opportunities and honest feedback… when I was a young pastor, a guy invited me to preach weekly at a truck stop chapel… that was where I got my start, but the problem was that I got no feedback… 

It’s a little like a musician getting started—if you can play in clubs and bars, you’ll get good pretty fast, and then when you’re on the big stage with all the support, it’s easier than if you just got thrown up there… you need to say “yes” to opportunities that come your way… 

Too many preachers are looking for instant success… the hard work of getting better requires a lot of work… after a hundred times—maybe—you’ll begin to find your voice… by two hundred messages you should be comfortable in your own skin… 

We need to create rooms where we review the work (of preaching) that we’ve done, and then preview the work that’s coming up… 

It’s important to surround yourself with multigenerational, multiethnic, and different gender voices… I’m trying to surround myself with people that will help me understand the people I’m pastoring…

We also need to create layers of opportunities… it doesn’t have to be 30-minute sermons from the start… even two to three-minute offering moments are a great place to start… 

Help people understand that preaching is a speech-act… it needs to be something that we can listen to and enjoy… listen to the great storytellers and writers… 

If we’ve got the greatest story that’s ever been told, we ought to be able to handle it beautifully..

Episode 108: An Interview with Winn Collier – A Burning in My Bones

In this episode we sit down with Winn Collier, Director of the Eugene Peterson Center for Christian Imagination at Western Theological Seminary and to talk with him about the release of his book, A Burning in My Bones: The Authorized Biography of Eugene Peterson. Grab a copy here.

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When I was a young, struggling pastor, someone handed me Eugene Peterson’s Working the Angles… I needed that book… I didn’t have language for what it meant to be a pastor, and Eugene gave me the starting of that language… 

A lot of people don’t understand Eugene… they think that even though he grew up Pentecostal, he left it in a huff… but that wasn’t true… he was invited into the Presbyterian world and at the end of the day it was more about what was in front of him… 

For someone who had as deep an ecclesiology as he did, he was profoundly un-enamored with any kind of ideal about any church tradition… when people asked why he was Presbyterian, he would say, “Because God put me here and I made a promise…” 

Eugene asked God to make him a saint… but a saint for him wasn’t someone who had achieved a nirvana-like experience but rather someone who in their very human body was so ravished by the love of Christ that their interior and exterior were becoming congruent… 

Eugene had a burning longing for holiness, for God… and at the same time he understood that a saint was someone who was becoming more and more human… that was the source of his gravitas… 

He insisted in a hundred different ways that all of our ideals have got to die… our pictures of the world are not the real world… until we let Jesus illuminate the actual realities of our life, we will just be fighting against God… 

There are a lot of things that Eugene stands for which we hear in an abstracted kind of way… but Eugene didn’t believe in abstract principles… he was interested in particular people in particular situations… he always started with, “Tell me what God is doing in your life…” 

When you ask the question, “What does Eugene Peterson contribute to the pastoral imagination?”, I think the answer is, “God…” 

We are so desperate to have God at the very core of our being again… all the upheaval we are seeing in our culture… and all the questions we are holding about the future… what the future holds is God… Eugene relentlessly pointed to the Triune God…

Episode 107: Four Rules for Preachers

In this episode we sit down to talk about some of the marks of genuine Spirit-inspired preaching.

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What I found fascinating reading through Micah is that the same word used for “wind” is the word used for “Spirit”… one wind is holy and one is not… not everyone knows how to discern the difference… 

Pastors should pray before they preach… we are under tremendous pressure these days… there are thousands of land mines… the temptation is to fall under the fear of man and to preach in a way that simply satisfies the base…  

The occupational hazard of the experienced preacher is that we can do this from our heads… we get good at outlining ideas, but we can forget that a good sermon is supposed to come from the living center of our union with God… 

Pastors should revere the Scriptures… right now there are a lot of people demanding content that is not Scriptural… they want us to preach on certain topics that are not informed and shaped by the Holy Scriptures… 

I believe it is going to become more and more important for pastors to explain why these texts are still important for us today… we need to get back to helping people understand the overarching narrative of the Scriptures… 

One of the things that we have learned is that by preaching the Scriptures, we get all the “felt needs” topics thrown in… we just have to be willing to hang in there for the long game… 

When you do preach it should be producing the fruits of the Spirit… what kind of people is your preaching producing…? How is it shaping them…? And in what spirit are you preaching the text…? Anger and divisiveness are not of the Holy Spirit… 

Many people think that the issues we’re seeing in our culture demand an angry response… I am very concerned about what’s happening in our culture… but I want to speak out on them in a radically new way… 

Pastors should be pointing people to Jesus… I know that sounds obvious, but the Great Commission has not been amended… we have the same assignment the saints of old had: to bring people to Jesus…

Episode 106: An Interview with Dr. Chris Green – Sanctifying Interpretation

In this episode we sit down with Dr. Chris Green to talk about his book, Sanctifying Interpretation, and how God uses the ‘troubling texts’ of Scripture to make us holy. Grab a copy of it here, and/or read Andrew’s review of it here.

