Interviews – Page 2 – Essential Church

Episode 151: Good News for Anxious Christians – An Interview with Philip Cary

In this episode we sit down with Dr. Philip Cary to talk about unbiblical and unhelpful stuff that evangelicals believe and how the gospel liberates us. Grab his book Good News for Anxious Christians here.

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Good News for Anxious Christians came from my conversations with Christians who were anxious because of the ‘practical advice’ they’d been given about how to improve their lives…

When the Gospel is replaced by practical advice, before long you’ll get anxious about whether the practical advice is actually working…

Part of the reason that people are anxious is that pastors are anxious… the odd mistake that we make is by thinking that the way to change someone’s life is to tell them to change their life… but that’s the law… it’s the gospel that really changes us…

Consumerism has a lot to do with this… we’re competing in a spiritual marketplace, and the church feels pressure to say, “We have a better lifestyle/product than everyone else…” that’s the wrong incentive…

When I say, “You don’t need to hear God’s voice ‘in your heart’”, I mean that we need to listen to the words of God that come to us from OUTSIDE our hearts: e.g., the Bible, the words of the gospel when it’s preached, etc. …

What God commands us to do is to seek wisdom… that means that our hearts should be shaped by wisdom… when that happens, your heart will have some good voices in it—they’ll still be your voices, and they’ll be worth listening to, because they’ve been formed by God’s wisdom…

As the Word of God comes to dwell in us, the voice will be our own, but the word will be God’s… the Word of God shapes our hearts… when we hear the story of Christ and receive it by faith, our hearts get reshaped into the image of Jesus Christ…

‘Conscience’ is a word that has dropped out of our vocabulary… God doesn’t decide for us, but he has told us how he’d like to behave in his Word… as we take that Word into our hearts, our conscience will come to nag us when we don’t treat people properly…

We don’t have to find God’s will for our lives because God has told us what his will is… The Ten Commandments are God’s will… The Two Great Commandments are God’s will… God wants us to learn to make wise decisions ourselves as responsible adults…

When the Gospel is properly preached, it’s not about our feelings, it’s about Jesus… and precisely that is what builds up our Christian feelings… our job is to give people Jesus Christ…

Episode 148: When Narcissism Comes to Church with Chuck DeGroat (Pt. 2)

In this episode we sit down with therapist and educator Chuck DeGroat to talk about the phenomenon of narcissism; what it is, how to spot it, and how to address it in our communities. Chuck is the author of When Narcissism Comes to Church. This is part 2 of 2.

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An emotionally intelligent leader is able to differentiate himself from you and doesn’t need to draw from you for his own ego…

We base our idea of narcissism on appearance sometimes… people use the word irresponsibly… confidence is not narcissism…

We need to understand the many faces of narcissism… sometimes narcissism can look like humility… for instance, an Enneagram 9 can be a narcissist… if you’ve ever experienced the quiet rage of a 9, you’ve felt it…

One of the things that happens to leaders is that we cut ourselves off from feedback… every pastor needs people in their life who can answer the question, “How do you experience me?” and do it without threat of retribution…

The higher up in the food chain you go, the more insulated you become and the more anxious you’ll feel… leaders often think that the higher you climb, the less anxious you’ll be… the more defended you become, the greater possibility there is that narcissism will evolve…

One of the big things we need to wrestle with is, “What is my shame wound?” A lot of people don’t think they have one—especially if they’ve been successful…

Our pain when we’re wounded by narcissists is often externalized by outing or naming people publicly… when it happened to me, I dreamed of ways to hurt the person who hurt me… we need the presence of a compassionate witness…

Oftentimes the way that people think they should heal from trauma is actually retraumatizing (e.g., confronting your abuser on social media)… that’s the wrong approach… you need to go to a good therapist to process what’s happening within you…

I want people to engage the work in an unhurried way… you need someone looking out for you who cares for you and who can help you step back from your unhealthy strategies for coping with the pain…

Metabolizing shame means going back into your story… people don’t want to do this work…

Episode 147: When Narcissism Comes to Church with Chuck DeGroat (Pt. 1)

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When we’re talking about narcissistic personality disorder, one of the things you see is an incapacity to empathize with others…

Some people say that narcissism is born in self-love… but that’s not true… narcissism is really born in self-contempt… they’re compensating with a grandiose part of themselves that has learned live life shielded and defended…

