Podcasts about church growth movement

In this episode, we welcome Melissa Dougherty to the show. She is a Christian apologist, author, and YouTuber. She is also the author of the book “Happy Lies: How a Movement You (Probably) Never Heard of Shaped Our Self-Obsessed World”. In this interview, we discuss what “New Thought” is and how it relates to “New Age”, why New Thought philosophies contain “happy lies”, the most nefarious thing about New Thought as it pertains to Christians, what can be done to eliminate the negative consequences of this ideology, why New Thought is fueled by moral relativism as the pursuit of “my truth”, how her own gender dysphoria as a child led to her subscribing to New Thought beliefs, how her faith in Christ saved her from these Satanic ideologies, how we are not enough, problems with the Church Growth Movement, why Satanic and occultic things like the Enneagram actually work, and much more. Let's get into it… Episode notes and links HERE. Donate to support our mission of equipping men to push back darkness. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr Adam Koontz and Col Willie Grills talk about the movie Jaws and how it began the monoculture era, shopping malls and consumerism, and how it relates to evangelism. Visit our website - A Brief History of Power Thanks to our sponsor, Gnesio Health Dr Koontz - Redeemer Lutheran Church Pr. Willie Grills - Zion Lutheran Church Music thanks to Verny

Today InPerspective with Dr. Harry Reeder April 24, 2025

When Ken researched his Bible School classmate, Melvin Warren, he stumbled across Dr. Curtis' book. It referenced a familiar, legendary press conference. In 1970, at the famed Arch entrance at the Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, Melvin made a speech as the cameras rolled and journalists scribbled notes. He claimed that the school's racism so marred his experience as a student that he tore up his diploma and tossed it into the trash. He made national news. That incident not only drove Ken into a years-long quest to understand the dynamic of racism in his white evangelical church but it also played significantly into the doctoral dissertation of another Moody grad, Dr. Jesse Curtis. Dr. Curtis is now an assistant professor at Valparaiso University. Ken and Jesse compare notes on that momentous event. It prompted Ken's Beached White Male journey. It also contributed to Dr. Curtis' doctoral focus - now a book considered a “must-read” by both Jemar Tisby and Kristin Kobes du Mez. Ken and Jese discuss The Myth of Colorblind Christians: Evangelicals and White Supremacy in the Civil Rights Era. Dr. Curtis covers the history of racism in the white evangelical church going back to the Billy Graham era when Howard Jones became the first African American evangelist on “The Team.” Jesse believes that the Church Growth Movement founded by Donald McGavran contributed to the segregation that was a feature in the explosive growth the church at the turn of the century - including “ethnic” congregations and mega-churches. McGavran's protege, C. Peter Wagner, added fuel that dynamic. In their wide-ranging discussion, they talk about evangelical super-stars like Rick Warren and Bill Hybels as well as champions like Bill Pannel, Tom Skinner and John Perkins. Curtis argues that the notion of “colorblind Christians” is a myth. While he wrote some five years ago, the case is as relevant as ever. Just this week, in his inaugural address, the 47th President stated, “We will forge a society that is colorblind…” His supporters stood in enthusiastic applause. Ken and Jesse agree: this is not progress. SHOW NOTESBecome a Patron | Ken's Substack PageEpisode Number 399    Support the show

In an era where the average church in America has an attendance of about 50 people, Karl Vaters talks about desizing the church. Karl also discusses the drug of size, the good and bad of the church growth movement, and what large and small churches get right.

Daniel Im is a pastor, podcaster, and author of The Discipleship Opportunity, a brand new book. His goal in discipleship is friendship by investing time, money, and energy in others, but specifically stewarding his time well to reach both believers and unbelievers who are interested. To learn more about the podcast or access the show notes, visit www.redletterpodcast.com. Today's episode is brought to you by Dwelling 1:14. Led by Pastor Greg Finke, Dwelling 1:14 is a discipleship organization that comes alongside pastors and leaders to help them intentionally disciple their people. Greg has worked with hundreds of churches and tens of thousands of people. He has developed a year-long training process that helps your church produce greater disciples in their everyday lives. He's an experienced practitioner and mentor, and he's ready to help your church. You can contact him and learn more about this year-long process here. Also, check out a webinar I had with Greg Finke in June of this year to help your church create a discipleship plan.Let's still include some Dwelling114 graphics, links, and webinar material here for when we post it on our website.Resources mentioned in the episode: Planting Missional Churches by Ed Stetzer ImBetween Podcast: Marriage and Parenting Podcast The Discipleship Opportunity: Leading a Great-Commission Church in a Post-Everything World by Daniel ImThe Making of a Leader by Frank DamazioDanielIm.comKey insights from the episode: In Canada, the church knows it is in the margins. – Daniel Im When the pews are empty, pastors don't just think they are doing something wrong; we think we're wrong. – Daniel Im The church growth movement started out of a reaction to churches as country clubs. - Daniel Im After the pandemic, we all became very possessive of our time. – Daniel Im Christian consumers are those who say they “watch” you. – Daniel Im Gen Z and Gen Alpha are some of the most spiritual, open generations we've ever seen. – Daniel Im If you chase uninterested Christians, you are just pandering to consumerism. – Daniel Im Daniel Im's Challenge: Pray the prayer: “Here I am, Lord.”Are you following Jesus? Many want to be greater followers of Jesus but don't know how. We extensively studied everything Jesus commanded of us and located five key targets to which Jesus invited His followers. The five targets are Being, Forgiving, Serving, Giving, and Going.In partnership with LifeWay Research, we created a Red Letter Challenge Assessment that will measure you according to these five targets. And the best news of all: it's free! You will receive your results immediately and be presented with the next steps to help you become an even greater follower of Jesus.You can take the FREE Red Letter Challenge Assessment here. This is another Hurrdat Media Production. Hurrdat Media is a podcast network and digital media production company based in Omaha, NE. Find more podcasts on the Hurrdat Media Network by going to HurrdatMedia.com or Hurrdat Media YouTube channel!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This conversation with Karl Vaters is a fascinating look at the history and impact of the Church Growth Movement in America and around the world. Karl shares how the movement started with good intentions to reach more people for Christ, but over time it became an unhealthy obsession with numerical growth and bigger churches. The danger is that we've often confused numerical size with spiritual health. Karl challenges us to shift our focus away from just growing the numbers, and instead prioritize discipleship and integrity in our churches. He believes discipleship can fix most problems a church faces, because it's about developing mature followers of Jesus, not just filling seats. Additionally, Karl warns against the celebrity culture that has crept into the church, where we elevate certain pastors and put them on a pedestal. Instead, he advocates for a return to more collaborative, team-based leadership that equips the whole body for ministry. Overall, this was a thought-provoking conversation that calls the church back to its biblical foundations of making disciples, walking in integrity, and letting Jesus build his church. Join us as we de-size the church. Karl Vaters is the author of five books, including the brand-new De-Sizing the Church. Karl produces resources for Helping Small Churches Thrive at KarlVaters.com. His heart is to help pastors of small churches (up to 90 percent of us) find the resources to lead well, and to capitalize on the unique advantages that come with pastoring a small church – something virtually every pastor will spend at least some of their ministry years doing. He also believes that big and small churches can and should work together more often – to the benefit and blessing of everyone.Karl also hosts a bi-weekly podcast, The Church Lobby: Conversations on Faith & Ministry. Episodes feature in-depth interviews about the topics that concern pastors, especially those who minister in a small church context.Karl has served in small-church ministry for over 40 years, so he speaks and writes from decades of hands-on pastoral experience.Karl's Book:De-Sizing the ChurchKarl's Recommendation:The Great DechurchingJoin Our Patreon for Early Access and More: PatreonConnect with Joshua: jjohnson@allnations.usGo to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Threads at www.facebook.com/shiftingculturepodcasthttps://www.instagram.com/shiftingculturepodcast/https://twitter.com/shiftingcultur2https://www.threads.net/@shiftingculturepodcasthttps://www.youtube.com/@shiftingculturepodcastConsider Giving to the podcast and to the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link belowRegister for the Further Together and Identity Exchange events at allnations.us Support the Show.

