Category: Interviews

Episode 102: An Interview with Rich Villodas – A Deeply Formed Life

In this episode we sit down with pastor and author Rich Villodas to discuss his book, The Deeply Formed Life.

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The five values of our congregation are contemplative rhythms, racial reconciliation, interior examination, sexual wholeness, or missional presence… we’re trying to offer these values to the world and to the church as a paradigm of faithfulness to Jesus…  

Contemplative rhythms are not just about slowing down our pace, but also giving ourselves over to God so that we can address the issues of our day from a deeper kind of wisdom…  

We need to resist formational compartmentalization… the evangelical tradition prioritizes right thinking, the Pentecostal tradition prioritizes right experience, and the progressive tradition prioritizes right action… I want to hold them all together… 

The foundation of engaging matters of race is thinking about the gospel differently… if I limit the gospel to a post-mortem status, I’ll miss it… I’ve found myself this past year regularly coming back to the question, “What do we mean when we say ‘the gospel’?” 

I’ve found myself also this past year reframing for people what racism really is… it’s not just an individual thing… we need to look at it from an individual, interpersonal, and institutional perspective…  

We need to think about how our family of origin shaped us with respect to race… to have people reflect on that and name it is painful… but we need to go back to the scene of the crime—where the malformation first took place… 

We also need to practice listening to other people’s experiences “in the bond of peace”… those who have had the privileges of social power must take the lead to listen first and most often…  

I am very hopeful for the church… I’m in conversation with so many pastors who are showing leadership, creativity, and innovation… a willingness to try new things amidst a new reality, and doing it with joy…  

I’m also encouraged by so many people who are investigating the claims of Christ… I’m hearing so many stories about how the pandemic, our current political climate, and the racial hostilities of the past year are pulling people to something deeper and higher…

Episode 101: An Interview with Steve Cuss – Managing Leadership Anxiety.

In this episode, we sit down with Steve Cuss to talk about his book Managing Leadership Anxiety and how leaders can become not only more self-aware but also wise about managing both their own anxiety and that of others. You can learn more about Steve and his work at capablelife.me.

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This book was born out of some measure of personal desperation… from a deep desire that the life I was proclaiming to others was also the life I was living… 

All chronic anxiety is based on false belief and false need… leadership anxiety is what happens to us when we don’t get what we feel we need to be okay… 

One form of this for me was the belief that every sermon I preached needed to be the best sermon people had ever heard… then, whether it went really well or poorly, I became anxious… I was living under a false need…  

There are universal sources of anxiety, where it doesn’t matter how you’re wired, if you’re in that situation, you’ll be anxious… for instance, whenever we are in situations where we don’t know what to do, we’ll be anxious… that’s where a lot of pastors are right now… 

When a pastor is better at eloquently telling people about the love of God than they are at experiencing it for themselves, they are going to hit a wall… 

Burnout isn’t because of workload… burnout happens because we haven’t addressed, for instance, what happens when the critic calls and all of our old “stories” from the past come up… we can’t control whether that will happen, only our response to it… 

What anxiety does is that it tells us a lie… it is spiritual warfare… it’s about the story we tell ourselves and the voice of our inner critic… the gospel frees us from the tyranny of believing these lies… 

The first step to becoming a non-anxious leader is to pay hyper attention to your own reactivity… and then to learn to notice how your anxiety infects other people and how their anxiety infects you…  

I think that we are failing at discipling our people into non-anxiousness… most people are more discipled by their political point of view than they are by Jesus…

Episode 099: Extravagant: Discovering a Life of Dangerous Generosity

In this episode we sit down with Pastor Brady to talk with him about his newest book Extravagant: Discovering a Life of Dangerous Generosity. Grab your copy over at Amazon today!

