March 2022 – Essential Church

Episode 132: The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb? – An Interview with Kyle Strobel

In this episode we sit down with Dr. Kyle Strobel to talk about the nature of power via his book (co-authored with Jamin Goggin), The Way of the Dragon or the Way of the Lamb? Grab it here.

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There’s a power system assumed by the world, the flesh, and the devil, and you see it when Jesus rebukes Peter: he’s set his mind on the things of man…

Another way to talk about the way of the dragon is the way of power in strength for the sake of control and domination; whereas the way of the lamb is the way of power in weakness for the sake of love…

One error is to see power as bad… those who are left-leaning have a tendency to demonize power… those who are right-leaning tend to worry less about power but are almost willing to embrace ANY power as long as it leads to the right ends…

Many of us simply accept the world’s definitions of power and then assume that Jesus is doing something else (not power-related)… but that’s not right… Jesus is redefining power entirely and is calling us to faith…

When we started this project, we knew it was an important issue… it influences everything… how you pray, how you worship, how you engage or don’t engage in politics—it all presupposes power… but the church is refusing to talk about it…

If you assume a vision of worldly power, the way of Jesus just won’t make sense…

Even a lot of the ways we understand spiritual gifts—it tends to be about actualizing strength, which is ironic, because Paul’s correspondence to the Corinthians is all about power being realized in weakness…

For folks in fulltime vocational ministry, the temptation is to construct a self… and if true power is love, if we really internalize that, it will help us realize that our value is received and not generated…

The central temptation for leaders is to use their natural ability to get things done… that’s the way of the dragon… if you’re a natural speaker, for instance, you’ll be tempted to use that gift to “win”… your strength is a place of wild temptation…

We need to constantly ask, “Lord, how am I tempted not to trust you? How am I tempted not to have to have faith…?”

Episode 131: “Where the Light Fell” with Philip Yancey

In this episode we sit down with one of the most prolific authors of the last hundred years, Philip Yancey, to talk with him about his new memoir Where the Light Fell.

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I knew that the version of Christianity I had been given—racist, angry, legalistic—couldn’t be right, and yet I also knew there was something worth salvaging…

I’ll often tell people that I grew up thinking that God was a scowling super-cop in the sky… it took me a long time to realize that the heart of the universe is not a scowl but a smile… the story of history is the story of God’s love…

Many “exvangelicals” have wistful memories of their youth… I wrote this book because I wanted to reach those people… my reasons for becoming an “ex” were stronger than most of theirs… and yet I emerged having discovered the love and grace of God…

My father was a victim of polio… he was 23 and he and my mother had planned to go on the mission field… after he died, my mother made a vow to God that me and my brother would replace him as missionaries to Africa… when we didn’t fit the script, the vow became a kind of curse… it was a theological error…

My brother and I took different paths in relating to our upbringing… he became one of Atlanta’s original hippies… I saw what that did to him… it was a living illustration of what happens to us when we have nothing to go toward…

Pain redeemed impresses me more than pain removed… often, it’s the hardest things we go through that are most important as we look back…

We are at a hinge time for the future of the evangelical church in the United States… we need to adjust to the fact that we’re not the home team anymore… this is new, and a lot of people don’t like it…

We are always called to live both in the city of God and in the city of humanity… we don’t take our marching order from political parties but from God… but there’s such an atmosphere of partisanship that it can be hard for people to know what to do…

The dialogue has gotten so crass and adversarial… Christians need to stand up against that… I want pastors, whatever they believe, to show the style of Jesus… our country needs this…

Episode 130: The Art of Healthy Conflict

In this episode, we share six rules for the art of having healthy conflict.

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I wish leadership was just sitting around reading your Bible, praying for a few people, and going home… but the reality is that we live in a fallen world, and in a fallen world there will be conflict…

Leadership is managing the differences of opinion among our people… people feel and think differently and when they come together in an organization, there will be conflict… leadership is stepping into that, knowing that the best things are often born out of conflict…

In a fallen world, any peace that is not conflictual is not true peace… we are living in a world that is not yet as it should be, and if we’re not willing to name the brokenness and deal with it, we have abdicated our responsibility as leaders…

What’s your motivation for leaning into conflict? For me, I’m not looking for a fight… I’m looking for the Holy Spirit… I’m looking for ways to build up and not tear down…

The first step is to confront in a timely manner… if something bothers me, I try to sleep on it and pray over it… if it is still bothering me after that, I need to go talk to that person…

The second step is to begin the conversation with affirmation… that affirmation is born out of prayer… we need to lead with what we love about the other person…

The third step is to not accuse but share your feelings… we don’t need to question people’s motives… we just need to speak honestly, without accusation…

The fourth step is to learn to listen… not every conversation needs to be argued… what I’ve found is that if I can just get people to start talking, I’ll learn everything I need to know…

The Bible calls the devil the accuser of the brethren… one of the primary functions of the enemy is that he accuses us one to another… the voice of accusation in our ears about each other is not the voice of the Spirit…

The fifth step is to be honest… oftentimes people lose courage in the face of the need to be honest… we need to learn to tell the truth and say it to the strength that we feel it… truth needs to be the benchmark of our organizations…

The sixth step is to be gracious… come into the meeting willing to entertain the possibility that you are wrong… both parties in the conversation need grace: you and them… if you pour out grace, that’s what you’ll get in the long run…