Author: esschurch

Episode 032: Prayer, Unity, and the Kingdom. A Conversation with Pete Greig

In this conversation, we were joined by Pete Greig to talk about the role and purpose of prayer in the local church and how we can contend for unity and revival within the Church. We were so encouraged by the stories of bridge-building that are unfolding through the 24-7 prayer movement and we hope that it blesses you.

 

Every transformational movement of the church through history has begun with a movement of prayer…

 

We’re experiencing around the world an unprecedented coming together of the Body of Christ in our lifetimes… we’re facing profound challenges and we need each other and we’re long past thinking that one tradition, approach, or celebrity Christian leader is going to have all the answers…

 

It is in the present that Christians are worst at finding God… if prayer means anything at all, it means that we learn to encounter God in our present circumstance… and until we can find God in the present, we will never find him anywhere else…

 

I am praying for revival more than ever, but I am wary of revivalism… not only does revivalism keep Christians immature, but it is blasphemous insofar as it refuses to worship Jesus Christ as he is manifest in our present reality…

 

Prayer is not so much an activity of the church as it is the very heartbeat of the church… we don’t pray to get people saved, we get people saved so that they can pray…

 

I pray for the church in America with a great deal of gratitude but also pain… the blessing of America to the nations is beyond calculation… but the pain is that I see such division and I am deeply concerned…

 

The church’s prophetic voice must be based in the revelation that God is a reconciling God… and so when I see profound divisions around race and class and wealth and politics, it breaks my heart… my prayer for the church in America is for reconciliation…

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • What most stood out to you about Pete’s comments and why?
  • Is prayer the “heartbeat” of your church, or just one of the things that happens? How can you begin to change this?
  • What would it look like for you and your ministry to move towards greater reconciliation and unity within the Body of Christ in your area? How can prayer be a stimulus to that end?

 

RESOURCES

Pete’s books, including Red Moon Rising, God on Mute, and his most recent, Dirty Glory, are all available on Amazon.

Watch a short film about Pete’s Vision

Episode 031: Developing a Discipleship Culture

Before His ascension, Jesus gave a Great Commission: to go and make disciples. In this essential conversation, we talk about how discipleship happens and what it looks like for us to help people become disciples of Jesus. Join in as we discuss what the long journey of discipleship unfolds in the lives of the people around us.

 

To me, discipleship is becoming cruciform, becoming like the One who spread his arms out on a tree… you know you’re becoming a disciple when you’re learning to lay down your life in the journey to be like Jesus…

 

Discipleship happens painfully slowly, it happens over conversations and meals… that’s why you have to pace yourself… it’s a long obedience in the same direction… if you’re trying to get everything fixed in six weeks, you’re going to be disappointed…

 

One of the things we’ve gotten wrong in the American paradigm is that we’ve made this a solo project, discipleship becomes a do-it-yourself kind of thing… and it really just doesn’t happen that way…

 

If you pay attention to what Jesus was doing, he was always telling people to “come and follow me…” it has be relational… for all of us, we need to put ourselves in spots where we can do “come and follow me…”

 

I can’t call everyone into the depths of my life as a pastor, but one of the things I can do, maybe my principle task, is to create the right kinds of conditions where the Spirit can do what the Spirit characteristically does…

 

At some point, all of us as pastors have to think about how we’re multiplying our ministry… and not in the American business sense, but in the sense of investing in people who will become disciple-makers…

 

The corporate worship gatherings are absolutely part of discipleship… it’s never been easier to show up to church and hide… I want to lead my gatherings in a way that makes people bump into each other in ways that make discipleship possible…

 

Is the goal of discipleship for people to look like me, or to look like Jesus? We need to be able to distinguish between what is just personal preference and what is Jesus…

 

In the New Testament, what you see is the Apostles speaking to the whole people of God together… they assume that the living Christ himself is discipling all of them, together, through all the instantiations of the church’s life…

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • Think for a minute: how do you and your team describe the “bullseye” of discipleship?
  • What kinds of “seedbeds” or environments have you created to help people grow into the stature of Christ? Are they sufficient to the task? Why or why not?
  • How much of your ministry is devoted to making disciples who will make disciples? What can you do to grow in this?