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One of the things that my mom and dad did on four or five different occasions is that they took struggling young men into our home… they fed them and clothed them and helped them get through school… I was marked by my parents’ extravagant generosity…

As people get older and make more money, the percentage of their generosity tends to go down… I think that’s because they get more guarded, more cautious, because there is more to lose… but this is the time in our lives when we can and should be more generous…

The most fun thing that I get to do right now is to give… it’s a joyful experience to take what the Lord has provided me and give it away to widows and orphans…

One of the things I talk about in the book is the beauty of a boring budget… you need a plan for your spending… which sounds awful, but is actually the most important thing… you can’t be generous if you don’t spend less than you make…

A lot of people think that compassion is a purely external thing… but I think it is an internal matter long before the need presents itself… compassion is a cultivated sense of empathy and concern for others…

As I get into my 60s and 70s, I want to be a kind old man… well, that doesn’t happen by accident… compassionate people have made up their mind to be interested in others…

To be honest about our Christian experience in America, most of us live in suburban bubbles and don’t take risks the way the Scripture calls us to take risks…

There are two topics that most pastors don’t want to talk about, and they are the two topics that are wrecking our families: sex and money… money is wrecking people right now… and we need to take responsibility for talking about it from the pulpit…

The moment in our lives when we realized that we didn’t “own” it, that our money was God’s provision, was the moment that our marriage changed… it was a matter of trust… did we trust ourselves or in God…?

Episode 098: An Interview with Dr. Derwin Gray // The Good Life: What Jesus Teaches About Finding True Happiness

In this episode we sit down with our good friend Dr. Derwin Gray to talk with him about his new book, The Good Life: What Jesus Teaches About Finding True Happiness. Grab a copy for yourself here.

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In 2014, we were a four-year-old church plant, and I started discovering that regardless of race or social class, people were not happy… so I started wondering, “What did Jesus say about happiness?”

Hiding in plain sight, in the greatest sermon ever preached, by the greatest preacher that ever preached, Jesus (in the beatitudes) teaches us about true happiness…

Jesus outlines eight characteristics that are actually a living portrait of himself… and we are invited to enter into Christ and his story… happiness is not about perpetually having good things happen… it’s about God making us good for the world…

Happiness is the divine birthright of every child born into the kingdom of God… but it is a happiness that is better than feelings… it is something that happens to you as you become like Christ… the beatitudes turn us into people we would want to be friends with…

Jesus is not a product and the church is not a corporation… we’re not selling a product to a group of consumers to help them fulfill something that THEY need fulfilled in their lives…

So much of the modern church has been built on a consumeristic understanding of Jesus… a Jesus that is merely used for what he can give us is not a Jesus that we can adore… and a Jesus we cannot adore is a Jesus we cannot worship…

The good news is that there is a new king, who is the true Lord of all and has launched his kingdom on earth, and now is welcoming us into his kingdom to fulfill the purpose for which we were created…

We will never treat someone above the label we give them… and “neighbor” is how Jesus describes humanity… we are called to treat everyone like Jesus died for them, because he did…

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 096: 10,000 Fathers

In this episode we sit down with a new addition to our staff, Aaron Keyes, to talk about the mission of his organization 10,000 Fathers and how to raise up worship leaders as genuine pastors in our churches. You can find out more about 10,000 Fathers at worship.school.

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I was never a great musical performer or singer… what I was able to do as a worship leader was to open the Scriptures and invite people to try it out… people came alive to that… I started realizing how rare it was to be led in worship by Scripture…

The stuff that pastors are trained in now is very different than what worship leaders are trained in… the apprenticeship and training that is required for being in pastoral leadership in the church doesn’t really exist for worship leaders…

Big songs will only carry small leaders so far… and that’s what’s happening… but the problem is more with the system—we’re hiring people because they know how to play guitar, and then we’re mad at them because they ONLY know how to play guitar…

The reason we started our worship school was to address this need… my wife and I and our pastor started praying and decided to bring worship leaders from around the world in to come and live with us… we wanted to do discipleship in the context of life together…

We’ve shifted it now to an 18-month thing where people don’t have to move… our goal is to raise worship leaders up who can be elders in the church for years to come…

We’ve had pastors call us to say that having worship leaders who can help them make disciples is such a gift… and that’s what we want to see…

Many worship leaders live with anxiety about their relevance… when they’re no longer relevant, they exit ministry… 10,000 Fathers is trying to equip people so that when their stage value starts going down, their spiritual and practical value to the church goes up…

Worship leaders are easy targets… but most of them want depth and want to be helpful to the church for a long time… most would jump at the opportunity to be equipped for that…

Episode 094: All Flame

In this episode we sit down to talk about Andrew Arndt’s new book All Flame: Entering into the Life of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. (Available on Amazon HERE!)

