Author: Aaron Olson

Episode 062: The Old Testament and the Church (Pt 2)

This is part 2 of our conversation on how the Old Testament and the New Testament relate, and how we can faithfully preach and teach the Old Testament in the Church.

There is no kingdom without law, without rule… if there is a king, there are people who live under the king’s way, his rule…

The giving of the Law at Sinai begins with grace… he rescued them from slavery, saying, “I want to be yours and I want you to be mine, and this is what that looks like…”

The Law at Sinai both confirms and establishes the covenant, it reveals what God is like, and it shows us how we are to live in the world… 

One of the things we have to remember about the purity and hygiene laws is that the ancient Israelites were out in the desert without the kind of sanitation we have today… God wasn’t embarrassing them but protecting them and their society from getting sick… 

So many of the instructions regarding sacrifices are instructions on sacrifices for happy occasions… it’s about how to throw a party that honors God… 

Even the sin and guilt offerings are a tremendous blessing… in the ancient world, there was no way to get out from under the burden of having done something wrong… 

Some things from the Old Testament are strengthened in the New… the sexuality laws are strengthened and clarified in the New… on the question of sexuality Jesus takes them back to the beginning…

The Church in the first century is wrestling with how Jew and Gentile live together… they’re not throwing the Old Testament away but are looking to it for wisdom and guidance in how to be one people in Jesus… 

There is a “law” for Christians now… it is the law of the Spirit written on our hearts… bearing one another’s burdens, loving our neighbors as ourselves… it looks like the fruit of the Spirit… 

The major shift in the New Testament is not that there’s no law but that there is now the Spirit of God living inside of us enabling us to live in right relationship with God and others…

Episode 061: The Post Easter Blues

In this episode Pastor Brady and Andrew sit down to talk about some “do’s” and “don’ts” for pastors in the week following Easter.
The first thing is to celebrate the wins… that should be the focus of this week… so many great things happened… you need to fixate on that…  You need to take some time this week to celebrate each other… this is the week to pat people on the back and tell them how great it all was… celebrate the big wins and the little wins… Another thing to do this week, after all the celebrations – this is a great week to evaluate systems and processes… how did we do? were we prepared? what can we learn?… find some things to improve upon…  Comparison is the thief of our joy… one of the things I will not do is that I will not post our Easter numbers publicly… I remember what it was like when I was pastoring a church of 150 and churches down the street had 500 or 15,000 or twelve million or whatever [on Easter Sunday]… social media can drain the life of out you… we need to be content…  This week is a time to ease up on your schedule a bit… recharge your batteries… we need to remember that we just put out a lot of spiritual energy… Work out… go on a long walk… spend some time with your spouse… eat well… don’t medicate… sometimes when we’re depleted, we eat improperly or drink too much alcohol or eat too much sugar… don’t do that… we need to replenish… take a deep breath and detox a bit…  I do think we can see residual growth from Easter Sunday, if we do it well… but we also need to know that Easter came late this year and that some of the rhythms of our culture are going to impact attendance…  This Sunday might be a good one to let someone else preach… I’ve always tried to be present the Sunday after Easter, but for some of you, if you put in multiple services – it is okay to take this Sunday off, and not to feel guilty about it…  If you’re a congregation member, this is a really good week to drop your pastor a note… there’s a lot of discouraged pastors out there this week… a phone call or a gift card will go a long way… 

Episode 060: The Old Testament and the Church (Pt 1)

In this episode (part 1 of 2) we sit down to talk about the challenge of preaching and teaching Christ in and from the Old Testament.