There are cracks in the foundation. We have assumed that church and discipleship should look a certain way to produce more numbers, but through the last several years, we've seen we may have missed the mark. In this episode, Daniel Im discusses discipleship in a post-modern world where truth is seen as subjective rather than objective. He proposes a discipleship framework that focuses on interested Christians and interested non-Christians rather than just reaching one group or the other. He encourages churches to empower all disciples to make disciples rather than relying only on formal church leadership. We talk equipping believers to gather, grow, give, and go together through community rather than just gathering for teaching. So join us as we dive into the opportunity we have for discipleship in a post-everything world. Daniel Im is a pastor, Bible teacher, writer, and podcast host with a passion for the local church. He is the lead pastor of Beulah Alliance Church and the author of No Silver Bullets, Planning Missional Churches, and You Are What You Do: And Six Other Lies about Work, Life, and Love. He lives in Edmonton, Alberta with his wife Christina and their three children. For more information, visit danielim.com and connect with him on social media @danielsangi. Daniel's newest book is The Discipleship Opportunity.Daniel's Book:The Discipleship OpportunityJoin Our Patreon for Early Access and More: PatreonConnect with Joshua: jjohnson@allnations.usGo to www.shiftingculturepodcast.com to interact and donate. Every donation helps to produce more podcasts for you to enjoy.Follow on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, or Threads at www.facebook.com/shiftingculturepodcasthttps://www.instagram.com/shiftingculturepodcast/https://twitter.com/shiftingcultur2https://www.threads.net/@shiftingculturepodcasthttps://www.youtube.com/@shiftingculturepodcastConsider Giving to the podcast and to the ministry that my wife and I do around the world. Just click on the support the show link belowSend us a Text Message.Support the Show.

Karl Vaters is not against bigness on principle. He is quick to point out that large churches can use their size to do things that smaller churches simply cannot. But he also says that the things that big churches do better are few, and that getting big, pursuing growth, often comes at great financial and spiritual cost. His new book is called De-Sizing The Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What's Next. He says that numbers are meant to inform us, not define us, and he goes on to say that our obsession with numbers is literally killing the church and its witness in the world. Karl Vaters knows of what he speaks. He grew up studying the Church Growth Movement, but he realized that most churches in America have less than 100 members, and that if he really wanted to make a difference, he should put his energies there. In addition to being a pastor, he has written other books, including The Church Recovery Guide, 100 Days to a Healthier Church, and Small Church Essentials. He and his wife Shelley have three children and two grandkids. The producer for today's program is Jeff McIntosh. Until next time, may God bless you.

Too many church leaders believe there’s a way to honor Christ and win the world’s approval. Wretched Radio | Air Date: May 13, 2024 https://media-wretched.org/Radio/Podcast/WR2024-0513.mp3 Segment 1 Phil Johnson is here today, kinda. Which professions are most reliable and trustworthy? AI can create a voice of your dead loved ones. Segment 2 News media aggressively […] The post PAUL SLAMS THE CHURCH GROWTH MOVEMENT appeared first on Wretched.

Karl Vaters interviews Bob Smietana, a columnist for Religion News Service, and the author of Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why it Matters. Bob and Karl discuss some of unintended consequences of the Church Growth Movement from Bob's unique vantage point. They also delve into the dangers of bigness and what we can do about it. Then they discuss Smietana's fascinating article, “There's a Reason Every Hit Worship Song Sounds the Same,” and what it says about the current church culture. Links Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why it Matters Religion News Service There's a Reason Every Hit Worship Song Sounds the Same Karl's new book, De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What's Next is now available wherever you buy books, either electronically or in print. If you've read the book and you'd like me to speak to your group about the issues I raise in it, reach out to me at KarlVaters.com/contactme. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Karl Vaters interviews Bob Smietana, a columnist for Religion News Service, and the author of Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why it Matters. Bob and Karl discuss some of unintended consequences of the Church Growth Movement from Bob's unique vantage point. They also delve into the dangers of bigness and what we can do about it. Then they discuss Smietana's fascinating article, “There's a Reason Every Hit Worship Song Sounds the Same,” and what it says about the current church culture. Links Reorganized Religion: The Reshaping of the American Church and Why it Matters Religion News Service There's a Reason Every Hit Worship Song Sounds the Same Karl's new book, De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What's Next is now available wherever you buy books, either electronically or in print. If you've read the book and you'd like me to speak to your group about the issues I raise in it, reach out to me at KarlVaters.com/contactme. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

“Church size matters to us far more than it should. From the pride it brings when the numbers are up to the shame and frustration it causes when the numbers are static or down, none of this provides a healthy foundation on which to build a healthy church body,” writes Karl Vaters. He goes on to suggest a solution: “We need to de-size the church.” In this episode of the Influence Podcast, I talk to Vaters about why bigness is a problem, why de-sizing the church is a solution, and how to do it. I'm George P. Wood, executive editor of Influence magazine and your host. Karl Vaters has served in small-church ministry for over 40 years, so he speaks and writes from decades of hands-on pastoral experience. An ordained Assemblies of God minister, he is author most recently of De-Sizing the Church: How Church Growth Became a Science, Then an Obsession, and What's Next, published this month by Moody Press. ————— This episode of the Influence podcast is brought to you by My Healthy Church, distributors of Momentum Training Series. Momentum Training Series will help you become more effective in your ministry, whether you are a new volunteer or a seasoned leader. The series covers topics such as including children with disabilities, teaching lessons that last, leaving a spiritual legacy, and cultivating a Spirit-empowered kids ministry. For more information about Momentum Training Series, visit MomentumTrainingSeries.com.

The Seeker Sensitive Movement is a philosophy or approach within Christianity that emphasizes making church services and environments more accessible and inviting to people who are not yet believers, often referred to as "seekers." The movement seeks to remove barriers that might prevent non-believers from feeling comfortable or welcome in church settings, with the goal of attracting them to explore the Christian faith. This movement is closely aligned with the Church Growth Movement and taught to revolutionize how church is conducted. In this video I will go over various aspects to include the history, examples, leaders, and compare to the Bible. I hope you enjoy it and if you like it please like share and subscribe. I hope this can help out people in their Christian walk of life and above all I hope this gives glory to God! (Some clips were used from multiple church YouTube channels and the church of tares documentary.)

