Category: Current Issues

Episode 119: A Church Called Tov (Pt. 1)

In this episode we sit down with Dr. Scot McKnight and Laura Barringer to discuss their book A Church Called Tov: Forming a Goodness Culture That Resists Abuses of Power and Promotes Healing. This is a two part episode.

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It was a disorienting experience to have our church covering up the truth… it launched a series of conversations about how Scripture was not being interpreted the way it should… 

Around the same time, I read a book on the German pastors and how they responded to the Holocaust that shocked me… it showed the power of sinfulness of Christian leaders… when confronted by the truth, they didn’t confess their sins… 

Pastors have an enormous power over people… and have the capacity to assume a platform and narrate a story that trusting people are going to believe… when the narrative is distorting, cynicism arises in the church…

I found the way that Matthew 18 was being used irritating… they were using that text to say that if a woman thinks that a leader abused her, she has a responsibility to tell him… that will protect a pastor every time…

We need to ask, “Who has the advantage?” when Matthew 18 is being used… it is never appropriate to require a victim of abuse to confront their abuser privately…

A sign of institutional narcissism is when you shift from thinking that your church is helpful to thinking that your church is the best church in the world and where you think that all other churches are inferior…

This isn’t just an issues with megachurches… small churches are impacted by it too… thinking that you are the true people of God is insidious and dangerous… 

Since writing this book, we’ve gotten tons of letters from people who have been impacted by power-through-fear cultures…

Power is a very interesting phenomenon that is wielded wisely and recklessly by the same people in the same churches, and we need to be more conscious of it…

There’s such a thrill for people to be in the pastor’s inner circle, that it becomes like a shield of pride… but it’s a double-edged sword—you can both welcome people in and kick them out… it’s like a drug for many people… 

Episode 118: The Power of Place

In this interview we sit down with Daniel Grothe and talk about his new book The Power of Place: Choosing Stability in a Rootless Age. Snag a copy of The Power of Place HERE.

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The question of “what is the good life” has bugged me for a long time… as I pay attention to people who are living good lives, all of them have lived lives of stability in place…

This was actually the first book I wanted to write… I think that wisdom looks like a rooted life in place… 

Summers in my childhood were spent in Idaho with my family… they worked the land hard and were tired at the end of the day… I don’t get to live exactly like that, but as a pastor I’ve tried to live that way…

With the Gerasene demoniac, this is the first time Jesus tells someone, “You can’t follow me…” Jesus sends him home… when Jesus finds him, he is on the fringes, he is place-less… Jesus heals him and sends him back into his life, to live settled… 

When we look at the Bible, see that place helps us find security… place helps us find identity… and place helps us learn skilled mastery… 

God is not the God of abstraction… he doesn’t bless us out in the ether somewhere, but he blesses us in place… the story of God ends with the new Jerusalem descending to earth which gives life and security to the nations… creation itself is re-placed, re-homed…

We need to remember that Jesus is Jesus OF NAZARETH… he comes to us in our particularity… he comes into the story to put together heaven and earth, flesh and spirit… 

Adam and Eve started wondering what they were missing out on, and it led to their looking outside of the limitations of the good life that God had given them… when we live at the edges, we miss out on the gift at the center…

When people leave our churches for silly reasons, I always think to myself, “You’re going to have a stranger bury you? I should be burying you… or if I go first, you should be at my funeral… you’re going to throw that away?”

Sometimes you can’t stay in a place… even then you can live by certain principles… Jeremiah 29:1-10 helps us… wherever you are, seek the peace and prosperity of the city to which you’ve been sent into exile… God will bless you there… 

Online church is a great tool, but it’s not a congregation… it will never replace the body of Christ, the local congregation of the saints… 

Episode 115: The Resilient Pastor (Pt. 2)

IIn this episode (part two of two) we sit down with Glenn Packiam to talk with him about his forthcoming book The Resilient Pastor: Leading Your Church in a Rapidly Changing World. (Releases in February—order HERE.)

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The new paganism presents a real challenge… because if people are managing the practical needs of their lives by getting what they need through the new paganism, it makes the church’s appeal more difficult… what does the church offer that people don’t already have…?