A narcissist fails to empathize with themselves first…

Some people will say that narcissists are evil through and through… that they’re born evil… but I think that there’s always a story behind a narcissist… if you’re well-loved when you’re young, you won’t need the narcissistic exterior later in your life…

The earliest warning sign that you’re in the orbit of a narcissist is your gut… there’s a stirring in your gut that something feels off… I can’t tell you how many people I know who have ignored their gut…

Narcissistic systems can often breed a sense of loyalty where the leader can’t be questioned… the leader needs to be large and in charge and is protecting their space and power at all costs…

Many of these leaders also have a sense of entitlement to success…

If you don’t metabolize shame in relational ways, you’ll find ways to protect yourself that will be harmful to yourself and others…

Metabolizing shame means going back into your story… people don’t want to do this work…

Episode 146: Steve Carter – The Gift of Pain

In this episode we sit down with author and pastor Steve Carter to talk about times of crisis and what it looks like to receive the good gifts of God in them.

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I wouldn’t wish what I went through on my worst enemy… but I also never had felt so close to God… the nearness of God was a surprising gift to me…

That season was bizarre because it created such cognitive dissonance… I’m a competitive person and it was hard to realize that I couldn’t make everyone happy…

I don’t know a meaningful human life where the deck hasn’t been cleared by God…

In ministry we often use our desire to influence as a substitute for paying attention to our elemental humanity… crisis taught me to tend to my foundations again…

For me, the gift in my crisis was that I started realizing that integrity and character is everything… as sad as it all was, God was building a new order in me through it…

In my 30s, I was so goals-driven… but the pace was unsustainable… I didn’t want to have to grieve or address my pain… I didn’t know how to wait, listen, or slow down well…

I was raised to channel my anger into competitiveness… my crisis taught me to realize that wasn’t working… I needed to learn to be driven by being in Christ…

My relationship with Jesus wasn’t affected by people’s behavior… my struggle was with a handful of people who had acted badly… but the crisis took me back to the Jesus way…

If you want to go through crisis well, you have to have a couple of values rise to the top to serve as a true north for the kind of person you want to be…

You also have to recognize that while it’s bad, it won’t always be bad…

Another thing I’d say is that you have to have mentors, counselors, pastors, and spiritual directors… you need voices who know you, can embody the ministry of presence for you, and can remind you of who you are…

Episode 145: Re-enchanting the Text – A Conversation with Cheryl Bridges-Johns

In this episode, we sit down with Dr. Cheryl Bridges-Johns, author of Re-enchanting the Text: Discovering the Bible as Sacred, Dangerous, and Mysterious (releases May 16), to talk with her about what it means to read the Bible in the wildness and power of the Spirit.

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I’m a fourth generation Pentecostal… it was a safe and sacred place and people told me they sensed God’s hand on my life… I preached my first sermon at sixteen…

In the mid-80s a group of us Pentecostal pastors and theologians began to gather and ask, “Is there a hermeneutic of the Spirit, and if so, what does it look like…?”

The history of the modern world is a history of disenchantment… many Protestant forms of religion in the 20^thcentury became disenchanted, full of “excarnation”—the absence of the sacred in the tangible…

In the Pentecostal tradition, we had a sense of the sacred in our bodies via the filling of the Spirit… but as we became more “evangelicalized”, we adopted some of the Protestant forms of disenchantment…

This included how we read the Bible… we were told that it was too mysterious and that we needed to do it another way…

The saints that I grew up with regarded the Bible as a presence, as a space of fellowship, and even an icon… it was a portal to God… whenever they sat down with their Bible in their lap, Jesus came and they had sweet fellowship… they ate the Word and it became them…

The critical thing is the sense of the “real presence” of the Spirit in the reading of Scripture… that the same Spirit who inspired it was also there in the reading of it… that’s not necessarily subjective; it is mysterious…

One of the marks of the saints I grew up with was their ability to live in the paradox of pain and suffering, knowing and not knowing… they didn’t have to settle everything…

We don’t need to gloss over the trauma and abuse recorded in the Bible, because it’s not a final word… it’s moving in a redemptive direction… we are led by the Spirit to grieve the trauma in the text… that grieving transforms us…

We need to let the text call us out beyond ourselves, into spaces that are not safe, that are scary… like Job who encounters God in the whirlwind and realizes that he is no longer in control…

Episode 144: A Conversation with Sharon & Ike Miller

In this episode we sit down with Sharon and Ike Miller, co-pastors of Bright City Church in Raleigh-Durham, Carolina to talk about life, ministry, and what they’re learning about leading well together.