1.3: Volkskirche, Countercultural Church, Church Growth Movement | Mission in einer postchristlichen Gesellschaft

Guest Bios Show Transcript Everything rises or falls on leadership. Ever heard that line? Think about what it means when applied to a pastor's role in a church. What about the priesthood of all believers? And where is Jesus in that equation? In this edition of The Roys Report, veteran church planter and pastor, Lance Ford, challenges popular views of leadership, showing how they're the opposite of what Scripture teaches. In the Body of Christ, the pastor is not the head; Jesus is! In 2012, Lance Ford's landmark work UnLeader exposed how unbiblical models of leadership have become an obsession in the church. Now The Atlas Factor, which is about shifting leadership onto the shoulders of Jesus, serves as a sequel to that book. One of the most eye-opening truths of The Atlas Factor is that leadership, when presented as a key to organizational success, is a relatively new concept. The multi-billion-dollar industry built around teaching and training people in leadership—in both the corporate world and the church—has emerged only within the past 40 to 50 years. And this model of leadership didn't come from Scripture; it came from the world. Lance was featured in a recent podcast with his message from the Restore Conference titled, “It's the System, Stupid.” If you caught that message, then you heard a preview of what Lance and Julie delve into in-depth in this podcast. Lance's prophetic message is a clarion call to the church to return to Jesus' way of doing things—or continue to face disastrous consequences. Guests Lance Ford Lance Ford is an author, church planter, coach, and consultant who has designed unique training systems currently being used by networks, seminaries, and leaders throughout the world. He has written several books including The Atlas Factor, UnLeader, The Missional Quest, and The Starfish and the Spirit. Lance holds a master's degree in Global Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary. Learn more at LanceFordBooks.com. Show Transcript SPEAKERSLANCE FORD, Julie Roys Julie Roys  00:04Everything rises or falls on leadership. Ever heard that line? Certainly, great leaders can make a big difference in the success of an organization. But think about what that line applied to the church really means. Does everything rise or fall on the pastor? What about the priesthood of all believers? What about the body of Christ, where each member plays a vital role? And most importantly, what about Jesus? Welcome to The Roys Report, a podcast dedicated to reporting the truth and restoring the church. I’m Julie Roys, and joining me today is Lance Ford, who spent decades planting and pastoring churches. And recently we published his talk from the RESTORE conference where he argued that so many of the scandals and issues that we see in the church today stem from our toxic model of leadership. Well, today you’re in for a treat, because Lance is joining me to discuss his new book, The Atlas Factor. And this book eviscerates the conventional wisdom that leadership is everything. In fact, one of the most eye-opening things I learned in this book is that leadership is a relatively new concept. Sure, there have always been people who lead and manage organizations. But leadership as this thing that’s crucial to the success of organizations is relatively new. And certainly, the industry that’s been built around teaching and training people in leadership in both the corporate world and the church is super new, like within the past 40 to 50 years. But I think the pressing question, especially in the church concerns whether these notions of leadership we’re training pastors to follow are actually biblical. And if they’re not, what’s the alternative? We’ll dig into those questions in just a minute.   Julie Roys  01:46 But first, I’d like to thank the sponsors of this podcast, Judson University and Marquardt of Barrington. If you’re looking for a top ranked Christian University, providing a caring community and an excellent college experience, Judson University is for you. Judson is located on 90 acres, just 40 miles west of Chicago in Elgin, Illinois. The school offers more than 60 majors, great leadership opportunities, and strong financial aid. Plus, you can take classes online as well as in person. Judson University is shaping lives that shaped the world. For more information, just go to JUDSONU.EDU Also, if you’re looking for a quality new or used car, I highly recommend my friends at Marquardt of Barrington. Marquardt is a Buick GMC dealership where you can expect honesty, integrity, and transparency. That’s because the owners there Dan and Kurt Marquardt, are men of integrity, to check them out, just go to BUYACAR123.COM.   Julie Roys  02:49 Well, again, joining me is Lance Ford, a church planter, coach, and consultant who spent decades pastoring and planting churches. And out of that experience and biblical study, he’s designed unique training systems that are being used by seminaries, church networks, and leaders throughout the world. Lance is also the author of several books, including one of my favorites called Unleader. This book exposes the obsession in the church to unbiblical models of leadership. It’s fantastic and eye opening. And Lance’s latest book, The Atlas Factor, is essentially a sequel to Unleader, and it’s quickly become one of my favorites as well. So, Lance, thanks so much for joining me. I’m really, really looking forward to our discussion.   LANCE FORD  03:29 It’s always one of my favorite things to do is visit with you, Julie.   Julie Roys  03:32 I’m glad to hear that. And I should mention that you also are a recent addition to The Roys Report board. So, we’re pretty excited about that. But I know you spoke at RESTORE and I heard from so so many people, but our board as well, just saying, hey, we need to get this guy on our board. So just really, really glad for all the wisdom that you’re going to bring to the board. So, thanks for being willing to do that.   LANCE FORD  03:55 Well, it’s a huge honor to be invited to be a part of y’all. The boardroom didn’t get smarter because I showed up it probably got a little dumber When I joined.   Julie Roys  04:04 I do not believe that. But as I mentioned, you spoke at RESTORE and gave a great talk on toxic leadership and  our obsession with it and probably had the best line of the entire conference I have to say, which became the title of the podcast that we put out with your talk, which is, It’s the System, Stupid! Just briefly for those who didn’t hear your talk, which if you didn’t hear Lance’s talk, it’s the System, Stupid!, I think it was like back in mid-December, we published that. Go back and listen to his talk. It is so so good. But talk about what you meant by that, that it’s the system stupid.   LANCE FORD  04:41 I think probably Julie one day I was probably somewhere along the midst of listening to The Rise and Fall of Mars Hill  podcast, and I was just thinking, they just keep talking about symptoms, symptoms. They never get to the solution, and I just said it out loud. It’s the system stupid. And it reminded me, James Carville’s deal with Clinton. It’s the economy stupid. So that’s kind of where that came from is that all these problems that we have are downstream from a messed-up system. And you can’t just deal with the symptoms and try to throw drugs at the symptoms. You have to bandage the wounds, pouring the oil on the wine, that’s necessary to say the least. Well, let’s do some preventative medicine. Let’s go back to the headwaters of this thing and try to nip some of this stuff in the bud. And it just seems that the answer almost every time, especially internally, from the groups that are in the midst of these falls and these breakdowns in leadership, usually their answer is, well, we just need better accountability. But it’s the same type of what they call accountability. So rare is it that when you hear a group say, well, we need new leadership, they don’t mean they need new leadership systems. They mean, we need a new hero leader.   Julie Roys  06:05 Yeah. Oh, exactly. I mean, I remember when Rick Warren was stepping down. And of course, there’s all sorts of issues with Andy Wood, who was picked as his successor. And we’ve published many articles on how he apparently is a horribly abusive leader. But he’s now in that position. And when I heard the language, though, it was like we need to find a successor for Rick. And I thought, really, who can be the successor to Rick Warren, and who is capable of being in a position over so many churches and having so many people following you? And I sit there and wonder, because there’s this idea that there’s going to be this really good, noble, full of integrity leader that can handle those kinds of pressures. And I sit there, and I look at that, and I’m like, I don’t know that I can handle that. That’s an awful lot to shoulder. And I think that really is at the root of what you’re talking about in this book, The Atlas Factor. The metaphor is great of you know, Atlas with the weight of the world on his shoulders. But essentially, that’s what we’ve set up leaders to be, to be Atlas, to do the impossible, and then we’re surprised when they fail. Here’s a quote that’s very early in your book from the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership, they’re irrefutable.   LANCE FORD  07:15 Be careful, Julie.   Julie Roys  07:17 But the 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership is this quote from LeRoy Eims, “a leader is one who sees more than others see, who sees further than others see, and who sees before others do.” And then there’s the quote that I said at the beginning of the podcast, that “everything rises or falls on leadership.” It’s almost like we have made these men into gods; talk about that whole dynamic and what it’s doing to pastors.   