January 2021 – Essential Church

Episode 102: An Interview with Rich Villodas – A Deeply Formed Life

In this episode we sit down with pastor and author Rich Villodas to discuss his book, The Deeply Formed Life.

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The five values of our congregation are contemplative rhythms, racial reconciliation, interior examination, sexual wholeness, or missional presence… we’re trying to offer these values to the world and to the church as a paradigm of faithfulness to Jesus…

Contemplative rhythms are not just about slowing down our pace, but also giving ourselves over to God so that we can address the issues of our day from a deeper kind of wisdom…

We need to resist formational compartmentalization… the evangelical tradition prioritizes right thinking, the Pentecostal tradition prioritizes right experience, and the progressive tradition prioritizes right action… I want to hold them all together…

The foundation of engaging matters of race is thinking about the gospel differently… if I limit the gospel to a post-mortem status, I’ll miss it… I’ve found myself this past year regularly coming back to the question, “What do we mean when we say ‘the gospel’?”

I’ve found myself also this past year reframing for people what racism really is… it’s not just an individual thing… we need to look at it from an individual, interpersonal, and institutional perspective…

We need to think about how our family of origin shaped us with respect to race… to have people reflect on that and name it is painful… but we need to go back to the scene of the crime—where the malformation first took place…

We also need to practice listening to other people’s experiences “in the bond of peace”… those who have had the privileges of social power must take the lead to listen first and most often…

I am very hopeful for the church… I’m in conversation with so many pastors who are showing leadership, creativity, and innovation… a willingness to try new things amidst a new reality, and doing it with joy…

I’m also encouraged by so many people who are investigating the claims of Christ… I’m hearing so many stories about how the pandemic, our current political climate, and the racial hostilities of the past year are pulling people to something deeper and higher…

Episode 101: An Interview with Steve Cuss – Managing Leadership Anxiety.

In this episode, we sit down with Steve Cuss to talk about his book Managing Leadership Anxiety and how leaders can become not only more self-aware but also wise about managing both their own anxiety and that of others. You can learn more about Steve and his work at capablelife.me.

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This book was born out of some measure of personal desperation… from a deep desire that the life I was proclaiming to others was also the life I was living…

All chronic anxiety is based on false belief and false need… leadership anxiety is what happens to us when we don’t get what we feel we need to be okay…

One form of this for me was the belief that every sermon I preached needed to be the best sermon people had ever heard… then, whether it went really well or poorly, I became anxious… I was living under a false need…

There are universal sources of anxiety, where it doesn’t matter how you’re wired, if you’re in that situation, you’ll be anxious… for instance, whenever we are in situations where we don’t know what to do, we’ll be anxious… that’s where a lot of pastors are right now…

When a pastor is better at eloquently telling people about the love of God than they are at experiencing it for themselves, they are going to hit a wall…

Burnout isn’t because of workload… burnout happens because we haven’t addressed, for instance, what happens when the critic calls and all of our old “stories” from the past come up… we can’t control whether that will happen, only our response to it…

What anxiety does is that it tells us a lie… it is spiritual warfare… it’s about the story we tell ourselves and the voice of our inner critic… the gospel frees us from the tyranny of believing these lies…

The first step to becoming a non-anxious leader is to pay hyper attention to your own reactivity… and then to learn to notice how your anxiety infects other people and how their anxiety infects you…

I think that we are failing at discipling our people into non-anxiousness… most people are more discipled by their political point of view than they are by Jesus…

Episode 100: Responding to January 6th

In this episode we sit down to talk about the events that transpired in our nation’s capitol on January 6th, what those events are telling us, and how the church needs to respond to it.

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The timing of what happened in our nation’s capitol could not have been worse for pastors… we’re all feeling it… that we didn’t need this… but sometimes we don’t have the luxury of choosing timing…

What we saw in our nation’s capitol is an accumulation of emotions that have been building up for a long time… it was hard to watch… I want to come out and say publicly that I condemn mob violence in any form… it was travesty, demonic, it was a sin…

We’ve always told our people to vote and get involved in politics… we’re not a-political… but we also believe that maintaining our witness to Jesus is the paramount thing… we have to maintain the integrity of our witness…

We need to ask ourselves one primary question: What is it that God blesses? That question leads me back to the beatitudes, which teaches us what God blesses… what we saw at our nation’s capitol is not the beatitudes being fleshed out…

We cannot choose the ways of the world and get the kingdom of God… if you want the kingdom of heaven to come to the earth, you have to choose the narrow way of Jesus…

The crucial thing about the way of Jesus is that it’s not quietism… Jesus bears truthful witness all the way to the end… but what he won’t do is he won’t yank the reins of power back…

At some point it just comes down to having faith: do we believe that God is in charge or not…? Do we still believe that the Holy Spirit is better at changing hearts than we are…?

I think in this moment, something is being driven out… if we’ll respond to the invitation of the Spirit, Jesus will cast some things out of us…

The meek will inherit the earth… we’re not trying to protect something that’s already given so much as we are trying to live in a way that positions us to receive what God will one day give…

What we’re all afraid of is that there’s some identifiable group out there that’s going to take away everything we hold dear…