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I didn’t think I was going to be a pastor… but Ike kept saying to me, “I think God wants us to do something together…”

Leading together is a constant learning process… when we launched, we were so driven by adrenaline and were ultimately running at a pace that wasn’t sustainable…

We’re learning a lot by making mistakes, because there aren’t a lot of couples that are doing quite what we’re doing… and even where they have, if their personalities are different than ours, it won’t work the same way for us…

It was really important for us as copastors to figure out what our lanes are… we broke that down by giftings and passions…

Even though we’re in the Bible Belt, we’re in a very progressive area… it’s a weird demographic… lots of people have church baggage and are very cynical… we have realized that a big part of our call is to be a sensitive, safe, and healing place for people…

At the same time, we want to help restore people to the capital ‘C’ Church, not just Bright City Church… the Church is God’s Plan A for people…

Consumerism is also shaping us in profound ways… every week people are coming to church with their list of demands… consumerism is bad for the consumers, but it’s also chewing up and spitting out pastors… it’s commodifying the pastorate…

We’ve discovered that it’s critical for us as leaders to be vulnerable with our struggles… it communicates a sense that it’s okay for us to come in and not have it all together…

Listening well is critical as leaders… so much of the hurt that people carry into church was that they never had spaces where they could be heard…

You can be in control or you can be in community but you can’t be both… to be in the Body is to be interdependent with others… when a desire for absolute autonomy and control leads the way, it severs us from the Body…

Episode 142: Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies with Marilyn McEntyre

In this episode we sit down with writer and teacher Marilyn McEntyre to talk with her about why our speech is so important and how sanctified speech and sanctified lives are connected. Check out her book Caring for Words in a Culture of Lies.

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Some of the urgency of this matter is self-explanatory at this point… I don’t know anyone of any theological or political persuasion who doesn’t recognize that our public discourse is in trouble…

There are some bad habits of speech that are pretty widespread… one of them is the tendency to fall into abstractions rather than particulars…

The scandal of the gospel is the scandal of particular… God came into a specific place and time… but in a lot of our public speech, we resort to abstraction…

Abstractions enable us to avoid responsibility… they allow us not to look at THIS person who has been begging on THIS particular street corner and has been unhoused for THIS MANY particular months… to go “deep” is to go particular…

One of the ancient meanings of the word conversation is “to walk with”… when you have a conversation with someone, you walk with them and come in parallel with them… but in our world, this can be hard to come by…

We need to quit trying to win… a lot of conversations in public speech turn into arguments very quickly because we’re trying to win… it sets up a kind of defensiveness that truncates exploratory conversation…

There’s a layer of accountability in our speech that is only available to us if our bodies are in the same room, in the vulnerability that face-to-face interaction makes possible…

One of the things that I would say to preachers is that if you’ve gone to seminary and have studied the ancient languages, hand ‘em over! Some of my favorite sermons have been when a preacher took time to explain the nuance of a word…

Sometimes I think that pastors are so desirous to be “pastoral” that they dumb down the content of their messages… you can simplify without dumbing down…

When I was a young adult I began worshiping in a church that featured written prayers… I loved stepping into words that had been carefully crafted and prayed for generations… written prayers help us step into the communion of saints to join them…

Episode 141: The Love That is God – An Interview with Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt

In this episode we sit down with Frederick Christian Bauerschmidt to talk with him about his book The Love That is God: An Invitation to Christian Faith.

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God is love is the radical claim of the Christian faith… but Jesus fills this out by saying that no greater love has a man than this: that he lay down his life for his friends… so the love of God suddenly takes on a hard edge…

My students sometimes really struggle with the idea in Christianity that we might need to undergo a kind of painful loss in order to become truly happy… daily crucifixion is not a mere metaphor…

We’re called to be countercultural… but if we let that become just another form of tribalism or militancy, we’re not being countercultural… we’re just reproducing the tribalism and militancy of our culture…

I think one of the crosses we run away from is the challenge of listening to the voice of the outsider… in my own tradition (the Roman Catholic Church), it was voices from the outside that finally held us accountable for some of our failures… sometimes the only way we can recognize our own distortions of the gospel is through the voice of the outsider…