LANCE FORD  07:47 The thing about the typical the prevailing leadership system in the overwhelming majority of churches today, it puts a weight up on the senior, and I might as well just say senior guy, cuz 99% of them are guys. But there are a few women in senior leadership positions, but just the job description, and then even the unwritten expectations that are placed upon them. I know I was a pastor for well over 20 years and was a church planter and a senior pastor for 10 years. So, if you just look at the job description, you’re basically the CEO. In fact, some of them call themselves CEOs, you’re the face of the church, the organization, you’re the top fundraiser, you are the top theologian, you’re supposed to be a marriage expert, a family expert, a child rearer. I mean, just go on and on and by the way, you need to give 45 to 50 fantastic talks a year too. No one’s built for that. And certainly when you go to the New Testament of any description of any type of leadership in the church, you don’t see that. In fact, Paul mentioned several times that he wasn’t even a good speaker. So, it’s a burden. And so that created the metaphor for The Atlas Factor for the book. It’s the weight of the world. It’s like Atlas, and a lot of people look at Atlas and they go, he was this hero. No, that was a punishment, Zeus gave him the punishment of having to hold the weight of the world on his shoulders. It’s out of order. It’s a misalignment. So, a lot of these pastors are victims too; Even the ones that don’t abuse, they’re being abused by this system of expectations, this fault system of leadership as it’s been cast upon them. And then of course, the ones as you said, that are narcissistic, have the tendencies, then they take that power, and then they become the abusers. And basically, then they take that weight, and they place it up on the shoulders of their staff or the volunteers and church members, and then they crush others with that weight.   Julie Roys  09:49 I have heard that so much from these churches where there is this big celebrity pastor, and they have to put on the big show and it’s really impossible to do. I mean, I have I always said, When my husband and I used to be youth pastors and we always said, The World entertains better than we do. So, if you want to be entertained, like go see a movie, go to all those things, but in the church, we’re gonna focus on worship and prayer and discipleship and Bible study. That’s what we do. But I think we’ve gotten away from that. And we’ve certainly gotten to this model where man we have to put on the show every week, and it’s crushing. And the staffs are getting crushed too. You quote this in your book that there’s a 2021 Barna study, 38% of pastors say they’ve considered quitting within the past year. And then if you look at pastors who are just 45 or younger, that jumps to 46%. So, I mean, if this plays out, we’re looking at a crisis in the church, we’re not going to have pastors willing to take these jobs.   LANCE FORD  10:45 Yeah well, there’s some stats that came out, I forget if it was Barna or who it was a couple of weeks ago. But it said that right now, currently, between four and 5000 pastors a month, are leaving the ministry. So you’re talking about a huge under the watermark in the boat of the church right now. So not only are people leaving the church, but you’ve got pastors leaving the church. So, it is a crisis, as you said.   Julie Roys  11:09 Although, I have to say at the same time, like I’m in this small house church, and he said recently, if we get a pastor, I’m gone. I’m gone. I mean, I think we’re a unique group, because there’s some pretty highly competent, mature Christians in there. So, you kind of have more leaders than you know what to do with. So, God help the pastor that would come in and try to pastor that. But yeah, I think there is sort of a suspicion about pastors. But really, because I think exactly what you’re talking about in this book is that we have merged this idea of leadership that really is worldly based with, we’ve kind of baptized it in Christian lingo. So that now so many people think that leadership, the way it’s being taught, you know, by people who claim they’re Christian, so that, you know, this must be biblical, is biblical. But leadership, it’s not really talked about very much in Scripture is it?   LANCE FORD  12:03 It’s not that there’s not leaders in Scripture, there’s leaders all throughout Scripture, but the leadership system as we know it today, in fact, leader or leadership is not even mentioned. It’s like, a half a dozen times in the entire New Testament. And it’s not spoken favorably, most of those times. But if you really get down to it, and I do try to make a delineation between attorney leader in leadership, because it’s become such a in our nomenclature today, but it’s a real new term. I’ve said that before some well-known authors that immediately react, and just like push back. Okay, first off, definitely, there’s been leadership forever. And it’s been studied. I mean, the Chinese going back to the 1300s. I mean, you can look at Plato and Machiavelli and others that studied leadership, but not leadership as we know it today. And what got me on this was just doing some research on it. And I just got curious one day and thought, Well, I’m gonna look up the word leadership. And I went to my old 1955 Oxford Dictionary, which is probably the best because it gives the evolution of words. And it wasn’t even defined there. I couldn’t even find the term and a definition, I finally found at one time in about a seven- or eight-word definition for the word leader, but then it didn’t even define leadership. That pushed me back further, you start reverse engineering, you know, how you are doing research, and I found the 1915 Webster dictionary. The word leadership was not even in there. And that really took me down a rabbit hole of finding out after just doing a couple of years of research, in searching even secular scholars that had done research on the word leadership and come to find out you couldn’t even find the word leadership until the mid-19th century. So, you’re not finding publications anywhere that mentioned it until the early 1900s. Even the term. Now the reason I say that, and it should stand out to us as a stark contrast, because leadership is an $87 billion dollar industry today. 87 billion, I mean, that’s more than entertainment, media and everything put together. So, it’s a huge thing that’s evolved over the last 100 years. And it didn’t even really start entering in the church, which is a gigantic thing in the church now, it didn’t even start entering into the church until I would say the 1970s. Because you can’t even find a dozen books with the term leadership in the title, even in the 1960s. So, it’s a really new thing. And now, and I say it as its defined, because you could interchange the word management and you’d be just fine because that’s really what it is. It’s management theory. It goes back to Peter Drucker 1966, his famous book, The Effective Executive. There were some significant church growth leaders took that book, they parlayed it into the Church Growth Movement because some leaders such as Robert Schuller, for instance, with Crystal Cathedral, Robert Schuller doesn’t get enough if you want to call it credit or blame for really being the biggest shaper of what we have today. And my research bears this out. You can track Bill Hybels in Willow Creek, they go right back to Schuler, although they scrubbed a lot of that from their history, because Schuler became so controversial that they just didn’t want to be associated with him. Rick Warren was a disciple of Schuler. Schuler was a disciple of Norman Vincent Peale. That’s where he got all of his positive thinking and everything. But then all of them went to Peter Drucker to get the management systems. And then Bob Buford, who created Leadership Network, which a lot of people, the listeners would say, I’ve never heard of a guy named Bob Buford. Well, he was way behind the scenes. But he was hugely shaping of what we have today with Leadership Network and funded and raised up and platformed and helped develop a lot of those leaders such as Hybels and Warren and others. And then a lot of the newer leaders that lead these prevailing, what I call Neo attractional churches today, their heritage, the family tree goes straight back to Peter Drucker and these management systems. And these management systems just conflict with what Jesus said Matthew 20, of the Gentiles, or the world systems; it’s a metaphor, he where if he was in the Old Testament would have said, The Babylonians or the Egyptians. But when he says the Gentiles practice dominating one another, or lorded over one another, it will not be this way among you. But the first will be last, the greatest will be the servant, which basically was pushing back against power, and against dominating one another in any system in his kingdom. But that’s the very thing that we have today. And it goes right back to management systems that we imported straight into the church.   Julie Roys  17:06 And you alluded to this, that we don’t see lead or leader much in Scripture. You write, and this was in Unleader as well, and this just blew me away, that we see the word disciple 260 times, as opposed to leader. Leader, I think is mentioned like seven times. So, it’s a 37:1 ratio. We used to think of the pastor as the shepherd. Even when I was a kid, that was really the prevailing metaphor was that our pastor was the shepherd, that changed. And I remember even when I was at Willow Creek because my husband and I spent several years there. And I just remember Hybels talking about how they had found shepherds to do the shepherding within the church, because he didn’t do it. It was kind of like, yeah, they have been put in as pastors, but they’re really more Shepherd. So, we’re putting them over here to let them Shepherd. Meanwhile, I’ll do the pastor thing, which is being the great orator and charismatic leader, and all that. And that became our model for pastor and then of course, Bill Hybels brought in so many worldly leadership. In fact, if you go and read about the Global Leadership Summit, like I’ve read some of the articles that were published in secular publications saying, Man, this is like the best business school that’s out there, like, I know, it’s at a church, but this is like, this is a great business school. Everybody in business, whether you’re a Christian or not, whatever you profess, just go to this really good. And we love that as Christians, because we constantly were seeking the world’s affirmation, which is really sad. Like we wanted that credibility in the church. So again, you’re putting language into things I felt for so long, and that the research in your book, you even go back farther, and I found some of this stuff that gave birth to our modern leadership movement was fascinating. And you start with 1840s, 1900, around there with this thing called Great Man theory. Describe what this is, and how it’s impacted our view of leadership today.   