This is one of the reasons why the gospel is racing through the global South and is waning in the West… the church is in decline in the West in part because we’re rich and have our needs met… 

Part of the reason it also may be in decline is that because we have positioned the gospel as only therapeutic, and once the practical need is satisfied, then the need for the gospel goes away… but perhaps the gospel is about MORE than the therapeutic… 

Another thing we are seeing is expressive individualism… it is the exaltation of the self as the source and goal of all goodness… my measure of what I am going to do is whether or not it will make “me” a “better me”…

People used to discover meaning in the world, but now we think that our job is to construct meaning in the world… this is why we hear people talk about “your truth” and “my truth”… it sounds nice in the suburbs, but it doesn’t work in Taliban-haunted Afghanistan…

What Christian spirituality has to do is claim the interiority while also showing how all the pieces of the world fit together… 

The aftermath of all of this is very messy… one person said, “I don’t believe in God, but I miss him…” and I think that describes so many people… 

I have an impulse in my heart to say that the church just needs to keep its doors open and trust that people will come… but Jesus is the one who goes out after the lost sheep… we need to go out and meet the culture where it is at…

We must never give up on the one thing that we have to offer that no one else does—the presence and power of God… 

We need to make room for the power of God… Paul says that one of the signs that the Gentiles belong to the kingdom is that the Spirit is at work… people don’t come to church for the coffee; they come for the presence and power of God, and that’s the one thing we’re carrying… 

Episode 114: The Resilient Pastor (Pt. 1)

In this episode (part one of two) we sit down with Glenn Packiam to talk with him about his forthcoming book The Resilient Pastor: Leading Your Church in a Rapidly Changing World. (Releases in February—order HERE.)

Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week!

In some ways the pandemic was the instigator of new changes… in other ways it accelerated some that were already in process… and in still other ways it revealed changes that had happened that maybe we had masked over… 

The tectonic plates that have shifted are Christianity and country… many of the things that we take for granted in Western civilization (like civil rights) have Christian roots… but now Christianity no longer has a prominent place… 

The big question for Western civilization is whether we can keep the fruit of a Christian culture when it is severed from its roots…

To say that we are in a “secular age” does not mean that we are post-religion, it means that we have decoupled the relationship between religion and the ordering of society…

Now we are seeing a surge in the gap left by that decoupling… one of the elements of that surge is a new pluralism in the West which is syncrestic and imperialistic… the new pluralism is where people say “I’ll take a dash of Buddhism and a dash of Hinduism and a little Christianity…”

In a way, the new pluralism is a response to religious fundamentalism… if embracing religions in their totality is seen to be evil, then taking a little of each is a way of hedging our bets…

One of the challenges here is that when I’m in conversations with people and they are leveraging a critique against the church, they don’t recognize that many of those critiques are dependent on what the church has taught…

There’s a greater burden now on the church to show that what it is teaching is good… that religion is good is no longer taken for granted… there’s an invitation of the Spirit here to show how what we believe is good for civil society…

Christianity at its best has always at its best has been able to name what is good about different religions and systems of thought while also showing how Christ corrects and completes them…

Another element of the surge is a new kind of paganism… in the old paganism, you used the gods as means to your own end… the new paganism is things like technology, commerce, and politics… it is a way to get what I want and make me feel better…  

Episode 112: An Interview with Tara Beth Leach – Radiant Church: Restoring the Credibility of our Witness

In this episode we sit down with pastor and author Tara Beth Leach to talk about her book Radiant Church: Restoring the Credibility of our Witness and what the church can do to recover a kingdom ethos. Grab a copy of her book here.
Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week! I am a daughter of evangelicalism… I wanted to be like Billy Graham when I grew up… the first time I walked into Willow Creek, I thought it was the epitome of what the church could be about… that’s just how I was formed…  It wasn’t until 2007 and 2008 that I began to look around and say, “Something isn’t right, here”… the first thing was women in ministry… so many women who were gifted to teach and preach didn’t have a role and they were leaving the church to take corporate jobs…  Later, seeing the church’s participation in Christian nationalism, racism, and success culture and the failure of many church leaders made me think that something wasn’t right…   It’s important that we love the church AND critique the church… we can be “all in” and still critique the church…  We have rooted ourselves in storylines that are not grounded in the grand narrative of Scripture… we have to go back and recover that narrative… our call to bear witness begins with Abraham where the Lord tells him that his descendants will shine like stars… we are those stars…  Let me be the first to confess that I am lured to success as much as anyone… I have always worked in the megachurch world, and it is so easy to pay attention to measurables like attendance and money… it’s easy to lose sight of the more important questions…   We have been hijacked by individualism in the church… it has distorted our witness… when faith becomes all about me, or all about a ticket to heaven, then we forsake the prayer that Jesus teaches, “on earth as it is in heaven” in which we participate as a PEOPLE…   We can’t talk about the missional crisis in the church until we talk about the formational crisis first… the gospel is about restoration, about the healing of all creation… the kingdom mission is about a partnership with the work that the triune God is doing to restore all creation…  We are called to be Great Commandment AND Great Commission people… justice and evangelism need to be reclaimed as the mission that we’ve been called to…   One practice we need to cultivate is a new kind of examen… we need to open ourselves to the Spirit by listening to our neighbors, women, people of color, and people that have been hurt by the church… not listening to prove a point but listening to receive…

