Month: November 2018

Episode 047: A Conversation with Andrew Wilson

In this episode we sit down to talk to our friend Andrew Wilson about his new book Spirit and Sacrament: An Invitation to Eucharismatic Worship to talk about the what, why, and how of blending the charismatic and sacramental expressions.

 

 

https://www.spiritandsacrament.com/

 

I don’t remember where I first came up with the word (“eucharismatic”), but my history is that I have some Anglicanism in my childhood that was non-charismatic… and then I went to a charismatic church that had almost no awareness of the historical church…

 

At around six or seven years ago I started thinking there was a need for the church to bring together these two gifts… the term eucharismatic is a putting together of two words: eucharistic and charismatic, and the link between them is charis—grace (or chara—joy)…

 

When we understand the gift of God in the spiritual gifts and the gift of God in the Lord’s supper, we can receive all of God’s gifts rather than just some…

 

For me, the sacramental tradition was not associated with joy… but then I began reading the history of the church, these people who had almost unutterable moments of revelation of the beauty of who God is [while celebrating the eucharist]…

 

The Lord’s Supper is the lovely thing where everyone knows that this is something they are supposed to do; the question is how and how often… our church was doing it in homes, like they did in Acts 2…

 

For us, we had to recognize that whatever we did not practice on Sunday we did not ultimately value… you can say the same for the gifts… unless we do this at some point on Sundays, the church will think this is relatively unimportant…

 

I think that for many in more traditional churches, they are concerned about the charismatic out of a concern for orthodoxy and for things to be done in a decently and in order kind of way…

 

One of the things you can do is pick low-hanging fruit… the judicious and careful use of a prophetic impression (and you might not even call it that)—most people, even the most conservative (traditional) are happy with the idea that God might lead them to do something…

 

You just need to be sensitive to the fact that for many people this is really new… you need to be able to explain things in a non-weird way what God is doing…

Episode 046: What is ‘Multi-Congregational’? (Part 2)

In this episode (the second of two) we sit down and finish our conversation about the multi-congregational model New Life Church has developed over the last several years. Why we did it, how it works, and what opportunities and challenges it presents.

 

 

This model is not your friend if you value speed and scale… if you want to go fast, this isn’t for you… it’s a crockpot not a microwave… it’s also not a model for scalability… there’s a cap on it because of built-in relationships…

 

What we’ve decided is that there’s a circle around in our city that we’re willing to plant congregations inside of… outside of that circle the best use of our time and resources would be to plant autonomous churches…

 

Another thing about this model is that if you don’t like people telling you “no,” you should stay away from it… but if you want to be collegial, familial, and do the slow work of building the kingdom together, then this is a great model for you…

 

Another challenge is that I’ve sent out a lot of really good leaders and so I have to constantly make sure the leadership pipeline at New Life North is replenished… I can’t just keep sending people out and ignore the leadership pipeline here…

 

So you have to move slow, but also think five years ahead… it takes 3-5 years to send out a leader like this with this much trust…

 

There is a sense in which we’ve multiplied one another’s trust… there are people here who trust Brady because they trust Daniel Grothe…

 

The reason our congregations are different is because Glenn and I are different… I’m not forcing Glenn to be a Brady clone…

 

Every house is different, but there’s a great sense of safety when you get to go back to your parents’ house, and I think that’s what New Life North feels like to these guys…

 

In order for us to be under one family covering, it has to be under one eldership, one family covering… each congregation has a “wisdom council” full of non-staff people who are watching them and their marriage…

 

I encourage all our elders to be present in our congregations from time to time… but I like the wisdom council because it gives people who are actually listening to the sermon and watching the pastors interact with the congregation… it gives a second layer of accountability which is super important…

 

The genius of this model is that it allows a lot of people to be taken care of very personally… it allows us all to live in proper pastoral work without silo-ing to much… we all are in all the work…

 

Episode 045: What is ‘Multi-Congregational’? (Part 1)

In this episode (the first of two) we sit down to talk about the multi-congregational model New Life has developed over the last several years—why we did it, how it works, and what opportunities and challenges it presents.

 

 

PART 1 SHOW NOTES

 

We stumbled into this, quite honestly… we knew we had a deep bench of teachers and preachers on our staff and we needed to infiltrate our city…

 

Brady was really taking a risk with me… he gave me a space to experiment and grow…

 

For us, we decided that the church should look more like a family model than a franchise… we wanted to create an environment for our “children” to thrive within their strengths…

 

We had a burden for a location and a leader who was willing to go… you have to have that… if the leader isn’t called to the location, it won’t work long-term…

 

I am not suggesting that everyone do it the way we did it… it requires a lot of vulnerability, a lot of honest conversation, and a great deal of trust… if you don’t have that, don’t even try…

 

All of us had to agree that when we had aggravations, we were going to talk about them… most relationships fall apart because we don’t know how to deal with conflict… this model is ripe with potential conflict…

 

We believe that to be a pastor is to be attentive to place, to the soil of where you’re planted… and so we CENTRALIZE our administrative [functions] but we CONTEXTUALIZE ministry…

 

If you’re in a church where you have a group of friends and you’re wondering how to expand, then this model will work for you… but if you’re in a church where you don’t have any preachers or teachers, this model is not for you… you need to spend a lot of time building relationship with each other…

 

The flip side of this is that we need to get clarity where clarity is possible… financials, percentages, benchmarks for hiring, etc.… you need to work that out as much as you can…

 

The tension came in when New Life Downtown was bringing in enough money to sustain them separately from us… so we came up with some percentages that would keep Glenn motivated and also kept finances coming back to us…

Episode 044: The Pastor in Relationship

In this episode, we sit down to talk about the kinds of relationships pastors need to cultivate in order to live and lead from a healthy place.

 

This is particularly tricky for young pastors or church planters… on one level, this is the last question you think about – who’s leading me, who’s caring for me?

 

Part of the reason this is so tricky is that there’s a power differential here… it can make it tricky to know what you’re seeing with people… are people drawing near to us because they care for us, or because they need us?

 

Only recently have I begun to think about the kinds of relationships I need… it’s not just about “having friends”… maybe we need to think of the pastor like Frodo Baggins… on the quest, you need several different kinds of people around you…

 

We need relationships inside the community certainly, but also relationships outside the community in order to stay healthy… keeping this in the right balance is crucial…

 

There’s already a distance between the pulpit and the pew in the very first interaction that people have with us… sometimes we unwittingly increase that gap… but we can also intentionally decrease that distance…

 

A spiritual director is someone that you see not exclusively when you’re in crisis… they are someone to help you see and pay attention to what is going on in your life, and even to bear witness to that…

 

What happens to us when we don’t have real relationships is that we become a parody of ourselves… we start being our persona and cease being the person God made us to be…

 

The fruits of the Holy Spirit are still the best index of whether or not we are healthy…

 

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