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My relationship with Scripture began in church… we went to church 4-5 times per week and the sermons were almost always from the Old Testament… the readings of the Old Testament were almost always typological… 

From the time of my childhood, the Old Testament texts—especially the troubling ones—have been the ones that have drawn me…  

I believe that God is like Jesus… if that is true, then all of Scripture is written by Jesus… so we should look at his teaching to see what the rest of Scripture is… 

When you look at the Gospel portraits of Jesus, you see that he is incredibly difficult… we have this notion that Jesus was a simple teacher… but that’s not true… Jesus in the Gospels almost never says anything that anyone understands, and when they do think they understand it they try to kill him… that’s true to what the Old Testament is… 

Before I wrote this book, I was convinced that you couldn’t talk about reading Scripture without first talking about what it means to be human and what it means to be the people of God… human beings have a calling: to be interpreters and mediators, and we mediate by interpreting… we are priests in that way… 

This, I believe, is the only way to understand why God would give us the Bible in the first place: it must be that he means for us to have to grapple with texts… Jesus never writes anything himself; he inspires others to write his story—and this is how Jesus writes and teaches… 

The reason that interpretation is difficult is because the process of becoming holy people is difficult…  

When we’re reading troubling texts, the first and most important thing is to pay attention to the fact that we are troubled, to lean into it, and to ask why we are troubled…  

Everyone says that the Old Testament is full of judgment… but if you actually go back and read the texts, what you see is that without exception, the judgments fail to work… no judgment short of the judgment that falls on Christ actually solves the human situation…  

Everyone needs to read Scripture… but we need to stop talking about it and actually read it, and read it well… we need to defamiliarize ourselves with our “readings” of Scripture and go back and read them with fresh eyes…

Episode 105: The Places of Encounter

In this episode we feature a conversation we had at our recent Essential Church Learning Community on “places of encounter” in our worship gatherings.

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Worship in the early church was designed around a fourfold shape or movement: the (re)gathering of the body, the proclamation of the Word, the response (which was usually done at the Table), and the sending, where the church is sent back out as missionaries… 

One of the things that can happen to us when we think about “encounter” as the place where the Holy Spirit “fits” within our worship service… but in the thinking of the New Testament, the Spirit is the whole logic of the service… the Spirit supersaturates everything that the church is… 

The third stanza of the Creed speaks to this… the church is a continuation of the stanza on the creed… the impact of the Triune God in the world is the existence of the church in the first place… which means that the whole service, in a sense, is “charismatic”…  

When we’re thinking about the “encounter” paradigm, it’s easy to think that we only encounter the Spirit in one part of the service… but this runs contrary to what Paul says in Ephesians 5…  

Paul thinks that we get filled with the Spirit by speaking to one another, by singing and making music, by giving thanks, and by submitting to one another… which means that we encounter the Spirit in each one of these places… 

Too much evangelical preaching prizes doctrinal correctness as the bar we must measure up to… too much charismatic preaching prizes experience… we think both are crucial… 

We think that the sermon is the place where the Word of God himself is speaking through the words of Scripture and through the words of the preacher… good preaching happens when we ask, “What is the Spirit saying NOW to these people?” 

Art is intentionally evocative… when Cranmer wrote the prayer book, he knew that what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies… part of why the arts belong in church is because we are trying to help people love Jesus, not just learn about Jesus… 

Sacraments are a proclamation that there is a startling physicality to the life of faith… we’re not gnostics or dualists… Jesus gives his people bread and wine because Jesus thought that faith was startlingly physical… to follow Jesus is to become “fleshy” in all the right ways… 

I want to remind you that sacraments are not just nice little mental assents to something that happened but that Jesus is changing us spiritually, physically, physiologically through them… 

The Spirit comes to us through other people… when we show up in worship, we are bringing the gifts and graces God has given us for other people…

Episode 103: An Interview with Dr. Simeon Zahl – The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience

In this episode we sit down with Dr. Simeon Zahl to talk about how a robust theology of the Holy Spirit can give us better language for talking about the role of experience in the life of a Christian. Grab a copy of his book, The Holy Spirit and Christian Experience 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! The main thing that drove me to write this book was that Protestant theology had gotten into a false dichotomy: either suspicion about experience or being uncritically accepting of it… I just think we need a better way of accounting for the experiential dimensions of the Spirit’s work…  I grew up with good Lutheran theology, but when I was in college at Harvard I got involved in the Alpha course… and at the Holy Spirit weekend, a lot of people had experiences of the Holy Spirit that were life-changing… I had been taught that I needed to make a choice between my Lutheran theology and the charismatic experience, but Alpha showed me that wasn’t the case…  People mean different things when they talk about ‘experience’… but fundamentally, everything is experience… you can’t get rid of it… the thing to do is to try to think well about it…   The main way the Scripture leads us to think about experience is through the doctrine of the Holy Spirit… the Spirit is the right way of talking about God’s action in the world…   There’s a story that’s told in the theological academy that the doctrine of justification by faith is a cold, legal, rationalistic form of Christianity… but when you read [the Reformers], you see that it’s all about a kind of experience that you’re being led to… an experience of moving from terror to joy…   Biblically and theologically, the Spirit is involved in three areas of life: salvation, sanctification, and the mission of the church… these things are not abstract… they are about having our desires transformed so that we desire the things of God…   There’s a way of talking about the Spirit where when you’re stuck in behavior patterns you can’t change then it must be a sign that you’re not a Christian… that always bothered me… what do we do when there isn’t striking transformation?  Luther is helpful here… he says you are both a sinner and a saint, which creates room to admit what is true… the gospel creates a firewall against despair… when our attention is on God, things go back into their proper shape…  We need to beware where we are preaching an idea or a concept that hasn’t been filtered through experience… it will create a disconnect for people…

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