 

Episode 030: The Life of the Preacher

Have you ever had a week where you feel like you should just pack up your study and give up preaching altogether? It was a week like that for Pastor Daniel Grothe that sparked this conversation about The Life of the Preacher. Listen in as we talk about what we find at the core of the calling to preach the Word of God.

10 Things I’ve Learned As A Preacher by Daniel Grothe_ Essential Church Podcast

 

Preaching is simultaneously the most joyful and maddening work I could ever do… we all have a little Jeremiah in our bones: “Who am I?”…

On paper we would all say, “Well of course the life of a preacher is a life of prayer…” but on a busy week, what people typically do is white-knuckle it trying to crank content out, forgetting that prayer is probably our best play…

There’s a difference between exegeting a text and discerning what the Spirit wants to do in this moment with these people right here, right now… I’m always saying, “Lord, who is this for? What is the pulse of this moment?”

When you preach to your congregation, that should come out of your life with these people… there shouldn’t be a disconnect between your life with them in the coffee shop and your preaching to them…

A story has a way of sneaking behind people’s defense mechanisms, and if Jesus is the consummate storyteller, then it’s okay for us…

There’s a profound element of mystery that not enough preachers appreciate, and so we fill in the mystery with talent, expertise, more stories, content, etc., and it becomes an anxious space…

For me, before I preach, the thing that I must do is quiet the space [of my heart]… I find a quiet place and say, “Come, Holy Spirit…” I need to clear the mechanism so that the Spirit can quiet me… if I go up there with all that anxious energy and I haven’t quieted myself, something’s not right…

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM
1) Which of Daniel’s 10 things resonated most with you and why?
2) What does it look like for you to have your messages grow up out of the soil of a healthy life lived in authentic community?
3) Which of these 10 things was most challenging to you and why? Where do you need to grow?

Episode 029: Doing Ministry in a Secular Age

When Jesus told his followers to make disciples in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria, and all the ends of the earth, he meant that the gospel should be brought to people where they are and in their contexts. So how do we as pastors and leaders bring the gospel to our neighbors in today’s secular age? We talk about it in this week’s essential conversation.

Episode 029 – SHOW NOTES – Doing Ministry in a Secular Age

 

One of my favorite metaphors is to think of the world as like an arena with a retractable roof, where the roof closes and no one really cares… everyone is so consumed with their own life that whether or not there is a God is kind of irrelevant…

 

The new situation makes you learn to say [the gospel] afresh… we’re having to learn how to tell the Story to people who are living in a new situation, but have the same hungers…

 

It’s almost like we’re in an Acts 17 moment… in the collapse of the marriage between Christianity and the culture, there’s a fresh opportunity to stand in the marketplace of ideas and tell people, “God raised Jesus from the dead—what do you think about that?”

 

Today’s climate is such that all belief is contested, and so in one sense we’ve gone to a pre-Christian culture, and in another sense we’ve “evolved” past it… people want the Jesus values without the Jesus claim…

 

We have to get better as pastors and leaders to say to people, “You’re going to serve somebody; you’re going to choose a cross somewhere…and only Jesus says ‘my yoke is easy and my burden is light…’”

 

The ministry of hospitality is one of the best gifts the church gives to the world… in a secular age, we need to be ones who open our doors and hearts and we host people and let the kingdom unfold so that people say, “This is where I need to be…”

 

Beauty is a great way of thinking about how the church can be at its best here… a Rembrandt painting doesn’t need to explain itself to you… it has a way of communicating itself to you and drawing you into it… the church needs to think about its own life that way… let people see!

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • How aware are you and your team about the rising tide of secularism in terms of your ministry process (planning, messaging, programming)? Does it figure at all in your ministry? Why or why not?
  • How would you describe your strategy for equipping your flock to live faithfully and hospitably within our secular age?
  • What can you do to help your congregation see the opportunities of living in this moment?

 

RESOURCES

James. K. A. Smith has written a dense but really helpful summary the new “secular” moment we’re living in called How (Not) To Be Secular. Check it out.