When I first started reading the Bible I was drawn to the Old Testament because the stories seemed more colorful… but admittedly I read it more like Aesop’s fables…

For me the starting place is that the Old Testament is Christian Scripture… the Church has always regarded it that way… it is the story of the kingdom, which just doesn’t suddenly appear with Jesus… to understand that, you have to go back to the Old Testament…

You begin to learn to read the Bible with Jesus at the center… you see how much of the OT anticipates the Messiah, Jesus, who is and is to come… he is where the story was headed…

Ideas like kingdom, covenant, and temple are motifs that are summed up in Jesus… the OT is not just a preamble but a prelude, where the motifs of the “song” are first laid down… 

We can really only understand the Old Testament fully in light of Jesus… but we can also only understand Jesus fully in light of the Old Testament… 

One of the things that is sometimes lost on people is that the Early Church’s “Bible” WAS the Old Testament… the New Testament is really a running commentary on the Old Testament in light of the Christ event… 

Robert Jenson says “the Old Testament was there before the Church was; the question was never about whether the Church could accept the Old Testament but whether the Old Testament could accept the Church…”

Sometimes we “heroize” Old Testament characters… but really, guys like David aren’t the heroes… Yahweh is the hero… the God who is the Father of Jesus is the hero… 

The question is whether God changes or not… and God is always the Father of Jesus Christ in the power of the Holy Spirit… he’s always the “Three in One…”

Augustine’s phrase was “vestigia trinitate”… that God had left signatures of himself in the created world, and the Old Testament supremely… if we read the Old Testament that way, we’ll see that the God revealed in Jesus is the deep reality of these texts… 

Episode 059: Why Pastors Want to Quit

In this episode we sit down to talk about some of the things that make pastors want to quit the ministry, and what we can do about it.

One of the things I’ve seen is that pastors are discouraged… social media gives people the ability to give immediate feedback, and hardly ever is it positive…

 Another reason I hear more and more is that pastors are under financial pressure… they’re asked to do an enormous task, and many of them are underpaid… 

The onus is really on the board or eldership to figure out what is fair compensation for your pastor, because you want to keep them around…

There’s a great amount of comparison that happens with pastors… “Why aren’t you more like the famous pastor [I just watched on the internet]?”

The competitive spirit is ruining a lot of pastor’s souls… if you’re not careful to manage that in your heart, if it is the dominant voice you hear in the morning, you will drive yourself off a cliff…

The amount of family pressure pastors feel is another factor… oftentimes the church does not allow the pastor a place to openly confess brokenness… so pastors begin to go underground, to alcohol or drugs to medicate the pain…

It takes something like 200 leisure hours to form a close friendship… a lot of time as pastors what we have are ministry friends… and that’s good… but what we need are friendships that exist beyond the church…

We need to have robust interests in other things… I have a group of guys I go away with each summer for a week, where we play golf, eat, and catch up with one another… talking about things that detox all of our souls… 

It’s important not to over-invest meaning into this calling… if something overly encourages or overly discourages us about the church, it is an indication we are getting too much of our identity from it…

UNCUT: An Interview with Jimmy Mellado (Extended Version)

In this UNCUT and EXTENDED episode, Pastor Brady sits down with Jimmy Mellado, the president of Compassion International, for a wide-ranging interview on his background, the sources of poverty, and the challenges of leadership.

 

Episode 058: An Interview with Jimmy Mellado

In this episode Pastor Brady sits down with Jimmy Mellado, the president of Compassion International, for a wide-ranging interview on his background, the sources of poverty, and the challenges of leadership.

 

 

My mom said to me, “When someone grows up in poverty, they never think it is going to be a benefit to their children… and yet I can see how my growing up in poverty impacted not only you in a positive way, but is using it to be central to your life’s calling [to serve the poor]…”

 

We [at Compassion] are a church-equipping ministry… we believe that the strategy that Jesus invented of discipleship through a local church is in fact the best strategy to release anyone in any circumstance from poverty…

 

When we talk to pastors [in central American countries], we’ve learned that they’ve earned the respect of gang leaders, because the gang leaders don’t want their kids doing what they’re doing… so they’ve declared Compassion sites “no violence” zones…

 

Life in leadership is hard; life in leadership alone is impossible… I have to do life in community… I used to do mentoring groups with pastors, and on average 70% of them would say they didn’t have one friend that they could be fully disclosing with…

 