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God’s intent with the human life is not to displace our humanity but to sit within in and radiate through it so that we become all flame… it’s not something for the spiritual elite, and no one’s life is better calibrated for holiness than anyone else’s…

We were a church that nobody knew about… but the life of the Spirit was so present among us… I was surrounded by very ordinary people who were full of the Spirit… that became my bar of what’s normal…

Jesus Christ did not come to write a book but to form a community… one of the pitfalls of the spiritual life is that people try to run off and do it by themselves… that can only end in nonsense or despair…

The only way you hang on during hard seasons in when you are surrounded by the church, which keeps putting in front of you the reality of the Triune God, the hope of Jesus Christ, and the practical support of their own commitment to you…

This is not an academic book of theology, nor is it purely a book of spiritual formation… if God is the fundamental truth of our existence, and God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, then his Triune identity shapes our stories…

My mom approached her spirituality like a farmer… up early in the morning seeking God… I’d wake up and wander down the stairs to the sound of my mom praying in tongues, covering her family in prayer…

My routine these days is similar… I’m up early with coffee and my Bible and I’m praying and asking God to put me to death and make me alive… if I don’t get that time, I’m just not right in the head…

I hope that people are taken again by the wonder and mystery of God… that they are awed again… we’re short on awe in the church… we do a great job giving people principles, but often wonder is missing…

I also hope that people whose faith is hanging on by a thread will see that there is no human experience they can have that is not already an event of the Triune God…

Episode 091: An Interview with N.T. Wright Pt. 2

In this episode, Andrew, Glenn, Jason, and Daniel chat about what they’ve learned over the years from NT Wright. Be sure to catch part 1 of Glenn’s conversation with Wright HERE.

Subscribe and Watch our conversation on our YouTube channel here.

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One of the things we do with crisis is we ask, “How did we get here?” and try to assign blame… and of course we want to get out of it as soon as possible… telling the story of Jesus won’t let us escape the sojourn… Jesus is the one who is the companion in the sojourn…

Jesus is not ONE of the ways we make sense of the world, Jesus is THE way we make sense of the world… Tom was one of the first people who helped me understand that the question is not “why” is this happening but “who” is God for us in this?

There are two threads in the OT… one thread is that calamity is the result of judgment… the other is the innocent sufferer… what I love about Tom is that he shows us that Jesus is both (the judgment-bearer and the innocent sufferer)…

A lot of Christians see racial justice as tangential to the gospel… but when you read the New Testament, you see that it is central…

Tom reminds us that we cannot privatize the gospel—Jesus is the ruler over all things and all people, and what God is doing is reconciling all things to himself in Jesus, and everyone to one another…

Part of God’s saving work is that God’s covenant righteousness is also covenant membership… Tom helps us see that Paul is talking about who belongs – and if we all belong because of our faith in Christ, there can’t be division anymore between me and my brother…

The beauty of repentance is that we are casting ourselves upon merciful God… for white America, this will be one of the hardest things to learn… that we can’t fix this… that we’re going to have to listen to our African American brothers and sisters and let them lead the way…

So much of Tom’s work contradicts our implicit divided worldviews… we think there is God’s realm and our earthly realm… but when you look at the history of Jesus, you see that heaven and earth are interlocked…

If the church now is Christ’s availability to the world, we are the place where the weeping of God meets the pain of the world…

Episode 090: An Interview with N.T. Wright

In this episode we sit down with world-renowned New Testament scholar N.T. Wright to talk about his new book “God and the Pandemic” as well as the way Gospel addresses racism.

Subscribe and Watch our interview with N.T. Wright on our YouTube channel here.

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Obviously there are plenty of things in the Old Testament which are about people misbehaving and God producing specific judgments—a plague or being defeated in battle or whatever it may be. But there are many other passages in the Old Testament—with the book of Job in the middle—which say “Yeah, bad things happen, but this was not God doing it and I do not deserve it.”