LANCE FORD  19:01 Great Man theory was the prevailing ideology of where great leaders came from. That was the term that they used. And so, when you go back and you look at even, I was able to even trace back and find some of the speaking topics for some conventions, conferences that were taking place back in the 1920s and 1930s. And so Great Man theory was basically the idea that leaders are born, they’re not made. And so, you’re gonna think about Teddy Roosevelt, you’re gonna think about Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, people like this, that just have this ability to lead, and you can’t make it. So that that would that would mean there’s a real limitation if you don’t happen to have a great man walk into the room, you know. So, then they started studying the traits of the great man and that about 20 years after Great Man theory was the prevailing theory. Then by the 1930s, 1940s was what was called Trait Theory, and they basically were studying the traits of the great man and saying, Well, maybe it’s possible that we can teach these traits, we can mimic these traits, and we can actually make great leaders. That’s how it started evolving. Then there became for a while it became what was called Group theory, which they said, well, leadership really is an effect upon a group of people. They actually started getting a little closer to what was right about what  I would call leadership, that leadership is a fruit product. It’s not a position, I would say a faithfully following Jesus as a servant. But then they moved away from the group theory, and that really went back into a person at the top. And then Management theory, by the 1950s, to corporate America, and the Industrial Revolution had matured and was getting old by that time. By that time, it really became Management theory. And then we replaced it with the word leadership. And like you said, earlier, Julie, I was just reflecting a while back and thinking, you know, when I was growing up, if you walked into a Denny’s, there were no Starbucks back then. So, if you walk through a breakfast place, and let’s say that there was and we used to have in small towns, they would call it the Ministerial Alliance. And pastors of local churches that actually liked each other, and they get together about once a month. So if you were to see a group of those guys sitting around, have a breakfast together, I say, 1980. I’ll guarantee you; the word leader and leadership would not even been uttered at that table while they’re having breakfast. It wouldn’t even come into their mind. They might have called themselves pastors or shepherds, they probably call themselves ministers. And certainly, the people from the local community sitting around would look over and said, Oh, yeah, that’s the ministers. They wouldn’t say that’s the leaders. That’s the leaders of the faith community. It just wasn’t in their thinking, right? Because the word Minister means servant, but it’s washed out today. And so, I mean, who wants to be a servant? You want to be a leader. This was the problem with the disciples of Jesus, and they watched him be a servant, and he still had to, you know, thump upside of the head, more than one occasion.   Julie Roys  22:20 I want to read a section of your book because I think it really crystallizes the moment that we’re living in right now. You write, “The industrial leadership approach to church leadership caused us to abandon the understanding of the church as a body and turn to a view of the church as a machine. Our language and titles changed as we veered away from the code of the New Testament in Jesus. It became normal to hear terms and titles such as strategic initiative, ROI, return on investment scale, engineering, management, leader, executive, superior, replace biblical language, such as steward, disciple, co-laborers, servant, minister, elder, brothers and sisters, et cetera. Noncompetes, and NDAs, and  HR became leverage points in place of loving your brother, blessing those you believed were your enemy and letting your Yes be Yes and your No be No.” Bingo. Right there. I mean, I talk a lot about the Evangelical industrial complex. And of course, that gets into the money and everything that’s involved. But it’s also once you become a corporation, you’ve got to manage that image. And that is the situation that we’re in. I’m guessing some people who have been really, really schooled in this, because I mean, leadership is everywhere, right? I mean, from the time kids are like teenagers, even maybe younger, in our church, we’re training them to be leaders. But it does beg the question, and I’m sure people are wondering right now is if everything doesn’t rise or fall on leadership, and what does it rise or fall on?   LANCE FORD  23:47 I believe it rises or falls on the headship of Jesus. And I believe that’s where we land on the problem of what’s happened in the church. That’s the other part of the metaphor for this book, The Atlas Factor was. I had written something one day, about three years ago on Facebook or X, it was Twitter then; we had the pretty little blue bird. But I just said something about leadership in the church being misaligned with the headship of Jesus, and the body. Had a buddy that reposted that and then his chiropractor made a comment. And he said, Yeah, that’s like subluxation with the C-1 and the C-2 vertebra in the body. Then he said something that really got my attention. He said, Yeah, when you have a problem with the Atlas vertebra, and the Axis vertebra, it misaligns the body with the head. And I was like, Whoa, that really got my attention because I’ve been playing around with this Atlas metaphor before. And little did I know, and you know, this is as a journalist and a researcher, then it sends me down into this wormhole. I ended up reading three or four books in chiropractic.   Julie Roys  24:57 You sound like my husband. My husband would do that. Give me the Cliff Notes honey.   LANCE FORD  25:02 My wife’s like land it, land it. Yeah, but it was fascinating Julie because he said C-1, the first vertebra is called the Atlas. So, in fact, this particular doctor had written a little book, a real tiny little pamphlet size book called, It Just Makes Sense. Well come to find out there’s a certain amount of chiropractors, it’s a small percentage of chiropractors that just practice, they call it upper cervical care. And so, they only focus on the two top vertebra, because they’re convinced that if you line those up, everything below is going to come in order and align. In fact, they’ve got some pretty large claims of incredible maladies that get healed and come into order when the body, the neurological system starts functioning like it should. In fact, my buddy that had posted this, his chiropractor, so my buddy has a very rare form of cancer. And I forget what it’s called, but it should not kill him. But he’s had it for several years. And so, he’s always having to watch his T counts and everything. And under Dr. Weller’s care, his numbers have totally come in order. And that’s been going on for about four or five years now. So, it’s really amazing. So, one of the quotes that he said, and I did quote it in Atlas, so that Atlas vertebra, that’s where the brain stem sits into. So, he’s talking about the relationship between the head and the body. And he says, there’s that extra something inside each and every one of us that gives life; the inborn, innate intelligence knows what to do and how to do it. The intelligence that came from our Creator travels in and through your nervous system, which is commonly referred to as the neurological system. Neuro logic or intelligence within the nerve, the neurological communication between the brain and the body through the brainstem is imperative for allowing the body the best ability to function at its optimum. We believe that the body does not need any assistance, just no interference in its functioning. When you apply that to what Paul said about the body of Christ, and the relationship to the head, which he really goes in depth in Ephesians 4, he mentioned the other places, but in Ephesians 4, which Ephesians. The whole book of Ephesians is scholars say this is the book for the church. And it’s not a book about leadership. Ephesians 4 is not text about leaders, it’s about the body, it’s a text, read to the body, corporately, it’s talking about the body when he says the apostle, prophet, evangelist, shepherd, and teacher – that’s within the body. These are not professional positions. And I would say, and I know you would agree, Julie, that your house church, you guys already have at least one, you have multiple pastors there already. So, you don’t need some pro that comes in leveraging authority and power. They’re gifted. So, the body of Christ is already gifted in these functions. But the problem is, is when humans try to occupy the place of headship and playing Atlas, then it creates a disjointedness, between the Atlas vertebra and the rest of the body. And so, what happens is, we get paralyzed, we can’t move. We get all these maladies in these atrophy that sets in below the neck because somebody else has stepped in and cause misalignment with our true head Jesus. And so, I really believe that the first job of a church leader, or a pastor that wants to try to change is it’s kind of what Dr. Eddie Weller said is that we need to eliminate interference between Jesus in the body. And usually, it’s our system of leadership that’s causing the interference, and is bringing that paralysis and those maladies that go along the neckline.   Julie Roys  28:54 That’s so interesting. As you’re saying this, I’m beginning to get an image in my head of a body trying to function with just the brain. Right? And the rest of the body being literally paralyzed or just limp and not able to move. And I think about that in the church because we have made these guys at the head who communicate truth to us. I mean, most of the people come into our churches right now, they don’t know how to read the scripture for themselves and listen to the Holy Spirit themselves. They need that pastor to interpret for them what’s going on, which is scary. I remember going to one of these, you know, video, Pastor churches, and I’m like, and it had a celebrity pastor who was in from, you know, states away, who was preaching to them, telling them what to do. And I thought to myself, that guy who was preaching, nothing he said was heretical; however, he was not explicating scripture right. He was making it say things it didn’t say, and it scared me because I thought, that guy anything he says will get swallowed by this mass of people, because they don’t know they are not equipped. They are not connected to the head. They’re connected to the pastor, right? Who really functions in a godlike way with so many of these people? And I think that’s why when you see one of these falls, you see, just huge disillusionment. You know, for a lot of us, it’s been hurtful. It’s been disillusioning. Yes. But not to that foundational level, because my pastor was never my God. He was always just a man. Right? That’s all he was. And so yeah, we’d have lost that idea that really, it’s a functioning body, and all the members have to be functioning for this thing to work. And the guy at the top is not the pastor. It’s Jesus Himself, which is a radical idea, the biblical idea.   