I sense a greater openness from my evangelical and charismatic friends to the great tradition of the church… I also think that evangelicals and charismatics are challenging the church to put faith at the center of their lives, and to expect God to show up in ways that are visible…

There are times when I find prayer immensely consoling… you don’t know what to do, and so you lay it at God’s feet… but prayer can also be a kind of therapy… like the physical therapist who stretches you and puts you through pain in order to restore you, prayer can be a stretching of our spirit that heals us…

I often pray the Psalms… every single human mood is found there… oftentimes the psalm is exactly what I needed, even though I didn’t know I needed it…

We don’t know where we are in history… we don’t know if we’re at the very beginning of the church’s story or the very end… but we don’t need to… if faith means anything, it means that we’re in a comedy that’s going to end with the marriage of heaven and earth…

Episode 140: Equipping our Youth for the Mission of God

In this episode we chat with Greg Stier, the founder and CEO of Dare to Share, which equips youth leaders and students in relational evangelism. We chat with him about best practices for doing just that. You can learn more about Greg HERE. And also download a free copy of his e-book “Gospelize Your Youth Ministry” for Kindle HERE or iPad HERE.

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What I try to remind everyone of is that everyone’s story is a radical story of salvation…

We’ve forgotten the power of the gospel to change and decided to focus on politics and culture instead… we’re just hacking at the leaves of evil rather than striking at the root…

Too many people are putting the onus of evangelism on the pastor… it’s a come and see mentality… we need to combine come and see with “go and rescue…”

We read in Acts that the apostle Paul trained and equipped people in the School of Tyrannus so that everyone in the province of Asia heard the word of the Lord… we need to start flipping our churches so that they become like little “schools of Tyrannus…”

We teach youth pastors how to build gospel greenhouses, where evangelism is as normal as breathing and disciples are made and multiplied by the teenagers…

Intercessory prayer fuels everything… the youth groups that grow the fastest are those that pray for the lost by name…

Relational evangelism drives our efforts… we’re trying to teach kids not only the content of the gospel of giving them strategies for engaging with their unreached friends…

Leaders have to fully embrace and model this… the youth groups that grew the fastest had leaders who were living out these values of prayer and relational evangelism…

The changing cultural factors make youth ministry more difficult IF we’re stuck in an old approach… we’re stuck in the 80s…

We need to create gospel-advancing youth groups and make the Great Commission the greatest cause… teenagers have been suffering from depression, anxiety, and isolation and the gospel gives identity, belonging, and purpose… that’s the answer…

Episode 139: The New Landscape of Church Leadership with Sean Morgan

In this conversation we sit down with Sean Morgan, founder of The Ascent Leader, to talk with him about some shifts he’s seeing in the landscape of church leadership over the last few years. You can check out Sean’s work with The Ascent Leader HERE.

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A lot of leadership energy is being spent right now dealing with disgruntled staff… it seems we are losing the ability to disagree in a healthy way…

The question isn’t whether we agree all the time or not, but how we disagree, and Scripture has a lot to say about unity…

This is especially challenging for churches that have campuses… it’s really difficult to have alignment when we’re not in physical proximity to one another…

Even when you have a campus that’s close, if you don’t take advantage of that proximity, you might as well be on the other side of the country… you have to be intentional…

The campuses I’m talking about are the ones that have live preaching… an arrogance can creep in that creates a toxicity which is ultimately unrecoverable…

We need to ask whether we are building churches at the speed that GOD has ordained for us, or are we putting growth hormones into the system to get what WE want…? Some of this is the bitter fruit of speeding things up to our pace, not God’s…

The higher the trust, the fewer the rules… when the trust level is high, you need fewer rules, and I think senior pastors are sending people out to lead churches WAY too early…

Most young leaders are not willing to sit in the hidden places… they see hiddenness as a punishment rather than a place where the Lord can do his best work in us…

The leaders that are thriving are the leaders who are willing to evaluate what is and is not “today”… are we willing to accurately look at what’s working and what’s not working…?

When you do identify what’s not working, are you willing to stop it or change it…? And can your team speak into that process…?

Every five years there needs to be serious renewal in vision and strategy… the leaders that are doing this well are leaning into their teams to evaluate vision and strategy and then are taking risks towards what they see needs to be done…