What “God and the Pandemic” is really all about is hermeneutics—it’s how to read the Bible for all it’s worth instead of just taking a bit here and a bit there… We have to read the Bible as a whole narrative with Jesus in the middle and only then do we get the real message.

Again and again the New Testament encourages us not to say “OK, we can now produce a rational analysis of why God has done this or that,” but we can say “what is our vocation as followers of Jesus in this extraordinary situation?” 

This is what it looks like when God takes charge: It’s not God sitting upstairs pushing buttons and pulling levers. It’s God coming in the person of his Son, in order to confront evil to take its weight upon himself to bring healing and New Creation… 

When Jesus redefines power at the end of Mark 10, he says, “Yeah, the emperors boss and bully and beat people up to get their way, we’re not going to do it like that. We’re not going to do it like that. We’re going to do it the other way. If anyone wants to be great, they must be your servant, the slave of all” …That’s the redefinition of power itself.

God is leading wise, humble Christian servants to be at the place of pressure and pain to be there in prayer. To be with. That’s the whole thing. God with us. 

In Romans 8, Paul is talking about how God saves creation as a whole with humans at last rescued from sin and death to take their place as the rescued rescuers… God has designed the world to work as a garden through human agency. We don’t make roses grow, but we prune them and tend them. 

To our hurried, Twittering, lament is a really difficult thing to do. To hold back from what we think we ought to say at once. To say: “No, I’m going to wait. I’m going to stay in this place of pain. Please help me Lord…help me to use these psalms, and teach my people to use these psalms, and to have a season of lament to just say ‘How long O Lord, how long?’” And then there may be new things that grow out of that… we become gradually formed by the passion of Christ. 

The Christian example of two thousand years of caring for those who cannot care for themselves has rubbed off on the world… The Church still has to say “We’re not giving up on this. We’re in this for the long haul.” 

Caring for the poor, caring for the sick and the dying, caring for the weak and the vulnerable and those without education. This is part of our DNA. This is what we do as Christians. And Christians have done that from day one, because it’s what Jesus did.

People think of going to church with the people who look like them and talk like them, but the whole point of the gospel in the beginning was that this was a new way of being human in which men and women every nation and tribe and tongue would come together.

Christianity is an entire way of being human. It’s economics, it’s politics, it’s philosophical, it’s everything. It’s got some religious elements, but it didn’t look like a first-century religion at all. It is its own category. And that category is instantiated in the life of the multi-colored, multi-ethnic everything-together church.

Episode 087: An Interview with Tom Holland Pt. 2

In this episode we sit down for the second of a two part interview with best-selling writer and historian Tom Holland talking about his breathtaking book Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. This is part 2 of 2.

No one rejects the concept of human rights… but when you ask, “Where did you get that idea from and why do you believe in them?” it is ultimately as theological idea as believing that Jesus Christ was raised from the dead on the third day…

Human rights do not objectively exist… you can’t say that you’re superior to theology and superstition and simultaneously say you believe in human rights… if you believe in human rights you may as well say you believe in angels…

The deep-seated assumption that empires are bad—you have you ask, “Where does THAT come from?” That idea might just conceivably have something to do with the fact that the prime emblem of the faith is a cross, which is the ultimate subversion of the symbol of imperial power…

The idea that it is possible for an entire society to be born again is so powerful that it brings emperors to kneel in the snow… it is revolutionary… but then the church will need to be corrected, which gives rise to the revolution of the Reformation, which gives rise to the revolution of the Enlightenment…

I found that in the process of researching this book, there was no period of Christian history that did not offer great riches and nourishment…

This book felt like a pilgrimage to me, but I didn’t know where I was going to end up… I found when I reached the journey’s end, I felt that my life had been hugely enriched by it… I had my heart opened to things that I otherwise would have been shut off from…

I wanted to write about my godmother because when she died, I left her feeling like that was it… that she would die and be dissolved and that would be it… but now I am not so confident in that… I wouldn’t say it has hardened into Christian faith, but my disbelief is gone…

When you live in a time of crisis, suddenly the sense of belonging to many generations of people who have faced much worse crises but using the same spiritual and emotional and moral framework that we have is incredibly powerful…

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