In my experience, as you lead over the long haul, you’ll either end up with a cynical heart, a hard heart, or a soft heart, and how you design your life will take you down one of those three paths…

 

The most important contribution you will make to the kingdom of heaven is not anything you do, but who you are becoming… I can’t stress that enough… that doesn’t mean we don’t care about results… “doing” matters a lot… but it is not more important than “being” in Christ…

 

A spiritual discipline can be any activity that you have dedicated to the Lord to either stop the natural flow of sin in your life, or increase the flow of the fruit of the Spirit in your life… spiritual disciplines help you do what you cannot do by “trying” alone…

 

Life will give you a lot of pop quizzes, and if you try to make the right decision when you get a character pop quiz, you’ll probably fail… you need to try to pre-decide how you’re going to handle the character pop quizzes that come your way…

Episode 057: The Pastoral Workweek

In this episode we sit down to talk about the central tasks of pastoral ministry and how to delegate and manage your time accordingly.

 

 

I have to do three things: lead the team, teach and preach, and be a shepherd to the congregation that’s in front of me… it’s hard to put a percentage to those things… the demands of people cannot be scheduled or predicted…

 

I tend to spend a lot of my time leading… 5-8 hours I spend studying for content for sermons… the rest of my time is available to pastor the congregation, to be present with them…

 

I try to keep track of ratios… generally I’m spending twice as much time on staff as I am on congregants… on an average week I might have four or so congregant meetings, and twelve or so staff-related meetings…

 

Most pastors that I coach have a hard time saying no, which means that the tyranny of the urgent tends to rob them…

 

What’s different about our job is how much content we have to create… most CEOs and leaders of small businesses might have to speak 4-6 times a year… we do that in a WEEK…

 

The pastoral vocation requires us to come up with so much creative content while also giving out so much emotional energy, which makes our job different from any other job on the planet, and most pastors don’t know how to manage that space and their energy…

 

For me, I have to think bigger than “sermon prep”… there’s something deeper than just preparing “the talk”… we have to cultivate a life from which messages emerge… we have to enrich the soil from which future messages will spring…

 

An older pastor once said to me, “Brady, don’t drown under the weight of people’s love… if you’re not able to say no to good things, you will drown under the weight of their love for you…”

 

The greatest gauge for me on whether I’m managing my schedule right is whether there is joy… I want to end my week with a certain sense of joy… if I can’t be joyful at home because of what work costs me, then something has to shift…

Episode 056: Jon Egan “Unveil” Interview

In this episode we sit down to talk with our dear friend and worship leader Jon Egan about his new album “Unveil” and all that he’s seeing and learning as a worship leader and songwriter. (You can pre-order Unveil wherever good music is sold online. You’ll get one song each week till the album releases on March 29th.)

 

 

For me this project was about singing song together… almost like giving the songs back to the people… we have so much going for us in modern worship, but my burden is “Are people actually singing?”

 

My story is not my story but God’s story… I can declare the realities of my life or I can declare something else… these songs are designed to equip the church to rise out of their own reality and sing a greater one…

 

Most of my life I’ve had a propensity to get lost in my feelings, and worship has been the thing that’s “unveiled” my eyes to see something greater… I run toward worship and I want my church to run toward it… worship has been the antidote to my propensity to fear…

 

I could have had the label give me a budget to record in a studio somewhere, but it would have been missing the church… I get emotional about it… my love for the church and their love for me has lifted me…

 

The song “Unveil” is one of those songs that we can only sing now… when all things are made new there will be a fullness of glory… but in this life we can cry out for things we don’t see… we can cry out for the glory, for God to “unveil” our hearts and eyes to know him…

 

The song “the Table” began because I was imagining a table where the Father, Son, and Spirit were at, and there was an empty seat where they were saying, “Come, there is a seat for you here…”

 

The song “Pure Exaltation” came because we didn’t have a song like that on the album… language for the church to help pull them up out of their reality and into heaven…

 

A burden of mine is that the voice of the worship leader is being muffled… we have great production, better than ever… which means you can get by now with echoing and not being an actual voice…

 

My challenge to young worship leaders is to use their voice… to write original songs for their church… churches sing their own songs the loudest…

Episode 055: Good Manners for Guest Speakers

In this episode we sit down to talk about the what’s and why’s behind choosing guest speakers, as well as some “good manners” for guest speakers to abide by.