LANCE FORD  30:43 You know, the word radical and radish have the same root. Radical literally means root. So, it’s funny how that when you talk about people that are radicals, man, they’re so radical. That’s usually the people that have gone back to the roots of things that we call the radicals. It  was like the hippies back in the 70s, they were reading Mother Earth News, you know, and they’re, you know, got their gardens out the backyard, and they’re doing all this stuff, you know, are they radical? No, they’re doing what people have done for thousands of years. So sometimes that’s the hint that the people that we call the radicals may just be the ones that have tapped back into something that’s at the root of our beginnings as the church. And so that’s one of the things that when you get to this misalignment of the body, the real job description of a pastor or if you believe in those FIFO gifts, the apostle, prophet, Pastor, shepherd, and evangelists and teacher, their job description, Paul says, is to equip or resource and train and supply the saints for the work of ministry. So, it’s not to do everything, it’s not to be the chief speaker to be the end all. Really your job there, when you wake up in the morning, I don’t care what your title is, if you’re on staff at a church, no matter what your rank is, first thing you wake up in the morning and think what I need to do is how can I best resource and equip and serve the people that are around me? So, during your day, you shouldn’t be telling people what to do, you should be asking people, how can I help you? How can I serve you? What do you need youth pastor? How can I help you today to fulfill your calling? But that’s not the way it is. I mean, it’s usually everybody’s here to serve my needs. That’s leadership. That’s the system.   Julie Roys  32:37 I mean, we have a professional pastorate. So, we pay for you to do things for us.   LANCE FORD  32:42 You’re a vendor of religious goods and services, and I’m a consumer. So, give it up.   Julie Roys  32:48 Exactly. And that’s where I don’t put all the blame on the guy at the top. It’s what we’ve allowed as consumers. It’s what we’ve allowed as the body that is not doing what the Bereans did, and going back and saying, is what they’re teaching us right now, is this biblical, or is it not?   LANCE FORD  33:03 One of the things I thought about is you look at iteration or a church says today, most people are biblically illiterate. We don’t expect them to read their Bibles. We don’t. I mean, that’s why we project every scripture on screen. We don’t expect people even to bring a Bible. When you and I were growing up. I mean, people were bringing a Bible to church. I grew up spent a lot of time in the Baptist Church. every other weekend, the whole family would load up and we go spend the weekend with my grandparents about an hour away. They were Nazarene. They were in a little Nazarene church. And so, I literally spent half my time in a Nazarene church. So, I got a lot of Nazarene in me. And that little church of about 60 people and 55 of them were my kinfolks. I mean, you talk about a pastor not having a chance. Stay in line buddy because the Browns and the Fords will kick you to the curb. Anyway, it was a sweet fellowship and all my great aunts and great uncles and everything, They had the little board on the side of the pulpit that told the attendance from the week before, it told the offering. And I’m not making this up, even had a place it said Bibles present, you know, which was always funny to me, because I’ve looked back, and I thought they were trying to make a point. And those folks knew their scriptures. I mean, they knew the Bible, and they may have been misapplying it, but they still knew the Scriptures. And we just don’t have that today. We really have dumbed people down. And that’s part of the entertainment and this all comes from the secret church evolvement but if you go into the prevailing church today, if you go anywhere on a Sunday morning, most of the churches especially of any size you walk in, you don’t even know what denomination you’re in because most of them are singing the same songs. And the style is the same you’re going to go into a dark room. The ceiling is going to be black. The stage is going to be well lit depending on how much money and resource they have. It may even have some smoke machines which I call that the Shekindof. Glory, by the way,   Julie Roys  35:03 When I see the smoke machine, I am so over the top that I just I cannot I just cannot. And by the way, though, when you talked about Nazarene, this is going to warm the heart of Christine Jones, who’s one of our board members because she’s Nazarene. But I did Bible Quizzing. So, when I heard she was a Nazarene I’m like, Oh, dang! Oh, man! You know, and I am was pretty good Bible quizzer.   LANCE FORD  35:27 I bet you were.   Julie Roys  35:29 We went to Nationals a couple times. Our Bible Quizzing, my mom was our coach, but I’m telling you, I learned 100 you know, 150 verses every single year I did Bible Quizzing. I mean, that’s how I learned the scripture. But those Nazarenes they memorized the whole book. They memorized the whole thing.   LANCE FORD  35:45 I had a niece that does the Bible Quizzing in the Nazarene church, and  I don’t ever want to go toe to toe with her.   Julie Roys  35:52 But here’s the thing. Like I know Christine to this day says when they say a passage, she’s going over the passage in her mind, because it’s still there, the memory is still there of that passage. And you can’t distort something that people know. But we’re in a situation where people don’t know it., and so it creates just this fertile ground for everything to be messed up, and it’s gotten really messed up. So, you’re talking about realignment, how do we realign? Like in this situation that we’re in, how can we realign because we’ve got some major, major vertebrae out of whack?   LANCE FORD  36:24 So, you have to start off not with just looking at and saying, Well, yeah, I gotta choose a different way lady. No, you have to repent. This is an issue of repentance. Because we disobey Jesus and the word disobedient in many places. In fact, Paul uses it when he talks about your disobedience coming into a line. It means to, to hearken to not just to hear, but to listen and obey. We’ve disobeyed Jesus disobeyed Jesus, not only with our systems, but just some of those things that you mentioned, when you read the quote from the book earlier, even our what we call ourselves as leaders is disobedient to Jesus. Jesus could not have been more plain, don’t call yourself Father, don’t call yourself Teacher, don’t call yourself leader, because he says it causes you to lift yourself up above your brothers and sisters. Because he’s trying to create a peer type of a culture, a sibling culture. And this is the nomenclature that you see throughout the New Testament, co-laborer, coworker, fellow worker, is mentioned dozens of times those terms. You never see employee and boss. Because what happens is, that’s a power difference, right? It differentiates between the power, every time those words are mentioned, every time those terms and those rank-based titles are mentioned. So, the first thing a leader has to do is say I have to change the culture, I have to repent. And I have to admit this, and then I have to be willing to start changing the culture. So, I think the first thing that a leader has to do is then move into saying, I’m going to ditch the management systems. And I’m going to try to learn what it would look like if people on our team are able self-manage. And as I’m doing that, not only am I changing my titles, which that’s probably the first thing you need to do, because it will just freak everybody out. But what you do is you change your role. And so, you wake up in the morning and saying, I’m no longer going to act like I am chief, and everybody’s here to serve me. But I’m going to do what Jesus said, I’m gonna become a chief servant. I’m gonna out serve everybody here. And I’m gonna go back to the very thing that Paul said in Ephesians 4. I am going to work myself silly in helping the people around me to fulfill their calling. I’m going to do everything I can to resource them, to equip them, and just watch this rising tide lift all the boats around. So that’s the  first moves. And I always say this is when you’re looking at moving from a centralized leadership to a decentralized leadership, you can’t just wipe everything out, because then it’s just chaos and anarchy. So, you have to replace the systems with other processes and agreements. And that’s one of the things I’ve tried to write a lot about, wrote about a lot book called The Starfish in the Spirit. And in this, try to give some processes in some systems and some agreements of how you can rebuild your system into working this way. Because it doesn’t just happen in a vacuum. It’s too enormous of a change to move into it. But it has to be biblical, because that’s where the safety and that’s where the joy is. And this doesn’t mean that everything’s going to be rainbows and unicorns. There’s still stress and hard things and difficulty. I mean, Paul talked about the anxiety he had in the churches, but a lot of that was him trying to straighten stuff like this out.   Julie Roys  39:58 The book that I interviewed Scott McKnight and Laura Behringer on, Pivot, you know, is talking a lot about sort of similar things making this pivot from realizing you have a toxic culture. You guys are talking about it from the same idea, but a little different vantage points. And given, you know, he’s more of a theologian, you’re more of a boots on the ground kind of guy. But I think saying a lot of the same things. And one thing I wonder is that we’re often thinking about it in terms of like you said, we’ve got this church that needs to change. I was very interested in church planting in my 20s. And a lot of people would say that a lot of time, it takes way more energy to change an existing church than it does to grow a new one. And it’s just something I’ve been wondering, you know, out of these ashes, because what’s happening in the evangelical church right now, I mean, it is, it’s imploding, which I know is painful for everybody involved in you know, to see these kinds of implosions. But I’ve really been asking myself, Should we be putting energy into changing the existing church, or should we be saying, we just need to close some churches, we need to scrap this model? Because I mean, even so often, when you get rid of like the toxic guy at the top, it’s a toxic system throughout,  it is so hard. You have so much inertia, that to change that church is so hard. So, I know you don’t get into this really in your book, but it’s something I’ve been wrestling with. And even wondering once you do start that new thing. How can we do it differently because this is what we’ve seen modeled?   