Episode 028: Singing Our Hope

What happens when we worship? How do we select songs for congregational worship that instill hope? In this conversation, Dr. Glenn Packiam talks about what he learned as he researched the expression and experience of hope in our worship.

SHOW NOTES – Episode 028 – Singing our Hope

 

The thing that was most surprising to me in my research was how little the songs dealt with the future… we don’t sing about the future (or the past) all that much… it concerned me that songs about hope had no future orientation…

 

It might be that the spirit of the age is one of the reasons why we don’t sing about the future all that much… it’s a luxury to sing about the present tense when the present is pretty good…

 

There’s a challenge here for pastors and worship leaders to help people see their felt needs in terms of the great need of our lives, which is the hope of Christ…

 

The Holy Spirit is the experience of God’s presence, and many would say that the Spirit is God’s future presence in the now… which is why people who experience the Holy Spirit feel hopeful [regardless of the song lyrics]…

 

Only on paper can you distinguish between hope and comfort… when people say “I feel hope,” what they’re saying is “I have a sense of God’s presence with me”… theologically we’re saying, “The Holy Spirit, who is the deposit of the future—you’re having a taste of him now…”

 

The good songs are not just songs that are true this month… I think we address the realities of our day better by singing about something that transcends our day… it’s great to sing about our present pain, but there’s something about the church coming together to sing about something quite a bit better, higher, and stronger…

 

One of the things we’ve challenged worship leaders and writers with is not just thinking of theology as the fence but as the doorway…

 

I hope that what worship leaders and songwriters hear is that what they’re doing is incredibly powerful and the Holy Spirit breathes on it, so let’s allow him to make our craft the very best it can be… when he breathes on that, how much more could it do?

 

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • Look at your worship set lists from the last 8 weeks. How many of the songs speak of the future hope of Christ? What do you think that says?
  • What are you doing to create space for people to experience the presence of the Spirit in your worship services?
  • What can you do to help your congregants fix the concerns of their lives in the future hope of Christ?

Episode 027: The Bible and the Church Pt 2

In this conversation, we pick up where we left off talking about the Bible. What is it, and how should it inform our lives and ministries?

Episode 027 – SHOW NOTES – The Bible and the Church Part 2

One of the mistakes we’ve made over the last several decades is that we’ve tried so hard to show how the Bible “relates” to people’s lives that we’ve eliminated what is unique, sacred, and divine about it…

 

If the Bible is just generalized life advice, we’ve actually domesticated the Scripture out of use… part of the job is to recover the uniqueness of Scripture…

 

We need to model for people that engagement with Scripture can take many different forms… it is a disservice to people to communicate to people a picture of engagement with Scripture in which it is uniformly ecstatic… sometimes it is, and sometimes it is not… we need to trust that God is in it…

 

As preachers, we need to realize that our sermon might be more Scripture than that person will hear all week long… if there’s any place where we can read lots of Scripture, it ought to be in church…

 

Two things that have been really transformative for our congregation (downtown) was (1) having Scripture readings in the service, which congregants lead… and (2) using the Immerse Bible plan… it is an arrangement of the Scriptures without chapters and verses which helps you become steeped in a section of Scripture… people had never read the Bible in big chunks before…

 

We preach through books of the Bible [at New Life] because there are lots of sticky pages in our Bibles that we never get to, and it’s easy for the preacher to just preach their greatest hits

 

What I’ve learned over the years is the value for the preacher of having “assigned readings”… that’s scary for charismatic preachers… but I’ve found that when you hold an assigned text against the life of the congregation, you will discover connections that you never would have seen otherwise…

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • What are you doing to help you people fall in love with Scripture? What more could you do?
  • Do your sermons model a rich engagement with Scripture? Or is Scripture a “pre-text” for your sermon? How can you start moving in a healthier direction?
  • What is your philosophy of your church’s preaching calendar? Does it help people fall in love with Scripture? Why or why not?

 

RESOURCES

The Immerse Bible

Fee and Stuart – How To Read The Bible For All Its Worth (a simple guide for layperson or preacher to understanding the different genres of Scripture)

Episode 026: The Cross of Christ

A special episode just in time for Holy Week. In this conversation, we discuss the importance of the Cross of Jesus Christ. What exactly do we believe about Jesus’ death and why does it matter? Listen in and enjoy this reflection as we move towards Good Friday.

