One Right Church

We all experience shame in some form or another. In this episode, we discuss how shame turns us into people pleasers. We become overly concerned with other people's acceptance and approval. When we fail, we cannot truly recover. Shame haunts us and makes us look over our shoulder, wondering if we'll be rejected again. Jesus knew shame. He took our shame on the cross that we might be free from shame. We recommend you follow Jesus for freedom from shame!

"Shame on you." That's something many of us heard growing up. Unhappily, shame follows us throughout our lives. Shame breeds in family systems and churches. We have been thinking about shame and would like to discuss it here. We believe it will take several episodes to discuss, and we will begin in this episode. We hope this will help you recognize the role shame plays in your own life and motivations. The good news is that God put our shame on Christ. One of the reasons we need Jesus is to deal with our shame.

That God knows your situation can be a wonderful comfort. God knows your situation, and that can be an excuse not to take responsibility. This episode discusses how people use the phrase "God knows" differently. I hope it helps you think about how trusting God makes a difference in your life and in your church.

Our church is looking for a pastor. Like passing a baton in a relay race, the transition is critical. The Followers of Christ did not make the critical transition, and the baton never got passed. Everything about the church has been affected by the lack of leadership. In this episode, we will discuss why a pastor is important and why the transition between them is so important.

You can bet on being a good person and going to the right church, or you can bet on Jesus. In this episode, we maintain that Jesus is a better way. Jesus makes promises that are better than what you can hope for from your own effort. Jesus offers a better way to salvation.

Wisdom is, among other things, the ability to predict consequences. Wise people know decisions have consequences. Choose first where you want to end up, then make your decision. In this episode, we encourage listeners to choose the consequences and then choose the decision that leads there.

In this episode, we interview William Hughes. Bill, as he asked us to call him, is a retired pastor in England. His call to the ministry and the gentleness of his character will be evident as you listen to this interview. We were introduced to Pastor Hughes through SermonAudio, which has an archive of over 600 of his sermons. One of our favorite messages, "Blessed are the Meek," is a good place to start. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did.

Preaching has been around since the beginning of the church; one could even say the prophets did it before that. Yet, it is viewed with suspicion. In this episode, we encourage you to listen to preaching. We recorded this episode because we are having a special guest next week. He is a preacher who is so warm-hearted and truthful that he was influential in leading many to Jesus. Stay tuned...

"I'm not superstitious...I'm just regular-stitious." It is easy for your beliefs or religion to cross over into superstition if you are not careful. In this episode, we discuss the difference between faith and superstition. One of my key takeaways is that God loves you, and you don't have to do certain things to ensure you stay in his favor. I hope this is an encouragement to you.

Is leaving the church the same as leaving the faith? Have you left the faith if you've left Followers? Is there only one church that can get you to heaven? In this episode, we talk about the relationship between the church and the faith. Are they necessarily the same thing? We hope this helps you find freedom in Christ.

We hear the same question about grace over and over. It may be worded differently. Is grace too easy? Will grace let you off the hook? Does grace mean you can do anything you want? In other words, can you abuse grace? This is a great question because it recognizes God's generosity and kindness, but misses the effects of grace. Grace itself works in someone's life and will change the person who receives it. We hope this helps you live by faith in God's grace. We hope this helps you give up on working for your own salvation.

Call it a hunch. Call it a bad feeling. Can you, should you trust it? Can you trust something more reliable than your intuition? Can you trust your feelings? Does God work through our feelings? That is our topic in this episode. I hope this helps you make good decisions.

We've talked about the characteristics of the One Right Church before. This episode addresses why you might want to reexamine continuing in a church with those characteristics. What might be the problem with continuing in the One Right Church? After all, why not One Right Church?

Bible study ended up being a big part of Mark's story. Several people are afraid of studying the Bible. They fear that studying the Bible might lead you away from the One Right Church. In this episode, we talk about why Bible study is a good thing. When other people join you in Bible study, you end up hearing from God in ways you wouldn't have by yourself. We do hope you will find people to study the Bible with.

In this episode, we discuss the difference between grieving with hope and without hope. Mark recently lost his nephew, Jake, in a tragic motorcycle accident. He and many others are grieving the loss. Jake had a strong faith in Jesus. As we reflect on it, his faith makes a huge difference in how we process our grief. We grieve with hope and find this to be another reason to commend genuine faith in Jesus.