Episode 111: An Interview with Lucy Peppiatt – Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women (Pt. 2)

In this episode (part two of two) we sit down with theologian and New Testament scholar Lucy Peppiatt to talk about her book Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Texts in which she unpacks why and how the biblical texts traditionally used to support the subordination of women to men might not be saying what we think they’re saying.

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With Genesis 2, people will say that because the woman was made after the man, she is subordinated to him… but I don’t think that’s warranted by the text… 

But with Genesis 3:16, it’s very interesting… human beings have eaten of the fruit, and God speaks over them the world that they have now created for themselves… God is revealing to them what they are going to have to live with… 

There are traditions that would say that God is speaking curses over them, but I see it as God saying, “This is what I told you would happen…” So his words to the woman encapsulate the dysfunctional relationship that now ensues between the man and the woman… 

Household codes were a normal part of the ancient world, and were normally addressed to men… Paul is making any great and different claim by calling the male of the household the “head”… it is descriptive not prescriptive… 

But what is fascinating about the Christian household is that the texts address the woman directly… women, slaves, and children are all addressed, along with the men… this is really powerful, subversive teaching…  

The apostles are saying to the men that their wives are their only sexual partner, which is radical for the ancient world… the men are called to a much higher standard than any other men of their time… they are called to a monogamous, loving relationship with their wives, in front of everyone… 

We might have wanted Paul to go further in overturning oppressive systems, but when we look at his letters, we can see that the seeds of revolution are planted… 

Ephesus was a place where the cult of Artemis was central… many wealthy women in Ephesus were priestesses in the cult, and it seems that some converted and came into the church, and became the false teachers…  

Once you realize this, you can construct a picture [of what Paul was addressing in 1 Timothy 2]… it helps make sense of Paul’s words…

Episode 110: An Interview with Lucy Peppiatt – Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women (Pt. 1)

In this episode (part one of two) we sit down with theologian and New Testament scholar Lucy Peppiatt to talk about her book Rediscovering Scripture’s Vision for Women: Fresh Perspectives on Disputed Texts in which she unpacks why and how the biblical texts traditionally used to support the subordination of women to men might not be saying what we think they’re saying.

Be sure to subscribe to our YouTube Channel and follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter to stay connected with us throughout the week!

In my twenties I made a commitment to Jesus and married an Anglican clergyman… I was busy with church and kids but felt like God was calling me into a ministry and teaching… and loved it… as I sought more training in theology, I found that I loved that too… I did a masters and halfway through was encouraged to do a PhD…  

Instead of “complementarian” I use the term “mutualist”… I was drawn to this term because when I first heard the term “complementarian” I assumed it meant someone who believed that male and female complemented each other perfectly…  

When I later learned what “complementarian” meant, I realized it assumed a power structure between men and women and that is not what I thought… I think men and women are different and those differences are good, but I don’t think “complementarian” best describes what I think… 

These issues are not cosmetic for the church, but they strike to the core of the church’s understanding of salvation…  

My experience of coming to know God in my twenties was uncompromisingly affirming… it built me up as a person… encountering the love of God was really life-changing… when I discovered [subordinationist theology] I realized that kind of setup of relationships hinders or blocks the revelation of God to a woman of who she is in Christ… 