 

 

Part of the reason to have guest speakers is to bring something to your church that doesn’t exist on your team… like a new voice or a new thought… the body of Christ is much broader and more diverse than most churches can represent out of their own pulpits…

 

Another reason to have a guest speaker is because I want my church to know who my friends are… I want them to know who our overseers are… who is speaking into my life and the life of my staff…

 

When our guest speakers come in, they are interested in us… they want to check in on us… there’s a sense of spiritual enrichment…

 

95% of the time, when I invite a guest speaker, they are pastors of their own congregation… they understand what I’m after and trying to accomplish… they are there to care deeply for the sheep… they’ve come in to add to my work and love the people who are in front of them…

 

Here are some good manners for guest speakers… first, find out how long they want you to speak for and finish on time…

 

Secondly, dress for the culture of the church you’re speaking at… if they do suit and tie, you do suit and tie… if they do jeans and a t-shirt, do jeans and a t-shirt…

 

Third, don’t create any messes… there are sermons I can preach to my congregation that I could never preach to another person’s congregation…

 

Fourth, let other people sell your books… I believe in my books but when I go to another person’s church, I don’t sell my product… if they want to sell them, that’s fine, but that’s not why I’m there…

 

Fifth, don’t be demanding… be low-maintenance… if you’re going to be a blessing, then go to be a blessing…

 

Lastly, go there to learn… a lot of times, my best ideas have come from my preaching trips… if we go in as learners, prepared to ask a lot of questions, it’s amazing the ideas we’ll get…

 

A good guest speaker is a person who, when they leave, the congregation is more in love with their church, and not with the ministry that just got on a plane and left town…

 

I tell young pastors to find older, faithful leaders who are finishing the race well, and have them be your guest speakers… your young congregation will thank you…

Episode 054: Tithing

In this episode we sit down about the spiritual discipline of tithing. Is it still a valid New Testament practice? What does the Scripture teach? How should we talk about it?

 

 

Tithing is the beginning point of generosity not the end point… when people argue with me about tithing, they’re never arguing because they want to give more… they’re looking for a reason not to give…

 

Tithing for me revealed motives that were deep in my heart… it revealed my fear of losing money or not having enough… tithing unsettled and stretched me and made me more disciplined…

 

In Acts, when the Spirit is poured out, people get radical with their generosity… tithing is fulfilled and heightened in the New Testament, it is not done away with…

 

The reason that a lot of people aren’t tithing is that they are living off of more than 100% of their income… you have to learn to live on less…

 

Now of course when people walk through crisis, for that there is grace… in fact, that’s why the rest of us should be tithing—to take care of those people!

 

Sometimes the way that we’ve talked about tithing is transactional… it’s about the person to person interaction with God, and we’ve lost the communal aspect of tithing…

 

The problem with many people is that when they start making $75k or more is they lose contact with the poor… when you lose contact, you lose compassion… tithing keeps us connected to the plight of the poor…

 

One of my own measurements personally with giving is, “Can I pray the prayer: Give us this day our daily bread?” with authenticity… if I can’t pray that prayer and mean it, I’m not being generous enough…

 

Giving to the church is a different kind of giving… it is worshipful and therefore undesignated… there’s a sense in which it is an openhanded gift, where we are saying to God, “I am yours…”

 

If everyone at New Life Church tithed, we could just about solve the problem of homeless, single moms in El Paso County… that’s what drives me to talk about this…

 

Where a lot of pastors fall short is that we don’t tell people where the money is spent… we need to let people know how their collective giving does collective good…

 

© 2024 Essential Church. Designed by Quema Labs.