 

 


Episode 026 – SHOW NOTES – The Cross of Christ

 

The cross is the crux of the whole story, the unexpected plot twist… who could have seen that God would rescue by becoming the afflicted one, by becoming the judged one…

 

Good Friday reminds us of the costliness, the weightiness, the holiness of the sacrifice of Jesus… you can only be prepared to receive Easter Sunday morning when you’ve properly gone through Good Friday…

 

In our generation of outrage, we tend to want the powerful abusers to pay, and Jesus in his death is not just showing solidarity with the victims, but is paying the judgment that we demand to see from the abusers…

 

Sin actually does have a real impact in human life… you don’t just wave a magic wand over it and watch it go away… sin drove us away from the heart of God, and Jesus went to find us… he absorbed the weight of our failure in order to bring us back home…

 

We need to think of sin not just as “doing bad things” but as a power that we were enslaved to… God judged Sin in the body of Christ Jesus and in doing so rescued us from slavery…

 

The powers of the air exhaust themselves on Jesus, who overcomes them by the power of an indestructible life… his victory over them accrues for us…

 

When we talk about God being love, the cross is the ultimate demonstration of God’s love… which is exactly what Paul says… some distortions of cross-preaching make wrath primary, that it was a demonstration of how mad God was at us… but the storyline of the cross is love, not wrath…

 

Because God is love, he opposes everything that mars, defaces, or destroys us… the expression of that is wrath, but always the wrath is an expression of love…

 

People come into a Good Friday service hurting, and one of the scariest thoughts to me is that those people would think they need to leave that in the car… on Good Friday we can say “There is no place that you have ever been that Jesus has left vacant…”

 

 

RESOURCES

Athanasius – On the Incarnation

  1. T. Wright – The Day the Revolution Began

Fleming Rutledge – The Crucifixion: Understanding the Death of Jesus Christ

Episode 025: The Bible and the Church Pt 1

In this conversation, we ask a simple and slightly funny question. What is the Bible? Perhaps one of the most taken-for-granted elements of Christian faith, we wanted to dig down and talk about what the Bible is, and what it isn’t.

Episode 025 – SHOW NOTES – The Bible and the Church

How we see this book [the Bible] determines how we approach it… everybody knows they are supposed to read the Bible but we don’t often stop to ask, “Just what is this thing?”

I think the best way to get to an answer [to the question of why the Bible is authoritative] is to begin with the resurrection… the followers of Jesus began to realize that Jesus was God himself meeting us in the flesh and fulfilling all the things he said he was going to do… so it legitimates and culminates the Old Testament!

Jesus claimed Israel’s Scriptures as pointing to him… the reason that this particular book [the Bible] has been treasured is that it bears witness to this Person [Jesus]… when we keep that firmly in mind, it helps keep the Bible vibrant and alive for us… we’re coming in contact with this Person…

The Bible is loved and cherished because the face of the God that we meet in Jesus Christ comes through… and if you just get people into it, it has a way of doing something to you…

If I could pick one paradigm for approaching this book, I would pick the “Grand Story”—it is the story of God working through a particular (not perfect) people… when you treat it that way, it changes how you read it…

This is a Story begun in love and carried through to completion in love… it has power to convert the mind and will and emotions into a different way of being…

There is not a time when I do not open up the Scriptures and find that this is the God who keeps rushing at me to bring me into blessing and to make me a blessing…

There is a way to read the troubling aspects of Scripture through the lens of the Person of Jesus that keeps us firmly in the character of God…

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM
1) Glenn mentioned a few common lenses people approach the Bible with. What is your default lens and why?
2) What would change in your reading of Scripture (or preaching and teaching) if you viewed it as the great Drama of God’s redemptive love?
3) How might viewing the Scripture as a witness to the Person of Christ impact how you read, preach, or teach the Bible?

Episode 024: The Creed

 

What can a centuries-old creed teach us about how to lead our ministries? In this conversation, we talk about how and why our church adopted the Nicene Creed and how it informs and shapes our ministry.

