Category: Current Issues

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 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 138: The Five Masculine Instincts with Chase Replogle

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.

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First and foremost, I’m a pastor, and I’ve watched over the last few years how the topic of masculinity has become controversial conversation… 

I was seeing the guys in my congregation struggle with this, and I wanted to create a book that offered a path towards a better conversation—a conversation about character…

The cultural ways of having this conversation are that either we need to deconstruct masculinity, or we need to indulge it… but what both of these approaches have in common is that they focus on externals rather than on the internal realities of a man…

I’m always careful to say that these “instincts” are not the five sins of man, nor are they the five expectations… the question is how we become mature men, given these instincts…

God initiated a conversation with Cain… I think that’s really profound… you’d imagine that Cain would ask God why he rejected his sacrifice… but he doesn’t… he acts impulsively and sarcastically…

Cain’s sarcasm is a thin veil for his contempt for God… his immaturity makes him reactive and winds up perpetually immature… he’s the picture of a lost adolescent, perpetually adrift… 

For men—if you find yourself struggling to take things seriously, or find yourself immediately reactionary, God may be using precisely those things to make you a better man… 

Samson has divine experiences in the midst of adventure, but instead of it enlightening him, he just indulges it and becomes less discerning…

This theme becomes larger and larger until he gives away his secret, I think, as a way of just being done with it… he’s sick of it all…

If you’re constantly trying to find meaning in adventure, and it’s weakening your commitments to place and family and vocation, then perhaps you’re putting something on adventure that it’s never going to be able to deliver…

A lot of pastors, in their search for adventure, are disrupting the framework of their congregations… we need to satisfy that thirst for adventure inside the boundaries of our lives…  

Episode 125: An Interview with Lyle Wells – Empire vs. Kingdom Leadership

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.

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I think there’s a great exhaustion to come… people have been grinding for so long that at some point your body reacts…

For many leaders, their voice changed during the pandemic… we were focused on the crisis, as we needed to be… but my fear is that many leaders haven’t taken their eyes back up to the horizon…

Many organizations have also developed an addiction to adrenaline… and now it has become their identity and their purpose… for many, endurance has become the goal rather than effectiveness… 

This is a season that ought to grow our ability to be resilient… we need to set our faces back towards our purpose and call and march boldly… but we also need to be still and wait for God to move…

We talk about taking “pit stops” that make the workload more manageable, because we know that the people in our organizations are fatigued…

One of the things we implemented is something we call “no meeting Mondays”… we were doing so much on Mondays that by the time 4:00 rolled around, they were already maxed out… 

If there was one thing I could say to leaders, it is that “your tank is your responsibility”… as a leader, you have to develop a working knowledge of two things: 1) What do you look like when your tank runs low? And 2) What fills up your tank?

Kingdoms and empires are really interesting… we start with the basic premise that no one wants to be average… in ministry it is even more pronounced, because it’s not just a job but a calling… 

We’ve noticed that on the journey people get stuck or they get scared… they need guides to help them overcome their challenges… the most pivotal decision we make when we step into leadership is whether we will be heroes or guides… 

Problems accrue in organizations when leaders—who are supposed to be guides—turn into heroes… that’s when churches become empires… often this happens unintentionally… 

The most fun you can have as a leader is investing in somebody and seeing them thrive in what God’s called them to do… but this is a fundamental shift for a lot of people… 

Episode 120: A Church Called Tov (Pt. 2)

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… 

Episode 119: A Church Called Tov (Pt. 1)

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.

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

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… 

Episode 118: The Power of Place

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… 

Episode 115: The Resilient Pastor (Pt. 2)

IIn this episode (part two of two) we sit down with Glenn Packiam to talk with him about his forthcoming book The Resilient Pastor: Leading Your Church in a Rapidly Changing World. (Releases in February—order 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 new paganism presents a real challenge… because if people are managing the practical needs of their lives by getting what they need through the new paganism, it makes the church’s appeal more difficult… what does the church offer that people don’t already have…?

This is one of the reasons why the gospel is racing through the global South and is waning in the West… the church is in decline in the West in part because we’re rich and have our needs met… 

Part of the reason it also may be in decline is that because we have positioned the gospel as only therapeutic, and once the practical need is satisfied, then the need for the gospel goes away… but perhaps the gospel is about MORE than the therapeutic… 

Another thing we are seeing is expressive individualism… it is the exaltation of the self as the source and goal of all goodness… my measure of what I am going to do is whether or not it will make “me” a “better me”…

People used to discover meaning in the world, but now we think that our job is to construct meaning in the world… this is why we hear people talk about “your truth” and “my truth”… it sounds nice in the suburbs, but it doesn’t work in Taliban-haunted Afghanistan…

What Christian spirituality has to do is claim the interiority while also showing how all the pieces of the world fit together… 

The aftermath of all of this is very messy… one person said, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him…” and I think that describes so many people… 

I have an impulse in my heart to say that the church just needs to keep its doors open and trust that people will come… but Jesus is the one who goes out after the lost sheep… we need to go out and meet the culture where it is at…

We must never give up on the one thing that we have to offer that no one else does—the presence and power of God… 

We need to make room for the power of God… Paul says that one of the signs that the Gentiles belong to the kingdom is that the Spirit is at work… people don’t come to church for the coffee; they come for the presence and power of God, and that’s the one thing we’re carrying… 

Episode 114: The Resilient Pastor (Pt. 1)

In this episode (part one of two) we sit down with Glenn Packiam to talk with him about his forthcoming book The Resilient Pastor: Leading Your Church in a Rapidly Changing World. (Releases in February—order 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!

In some ways the pandemic was the instigator of new changes… in other ways it accelerated some that were already in process… and in still other ways it revealed changes that had happened that maybe we had masked over… 

The tectonic plates that have shifted are Christianity and country… many of the things that we take for granted in Western civilization (like civil rights) have Christian roots… but now Christianity no longer has a prominent place… 

The big question for Western civilization is whether we can keep the fruit of a Christian culture when it is severed from its roots…

To say that we are in a “secular age” does not mean that we are post-religion, it means that we have decoupled the relationship between religion and the ordering of society…

Now we are seeing a surge in the gap left by that decoupling… one of the elements of that surge is a new pluralism in the West which is syncrestic and imperialistic… the new pluralism is where people say “I’ll take a dash of Buddhism and a dash of Hinduism and a little Christianity…”

In a way, the new pluralism is a response to religious fundamentalism… if embracing religions in their totality is seen to be evil, then taking a little of each is a way of hedging our bets…

One of the challenges here is that when I’m in conversations with people and they are leveraging a critique against the church, they don’t recognize that many of those critiques are dependent on what the church has taught…

There’s a greater burden now on the church to show that what it is teaching is good… that religion is good is no longer taken for granted… there’s an invitation of the Spirit here to show how what we believe is good for civil society…

Christianity at its best has always at its best has been able to name what is good about different religions and systems of thought while also showing how Christ corrects and completes them…

Another element of the surge is a new kind of paganism… in the old paganism, you used the gods as means to your own end… the new paganism is things like technology, commerce, and politics… it is a way to get what I want and make me feel better…  

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