I think that it prevents her from understanding that before Christ she can come into the fullness of who she is, without needing a man to mediate that to her… it’s a distortion of the gospel because it is a distortion of what Christ says to a woman… 

Genesis 1, 2, and 3 are seminal texts… we know based on Genesis 1 that male and female together are made in the image of God…  

Old Testament scholars make a very clear case for the phrase “helper suitable” connoting strength and mutuality… for the Hebrew phrase to be translated “helpmeet” when the word itself [Hebrew: ezer] has been used for God, it is disingenuous…

When the man cries out “this is flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone”, he is saying that she is his perfect counterpart who will be with him and is his substance and equal… that she comes from his side denotes equality and mutuality…

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…

Episode 097: Leadership During Turbulent Times: An Interview with Dr. Ben Witherington

In this episode we sit down with New Testament scholar Dr. Ben Witherington to talk about church leadership during turbulent times.

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My parents were devout Christians and raised me in church… I was there every week and those people really shaped me… and I had some wonderful pastors along the way who were a big encouragement to me…

As I got older, there were a couple years where I didn’t really attend church… the churches seemed very formal… so I wandered until the Lord called me back through some friends into InterVarsity… that did me a world of good during a very turbulent time…

One of the things that is clear to me about right now is that when you have a crisis, you find out which people have a civic religion and which people have a genuine Christian religion… there is a sort of winnowing effect in a crisis, and you find out where people really place their trust…

I think what I want to say to pastors right now is that they need to take half-baked Christians and put them back in the oven… you don’t get to wear the big ‘C’ on your forehead if *this* is what you think about race, disease, etc…

We have a teaching moment right now, an opportunity to raise the level of biblical spirituality and sanctification, because people are struggling… we learn more from trial and tribulation than we do from other times, so: carpe diem—seize the day and let people know how Christians are supposed to behave…

We need more solid, meaty biblical preaching and teaching that’s bringing the text to bear on the situation at hand… a good preacher knows how to do this… I’m not talking about speaking to the issue du jour, but giving people the tools to fight off sub-Christianity…

It is time for us to redouble our efforts to make sure our ministers are well-equipped to equip the saints for the works of ministry…

With fallen human beings, sins like the sin of racism don’t go away; they keep resurfacing… we need to look to genuinely people like (civil rights leader) John Lewis who lived his faith out in day to day life… to Christians who will call us to action…

To the pastors of today I want to say: you are a long way from being finished… read 1 Kings 18 and 19: now is no time to give up; now is the time to redouble your efforts…

Episode 093: Covid-19: Where Are We Now?

Welcome to the start of Season 7 of the Essential Church Podcast. In this episode we sit down to discuss the state of the church seven months into Covid-19.

We’re seeing that fear is a powerful motivator… fear is front and center in our culture right now… pastors are wrestling with it in a way they haven’t before…

Pastors weren’t trained for this in seminary… they weren’t trained in social media or on the nuances of the culture right now…

I am concerned that if we’re not careful we are going to see a mass exodus of pastors from pastoral ministry… there’s a growing concern about this around the country…

I am telling pastors to mute the wrong voices and amplify the right voices… who we listen to will very much determine the condition of our souls…

Right now about half the churches in the US are open for in-person worship… what I am hearing from pastors across the country is that 25-30% of people are actually returning to church… people have started forming new habits…

In person church attendance has been on the decline for years… all Covid did was accelerate a trend that had already started…

I’m hearing from really committed churchgoers that they have new habits on Sundays… they wake up late, eat brunch, turn on the broadcast, and then head out hiking… that’s the new habit… we’re going to have to reshape people’s ecclesiology to help them understand the power of the gathering…

Our services don’t feel the way they used to feel from a “production” standpoint… but the spirit was as strong as ever… that’s something we can’t manufacture…

For most of church history and most of the church global, “suboptimal” is just how you do church… and those pastors who don’t want to jump in because it’s going to be suboptimal are making an enormous mistake…

I think right now we need to simplify what we’re doing… the pastors out there that are trying to push forward with a big, bold vision – you’re going to burn out…

I’m taking about simplifying everything… meetings, what you say yes to, your fall relaunch… complexity is not our friend right now… you need to have one or two things every day that you’re doing well…

We have been breathing out really hard these last seven months… now we need to start to breath in again… simplify everything…

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