In this episode, we answer two listener questions. One question is about parenting; the other is about what it means that a believer might make another family member holy.

A listener asked us to talk about propitiation. It's Christmas party conversation material, but propitiation is a very important word. In short, it means the satisfaction of wrath. Propitiation means Jesus has satisfied God's wrath and you don't need to. We hope this helps you trust Jesus.

This episode is a special one because Cindy joins us to reflect on what the past five years have held. They have been out of The One Right Church for five years. Mark and Cindy found several things to be thankful for and sad about as they reflected on the five years since they left the Followers of Christ church.

In this episode, we talk about an important verse that was misused in Mark's past. More than that, we talk about how to tell if a verse is being used correctly. The verse in question is Jesus' teaching that if you want to save your life, you must lose it (Matthew 10:25). We really do hope you save your life...by surrendering it to Jesus. To properly understand a verse in the Bible you have to figure out what it meant to its first audience. You do that with an ancient book the same way you do in an ordinary conversation. Context. We all hate having our words taken out of context. God doesn't like it very well either. We hope this helps you read the Bible better.

We take a page from Fiddler on the Roof and ask about traditions! Mark grew up with all kinds of traditions, some good, some bad. How do you discern whether you should keep your tradition? What makes a tradition a good tradition? These are important questions, especially if your traditions are religious ones. P.S. We are sorry not to send an episode last week. We had a tragedy in the family. Thank you for your patience and prayers.

Is joy different than happiness? How do you know which you have? How can you have true joy even in you are suffering? These and other questions are ones we explore in the episode. Some of the Bible verses that are central to this episode come from Romans 5:1-5: [1] Therefore, since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. [2] Through him we have also obtained access by faith into this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in hope of the glory of God. [3] Not only that, but we rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, [4] and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, [5] and hope does not put us to shame, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us. (ESV)

We have attempted to define some important terms in the Christian faith. One of those terms we need to get clear on is sin. What is sin? Should we distinguish between sin and sins, between the principle or nature of sin and the acts that spring from it. This is especially important if you are keeping track of sins in order to balance out your sins with good works. These are some of the things we try to clear up in this episode.

In this episode, we discuss the difference between repentance and merely saying sorry. We all grew up being told to apologize and say we're sorry. If we didn't do it right, our parents would tell us to be even sorrier. Is that repentance? Repentance is an important piece in our relationship with God. I hope this points you in the direction of heartfelt repentance.

In this episode, we attempt to define hope. How is Christian hope different from other hope? Does the resurrection of Jesus give you hope, as if you might have the hope of a raise at work? Or is the hope of a different kind? If you would like to be more hopeful, please listen in!

Salvation sounds like a religious word, if any word does. What does Salvation mean? In this episode, we discuss why we need salvation and how we get it. The simplest and most important thing about salvation is that you can't do it for yourself. That's why you need a savior, someone must save you. I hope you meet him. His name is Jesus.

The name of our podcast is The One Right Church. But what is it? What makes a church the one right church? We discuss a list of characteristics that, I hope, will help you know if you are in a situation that might fall into the category of the "One Right Church."

It is easy to say," "Just have faith." It is hard to do. If you are saved by grace through faith, it is pretty essential to know what faith is. So, in today's episode, we work to define what we mean when we say "Faith." It doesn't help to use synonyms like trust or believe. I hope this episode builds your faith.

New episodes are back! We will restart with a series of definitions. The first topic we'll define is "Grace." It has been debated throughout history. What makes Grace amazing? What is grace? How do you get it? What does it do for you? We've learned that we can't have a meaningful conversation if the speaker and the hearer are using the same word in different ways. So, we will spend some time defining words. I hope the conversation about grace makes you long for God to treat you with grace. Thank you for your patience with the encore episodes.

Good Friday prompted us to talk about the cross of Jesus. The cross is the centerpiece of Christianity because it is there that God dealt with our sin. He reconciled us to himself and defeated the devil. You cannot make too much of the cross.

"You don't need to read the Old Testament." Many of us have heard something like that. In this episode, we discuss some of the benefits of reading the Old Testament. The main benefit is that Jesus makes more sense if you read the Old Testament. In fact, Jesus himself showed as much in Luke 24:27, after he rose from the dead.