Episode 024 – SHOW NOTES – The Creed

 

Instead of having a unique statement of faith that highlights the ways that we are different from other churches, why not go back to this statement of faith that shows how we are all united?

 

In a world that is drunk on individuality, the Creed sobers us… in a world that loves what is new, the Creed takes us back… in a skeptical world, the Creed helps us say, “We actually believe something…”

 

When people come in and they have doubts and they’re afraid and the bottom has fallen out and they’re not sure if “they believe in,” they can step into a space where the community says for them, “We believe in… and you’re going to make it…”

 

This is a question of “What is our bedrock?”—our bedrock is not our distinctiveness; our bedrock is our unitedness in Christ…

 

If my sermon can’t go through the four stanzas, I have not risen to the level of what a “word” ought to be… the Creed has created an infrastructure for me… these are the safe lanes in which a sermon must run…

 

In some ways, the Creed has taught our people how to pray… sometimes in our minds, there is an undifferentiated way of addressing the Triune God… the Creed helps us there… God is one and yet we can shine a light on each Person…

 

We’re trying to keep the Creed part of a “living liturgy”… and so if at any point we’re doing it just to do it, we need to pause…

 

The presence of doubt is the condition in which faith exists… “We believe” says that these are not sureties but acts of belief and mystery… and “in” says that this is something that invites us to cling to a Person… it is an act of worship… it is intimate…

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • Take some time to read the Nicene Creed (go here for one version). What do you notice? What stands out to you?
  • Are there ways that you could begin to incorporate the Creed into your church’s worship?
  • Compare the Creed to your church’s statement of faith. How are they similar or different? In what way would utilizing the Creed as a statement of faith be a benefit to you and your church? A challenge?

 

 

Episode 023: Spiritual Authority

Spiritual Authority is a significant biblical concept that recognizes that God sends people into our lives to speak to us and guide us. In this essential conversation, we talk about the importance of spiritual authority, why people don’t accept it, and how, when it is done right, it can be a beautiful gift.

 

Episode 023 – SHOW NOTES – Spiritual Authority

 

Spiritual authority is an awareness that God has placed people in my life to help guide me to the place that the Lord has directed me… It is because of the frailty of human life that we need people around us to help us see our blind spots…

 

We have created an entire generation of consumer believers who come to church because it’s convenient or feels good, but the moment someone begins speaking directly to them, they flee to the next church down the street… this has damaged the message of the gospel…

 

You only have as much authority as you are willing to submit to… everyone wants to be in charge… but delegated spiritual authority is given to us when we are found trustworthy by the Lord… he can’t trust us with leadership if we aren’t willing to serve our way into it…

 

Jesus was constantly telling his disciples: do not fight your way to the top, don’t demand to be in charge, don’t demand the spotlight… if you want to be great, you must serve your way there…

 

If people are talking more about the person who preached the sermon than on the Christ that was preached in the sermon, you need to flee and go to another place… there is a cult of personality happening in the church now that is hurting us… it’s a sign that the leaders of that church are probably not submitted to healthy, biblical authority…

 

The only way you know whether you are really submitted to authority is if someone can tell you “no”… I have some great mentors in my life, and if any of them told me not to do something, I would hit the brakes… if my wife said to me about something “Don’t do it,” I wouldn’t…

 

The three areas we need input and oversight are: your personal life, your theology, and your money/spending (both inside the church and in your house)…

 

A lot of leaders fall into this trap of being “the God expert,” and so they don’t feel like they have permission to question or doubt or wrestle with the deep, troubling questions of Scripture… pastors need people to bounce [theological/interpretive] ideas off of…

 

The way we spend our money reflects our hearts… pastors are notorious for saying this to their congregations, but often we ask it of ourselves because we don’t have anyone challenging us on it…

 

The devil works in the silences, and when you can invite trusted, wise counselors into the silences, the enemy’s power is broken off of us…

 

QUESTIONS FOR YOU AND YOUR TEAM

  • Does your church have a healthy culture of spiritual authority?
  • Do you have people who can tell you “no”? Who are they?
  • Which of the three areas of accountability discussed in the podcast are most difficult for you? How can you grow in that area?

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