Julie Roys  40:02 What you’re touching on there is the whole wineskin issue that Jesus taught. You can’t put new wine in an old wineskin. But can you create a new wineskin for the old wine? Heard a lot of people talk about that. Which yeah, well,  maybe you can, I think is very difficult for the reasons you said. Now, two out of the last three houses that my wife and I have lived in, we built ourselves. And when I say that, I mean, we built it ourselves. I didn’t contract it. Our hands, blood and sweat, and skin. And I just kind of grew up with that, my grandpa was a carpenter. So, I kind of grew up with that.   LANCE FORD  41:31 We built one house. We didn’t do everything ourselves. But yeah, I thought, general contracting, how hard can that be?   LANCE FORD  42:14 Oh yeah, you got that lesson, then, you found out. And you promise, I will never do this again, which I said I would never do it again after the first one.   Julie Roys  42:22 Well, no, actually, I said, I learned so much by making so many stupid mistakes in that first one that I want to do it again, so that I can capitalize on the lessons learned.   LANCE FORD  42:31 Now that’s good. And it is a fun process. And it was very cathartic. This one that we built was a smaller house. And it was very cathartic. But also, we’ve rehabbed houses. And I would say as hard as it is to build from the ground up, it’s easier than rehabbing a house.   Julie Roys  42:47 Cuz you never know what you’re gonna get into.   LANCE FORD  42:49 You don’t know what’s behind that wall, you know, and you think that you know, and you peel it back, and you just discover, oh, it’s deeper, and you’re taking it down to the studs, and you get down the studs and go, Oh, the termites were here before I was here, right? All kinds of stuff. So yeah, those issues come into place. I tell you, one of the things that we’ve seen a lot of success, and I say we because I do work with a few others. I’m a part of a team that we do help churches in consulting and coaching. we talk about terms of a parallel track, just trying smaller little projects, and seeing how they go. In fact, several of the largest churches, and we’ve worked with large churches that realize that they just cannot completely turn that thing around. So, what they do is they start investing in different types of church plants, or micro churches, or whatever. And I think their hearts are good and right in that. And so, I’ve got some friends that do lead large mega churches. And I think that they are, some of them have developed some leadership systems that are closest to what I would hope to see. And I think it’s probably about as close as they can get without just killing the thing.   LANCE FORD  44:06 Our time is getting short. But there’s one term that I thought was so good when you’re talking about developing a culture of equality, and you talked about this term, I’ve never heard this this term before, but equa-potency, thank you. But yeah, explain what you mean by that, because I thought that was actually a pretty key component to what you’re talking about.   LANCE FORD  44:30 What equa-potency basically, is kind of a culture of equals. When you talk about a quality in a leadership system, it freaks a lot of people out because immediately the pushback is somebody has to be in charge. The buck has to stop somewhere. You can’t have equality, everybody’s not equal. You can just look at him. Okay, so let’s start right there. And Paul talks about this in Romans 12. In fact, Romans 12:1-2 you know, we usually start out with be not conformed to this world but be transformed by the renewing of your mind right? So that you can prove what is the good, perfect, pleasing will of God. And we usually stop there. And so, people usually read that verse and say, Oh, that’s the verse about not being worldly, you know, don’t drink, don’t chew, don’t run around with girls that do, right? And always blame a woman, right? That was the little saying growing up. But don’t stop there, keep reading the rest of the of the text, because then he’s really going into how gifts that the Lord pours out should be functioning. And so, one of the things that he says he talks about the different gifts, in fact, he talks about people that do have a gift of administration, or what we would call leadership. And he talks about, then he says, but do it with sobriety, be sober, and then he starts talking about don’t look on your own things and be selfish. And he starts going into this whole thing about different people have different measures for their giftings. So, in any room, if you have a sizable room, and you think about just outstanding, let’s say the great men or the great women that are great into gifting or whatever. And you and I, Julie may have a similar gifting. But we can just look like I’ve got a couple of friends that are mentors of mine. And I’m thinking about one in particular. He’s been an incredible mentor in my life. And he and I have similar gifts. Mine, I can’t even touch his abilities in some of this stuff. He is just far out. Well, Paul will call that he has a greater measure of faith. It’s not faith like we think about it all. Oh yeah, he’s confident and all that. No, it’s really the term there, really iterates it’s the ability to use that gift. And some people just have that, have a greater measure. And so, Paul warns them to treat the others as equals. And so, this particular mentor in my life, he’s always treated me that way. And in the first few years, we started working together, man, I mean, there was no way I could touch what he did. But he always encouraged me genuinely, not patronizing me. But really, he just thought you never know when what the Lord wants to say or do is going to come through Lance or Jill or Rob or Steve in the room, just because I’ve got the big platform, I’m speaking as him, I can use any of them. So that’s equa-potency. So, it’s potent. So, when you get a group of people together, and you have an equal atmosphere, not meaning that everybody has the same has equal gifts, but they have equal opportunity. And so that’s really what we’re saying. It’s a culture that everybody is treated as equals to have equal opportunity, even if they don’t have the equal faith in the giftings that they have. Does that make sense?   Julie Roys  47:55 Absolutely it does. And as you’re talking about this, we do think of the people that that are incredibly gifted. And we have examples of that in scripture. But we also have probably the greatest leader, or one of the ones that we look to in the Old Testament was Moses, who couldn’t speak, had all sorts of failings. And yet God used him in amazing ways. Because he had that spiritual connection to God. He knew God, and he had a heart after God. And we have majored on the minors, right? We’ve made the gifting so important instead of the heart for God. And there’s so much in your book, we could discuss, and I would love to discuss, you get into how spiritual warfare, how that plays out in this practical steps. And so, I really encourage people, this is going to be our book for this month, for anybody who gives a donation of $30 or more, we’ll get you a copy of The Atlas Factor, just a phenomenal phenomenal book. So, if you want to do that, support our work here at The Roys report, but also get this incredible resource, just go to JULIEROYS.COM/DONATE. And we can get this book in your hands. And I want to get this book as many hands as I can. Because I think it’s a paradigm shift is what you’re talking about. And you’ve been talking about it now for 11 years since you wrote your first one, Unleader. And I think there’s a lot of resistance. But the more and more we see the crash and burns, the more and more we’re going to have to say we’ve got to do it a different way. And so, I feel like you’re very much a prophetic voice when it comes to this issue. Just so grateful for it. So, Lance, thank you. Thank you for taking the time. Thank you for speaking at RESTORE. Thank you for being on our board. Thanks for writing this book, The Atlas Factor. Really awesome.   Julie Roys  48:13 Always a joy, Julie, thank you.   Julie Roys  49:41 Well, again, that was Lance Ford, an experienced church planter, pastor, consultant, and author of The Atlas Factor, Shifting Leadership Onto the Shoulders of Jesus. And as we mentioned, this book releases this month, and we’re actually giving away copies of The Atlas Factor to anyone who gives a gift of $30 or more  to The Roys Report this month. Again, we don’t have any big donors or advertisers almost all the funding for The Roys Report comes from you, the people who care about exposing abuse and corruption in the church and caring for abuse victims. So, if you can please go to JJULIEROYS.COM/DONATE  and give what you’re able to this ministry. And when you give, we’ll gladly send you a copy of The Atlas Factor. Also, just a quick reminder to subscribe to The Roys Report on Apple podcast, Google podcasts or Spotify. That way you won’t miss any of these episodes. And while you’re at it, I’d really appreciate it if you’d help us spread the word about the podcast by leaving a review. And then please share the podcast on social media so more people can hear about this great content. Again, thanks so much for joining me. Hope you are blessed and encouraged.   Read more