We all tell ourselves stories. We try to fit our lives into a story that makes sense and has a beginning and an end. Which story you tell yourself makes all the difference. The gospel is the story God tells. In this episode, we examine God's story and compare it with alternate stories. We hope that looking at them side-by-side will be helpful.

Sometimes you tell yourself a story to make things okay. In this episode, we look at one of those stories. "God will make a way." It sounds good but falls short of good news. We hope this helps you think about this and the other things you might tell yourself. Don't settle for hope that is not good enough.

This episode is about the fullness of the Gentiles. It may seem like an unusual topic for an episode, and it is. Yet, it has been a part of the explanation for many about why the One Right Church was the right one. So we thought we should talk about it. We hope this is helpful to you.

In this episode, we discuss weddings in the One Right Church. Weddings reflect what is important both to the couple and to their community. Mark tells us that weddings in the One Right Church are pretty different from weddings outside.

This episode is simple. Christ Alone is the topic. It is simple that one must believe in Christ alone for salvation, but everything hangs on it. If we advocate for Christ-And something else, we will miss out on the gift of salvation that Christ offers. It is our hope that you will not add to or subtract from Jesus when you think of eternal things.

We talk again with Laren Eells, this time about his testimony. His story of coming to faith in Jesus is one of the most dramatic and inspiring we've ever heard. Enjoy!

Do you believe lightning can strike twice? We interview Laren Eells about his experience of the revival in the Idaho Followers of Christ Church about the same time it happened in Oregon City. This is part one of a two-part interview. Laren shares some of the unique things about his branch of Followers, along with some similarities and differences from Oregon City. Laren is a wonderful storyteller. We hope you enjoy this conversation as much as we did. Come back next week to hear his personal testimony.

In this episode, we talk about how to understand the Bible. What are you trying to do when you read the Bible? What are some common mistakes people make when they go to the Bible? Here are a couple of ways we misunderstand the Bible: Mistake descriptions for prescriptions. Import your own meaning into the text. Proof-texting: Finding proof for your idea from a verse out of context. Here are a couple of safe-guards when you read your Bible: Treat it as normal communication. Try to understand the simple meaning the writer intended. Location, Location, Location. Context makes all the difference. Come ready to submit to what the text says, not what you want it to say.

It's not what you know; it's who you know! Knowing people who can help or hurt you is one thing. It is another thing to know Jesus. This episode is about who you know!

We all struggle to submit to authority. Yet, the use of authority sets the One Right Church apart from others. So, in this episode we discuss what it means to have and submit to proper authority.

Where do you draw the lines about who is in and who is out? That is a very important question and one that most people don't think about even though they do it. In this episode, we discuss where that line is drawn and where it should be drawn.

Nothing shapes the present like the past. This week we interview Marshall Phillips about the History of the Followers of Christ. History has a way of orienting us because we didn't get here from nowhere!

The parable of the Good Samaritan always hits close to home. This week Mark compares what it means to him now with what it would have meant before. We hope it helps you love your neighbor.

2023 was our first year of podcasting. We took a pause to reflect on what God has done and what has been encouraging to us because of the podcast. We are going to take next week off. But we will be back with more interviews and episodes. May your Christmas and New Year be blessed by God!

We're happy to have Maria Shaw on the podcast today. She shares her perspective and experience with prayer, before and after she knew Jesus as her savior.

This whole time Mark has been talking about worldliness, being a worldly person, being "of the world" in a way that has perplexed Scott. In this episode, he explains. What did he used to mean by "worldly" and how is that different from what he thinks now?

There was a time when Mark couldn't imagine a life outside the religious tradition he grew up in. In this episode, his invitation to you is the same as the invitation of Jesus to some of his early disciples, "Come and See!"

Many people have suggested times and dates for the end of the world. Walter White was one of those people. In this episode, we talk about the dream that was the basis of his prophecy as well as some of the downstream effects of that prophecy. We hope you will be prepared for the coming of the Lord, even though it didn't happen as Walter predicted.

This week we are rebroadcasting an episode where Mark answers the top two questions he gets: Why did you stay? Why did you leave? I hope you enjoy it. Happy Thanksgiving!

In this episode, we talk about the importance of an education and what reasons Mark was encouraged NOT to get one.

This week we talk about doctrine -- what it is and why it is important. Doctrine is of utmost importance if you are to be the one right church.