Tag: books

Episode 153: The Ache for Meaning – An Interview with Tommy Brown

In this episode we sit down with pastor and author Tommy Brown to talk about his new book The Ache for Meaningand how the temptations of Christ reveal who we are and what we are seeking. 

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I was more depressed than I realized and was at a near crisis in ministry… I had lost touch with what it meant to be a pastor…

Reading through the temptations of Christ one day, I knew I was on the scent of the trail that I needed to be on… it really started a seven-year journey for me of learning to name my ache and my questions as a pastor…

The temptations are symbolic… the devil didn’t make them up on the spot… they’re each an echo from Israel’s wilderness wanderings… and they speak to our perennial needs for security, significance, and control… 

You can boil them down into questions: Will I have enough? Am I enough? And do I matter? In any given situation, we can ask ourselves those questions to see what’s driving our anxiety…

For pastors, it’s a deep seduction to get the deepest needs of our lives met by the church… which means that when things aren’t going well at the church, it strikes at our identity… our identity can’t be based in externals but in sonship…

Jesus is the already the Son of God by nature as the second person of the Trinity and by gift as the Spirit descends upon him… and so the devil is trying to get Jesus to do something that doesn’t need to be done… 

The enemy plays with our minds trying to convince us that there’s something to be done to achieve something that’s already been given… and that’s where we get screwy…

There’s an over-functioning in ministry that comes from the fact that we haven’t settled ourselves into our “aready-ness” as sons and daughters of God… 

As you grow in your faith, the tests don’t stop… what I’ve learned is to spot them and respond to them earlier… the space between stimulus and response is the place where our freedom lies… 

The higher you go in leadership, the more sophisticated and nuanced the temptations become… in every moment there’s an opportunity to respond in one way or another… 

Episode 152: Neuroscience and Spiritual Formation – A Conversation with Michael Hendricks

In this episode we sit down with Michel Hendricks to talk with him about his book The Other Half of Church: Christian Community, Brain Science, and Overcoming Spiritual Stagnation.

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This book was written out of frustration and confusion… some pastors and I were talking about our frustrations with discipleship, and one of the pastors said, “Michel, I think we’re ignoring the neuroscience angle,” and I had no idea what he was talking about…

The left side of the brain is what in popular culture we think of AS the brain… it’s the problem-solving side… but the deeper, relational questions are handled in the right brain—it’s the more powerful side of the brain… 

Before the left brain even kicks in, the right brain is asking, “Who are these people? Are these my people? Am I safe here?” Most of our discipleship is left-brain oriented and doesn’t take the right brain into account at all…

Our brains are designed to change us through love… our attachments and bonds with others are the strongest force in the brain for the formation of our character… 

I’m not saying that we should drop left-brained discipleship skills, but that we ADD the right-brain relational skills… e.g., joy—are we creating environments where people are happy to see one another…? Joy is fuel for transformation… and when our joy is low, nothing really works…

For the Hebrew mind, the face and presence of God were inseparable… the face WAS the presence, like a baby looking into its mother’s face… that’s how a baby grows… and how we grow with God…

Our churches need to function much more like families than they do like religious organizations… families are primarily and fundamentally about creating bonds…

If our relational skills are right, we can do church discipline in a way that’s healthy… it’s about flipping on the self-regulating principle in the body of Christ… 

There is a form of healthy shame and toxic shame… toxic shame is what most of us have experienced… healthy shame is deeply relational and helps remind us of who we are… it reinforces our good group identity…

Forming community this way makes us virtually immune to narcissism… if we are a deeply bonded family which self-corrects, we are creating a soil that narcissism can’t thrive in… 

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)

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 1 of 2.

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

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 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 20thcentury 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 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 138: The Five Masculine Instincts with Chase Replogle

In this episode we sit down with pastor and author Chase Replogle to talk about his book The Five Masculine Instincts. For more on Chase’s book and extra resources click here.

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First and foremost, I’m a pastor, and I’ve watched over the last few years how the topic of masculinity has become controversial conversation… 

I was seeing the guys in my congregation struggle with this, and I wanted to create a book that offered a path towards a better conversation—a conversation about character…

The cultural ways of having this conversation are that either we need to deconstruct masculinity, or we need to indulge it… but what both of these approaches have in common is that they focus on externals rather than on the internal realities of a man…

I’m always careful to say that these “instincts” are not the five sins of man, nor are they the five expectations… the question is how we become mature men, given these instincts…

God initiated a conversation with Cain… I think that’s really profound… you’d imagine that Cain would ask God why he rejected his sacrifice… but he doesn’t… he acts impulsively and sarcastically…

Cain’s sarcasm is a thin veil for his contempt for God… his immaturity makes him reactive and winds up perpetually immature… he’s the picture of a lost adolescent, perpetually adrift… 

For men—if you find yourself struggling to take things seriously, or find yourself immediately reactionary, God may be using precisely those things to make you a better man… 

Samson has divine experiences in the midst of adventure, but instead of it enlightening him, he just indulges it and becomes less discerning…

This theme becomes larger and larger until he gives away his secret, I think, as a way of just being done with it… he’s sick of it all…

If you’re constantly trying to find meaning in adventure, and it’s weakening your commitments to place and family and vocation, then perhaps you’re putting something on adventure that it’s never going to be able to deliver…

A lot of pastors, in their search for adventure, are disrupting the framework of their congregations… we need to satisfy that thirst for adventure inside the boundaries of our lives…  

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