Guest Bios Show Transcript https://youtu.be/WuE4Gfre8b8Why is church after church succumbing to corruption and false doctrine? Yes, it's the result of greed, immorality, and a lust for power. But we've had those vices forever. So, why is there an epidemic of corruption in the church now? Author, pastor, and church planter, Lance Ford, who's worked inside pastor training networks for decades, answers that question with a line reminiscent of Bill Clinton's first presidential campaign motto: “It's the system, stupid.” Lance explains more in this enlightening edition of The Roys Report, featuring his session from our recent Restore Conference. Lance says the system of leadership that's been imported into the church from corporate America is what's producing our abysmal results. This system has been wholesale embraced by Christians, but there's nothing biblical about it. It's what Jesus called the way of the Gentiles. And unless we start to dismantle this godless system and replace it with a godly one, the church will continue to be plagued by scandals and spiritual abuse. Over decades, Lance has identified the toxic leadership models that have been imported into the church and he's sought a different path. As one who has designed unique training systems being used by networks, seminaries, and leaders throughout the world, he is speaking from a heart of love for pastors and the church. This is an extremely illuminating talk, essential for anyone who cares about the health of the church and the proper care of those in it. Guests Lance Ford Lance Ford is an author, church planter, coach, and consultant who has designed unique training systems currently being used by networks, seminaries, and leaders throughout the world. He has written several books including UnLeader, The Missional Quest, and The Starfish and the Spirit. His next book, The Atlas Factor, will be released in February. Lance holds a master's degree in Global Leadership from Fuller Theological Seminary. Learn more at LanceFordBooks.com. Show Transcript SPEAKERSLANCE FORD LANCE FORD  00:00You know, I’m sure that a lot of the speakers will do this, and it’ll be appropriate. But I just really want to thank Julie and her team, not only for just putting this together but for the writers on staff. The hard, dangerous work that they do. Because let me tell you, if you’re a demon right now, in the church, these are some dangerous people. Okay? So, hell fears what we’re doing here. But I am convinced that what we have seen over the last few years, the exposures of leaders, and you know all the names, and many of you come from situations where the names behind your stories aren’t in the headlines. But make no mistake about it, the Holy Spirit is shaking that which can be shaken, so that things that can’t be shaken will remain. Okay? I am convinced that Aslan is on the move. And I’m convinced that Jesus is standing at the door knocking. And we probably heard that verse growing up a lot, how Jesus is standing knocking at the door of your heart. That’s not the context of that verse in Revelation three. He’s standing on the outside of the door of the church, knocking to get in. And the question should be asked, Why is he on the other side of the door? But I believe that we are in a moment, and we are in a time where the Lord is raising so many voices up to speak against this stuff. And not only to just expose it, but to truly bring restoration. Amen? To restore the church to the hands of Jesus into the headship of Jesus.   LANCE FORD  02:13 Some of you are old enough in here to remember Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign. You remember James Carville? So, Carville ran the campaign, and he came up with this campaign slogan kind of by accident, because he had just posted it in the campaign headquarters for the workers to kind of stay focused. He knew that Clinton’s this guy from Arkansas and Arkansas wasn’t really taken that seriously. I’m from Texas, so I still don’t take Arkansas seriously. But, you know, this, I mean, you can’t become president from Arkansas. And nobody knew who Clinton was. And so there was an uphill battle, and Carville comes up with this little moniker that he thought, our best chance is if we can get the American people to focus on one bottom line. And how many of you remember what that moniker was? It’s the economy stupid. And that, really, Clinton ran on that, and he won. Now, as I have listened over the last few years, to so many podcasts, and blogs and stories, and read articles, I constantly find myself doing it this week, I was listening to a podcast. And I’ll hear myself out loud, say a little riff on James Carville’s, It’s the economy stupid. And I’ll hear the stories and I’ll go it’s the system stupid. It’s the system. And so, we have this system of leadership that has been imported straight into the church, that almost wholesale is received and accepted and run with, but few people question the system.   LANCE FORD  04:16 Edwards Deming said, every system is perfectly designed to produce the results it produces. So, when I hear so many of the leadership abuse stories, it should not surprise us. The system is perfectly designed to get the stuff that its getting. It’s a perfect garden to grow what is growing. The prevailing leadership systems in most churches of our day are not only not rooted in the words and the ways of Jesus in the epistles, they come from what Jesus called the ways of the Gentiles. What the Old Testament prophets would have called Babylonian or Egyptian. Just read Jeremiah in Ezekiel, and some of those prophets, and see some of the metaphors that they use that always flipped it back to Egyptian or Babylonian. Well, in the time of Jesus, when Jesus says the Gentiles, he’s speaking systemically, he’s speaking about a system. And so, over the last 30 to 35 years in particular, we have sewed to the wind, and we’re now reaping the whirlwind of the corrupt seeds of a false doctrine, and I’m going to call it that a doctrine of leadership. And see that’s the thing is, we don’t call it a doctrine. We don’t think about it as a doctrine, but make no mistake, it very much is a doctrine in the church today.   LANCE FORD  05:49 Now, you’ve already figured out Julie put me right behind sweet Ken. Thanks, Julie. So, it’s the typical, you already figured is good copy/bad cop, okay? And I don’t want to be a bad cop. I want to be nice. I want to be sweet. I don’t want to come across as a jerk. I spoke some of these types of things just a few years ago at a conference, and as I showed up to this particular conference, I was wondering, why did they invite me here? because they had me speak on leadership to a thousand Missouri pastors. And it was kind of like the experience for me, was kind of like Marty McFly on the stage when he was playing. And remember how the crowd just looked at him? That was my experience in Missouri to a thousand Missouri pastors. I was just glad to get out of there.   LANCE FORD  07:10 Ivan Illich was a Catholic priest and theologian, and he was asked what’s the most radical way to change a society? Is it through violent revolution? Or is it through gradual reform? And he said, If you want to change your culture, if you want to change society, you have to tell an alternative story. And so, what he was talking about is what sociologists and anthropologists would call a system story. Because every one of us, every one of us, every group, every tribe, every family has what we would call a system story. A system story is really your paradigm. It’s the way you see things. And the irony about a system story is it’s not necessarily what you believe at as far as core truths. It’s about habitual behavior. And it’s tied to deep seated narratives. And when we are looking at systems story of leadership, especially in groups, people tend to behave in the moment, according to a leadership system story that’s been imported into the church, not necessarily from what they believe the scriptures say. And so, the system story of a group will override even the claims of what they say they believe to be true. I mean, if you ever listened to any podcast or quotes from Mark Driscoll, one of his favorite monikers is, it’s all about Jesus. Exactly. Okay. Because he operates from a system story. He operates from a particular leadership system story. Jesus told the Pharisees; you nullify the Word of God by your traditions. He’s talking about their system story. He said, you search the scriptures daily, but you don’t come to me. Why? Because this particular system story overrides, it's the way they look at things. And so your system story influences everything, especially in churches. Our system stories influence our vocabulary, the way we say things. How many of you grew up with this? I grew up in church and grew up in the South. You grew up with this.   LANCE FORD  10:00 That’s a demonic little nursery rhyme. Why? Because this ain’t the church, Jack. That’s not the church. That’s the church. The folks are the church, the church isn’t a place you go to. It’s not an event. It’s not a location. It’s a people. And so, when we start thinking that church is a place, we’ve immediately got the system wrong, because I love my grandpa, he used to always say, he didn’t call it the church, he call it the church house. Guy Ford had that right back in 1965. He had it right. It’s just a building. It’s a sheep shed. But these are system stories. Our system stories influence our power structures within the church. It influences the way that we look at accountability. And even though we read Scripture, we read the Scripture over and over throughout the New Testament, it really emphasizes a mutual submission, a mutual accountability. In most of these abusive, in all of these abusive leadership systems, they’ll say they have accountability. But the accountability only runs one way. It’s a one-way street. But that’s not the system story of the New Testament. We have systems stories of titles that completely conflict with what Jesus said, that we use every day in our churches. And I’m going to talk a little bit about that I can’t help myself, I’m going to talk a little bit about that in a few minutes.   LANCE FORD  11:39 One of the things I like to do when I’ll start to work with a church that says that they want some consulting, or some coaching or help in a transitioning, is I’ll take them through some assessments and a few things. But one of things I always like to do right off the bat is look at their website. And so, I’ll look at church websites, and I’ll pull up the staff or the team, and I like to look to see how they list the team. And I’ve counted it up for usually it’s about 95% of churches. And you could do this on your own, you could just start arbitrarily looking at church websites. About 95% list the staff by hierarchy. Very rarely will you ever find a church that lists the staff alphabetically. I found a church came to me a couple of months ago, our team is going to start working with them in January. And they said that they’ve been trying to transition to more of a servant leadership type of style. And they’ve been trying to make inroads. Now I went and looked at their website. The first person listed on their team was the custodian. I thought, hey, you’re ahead of the game already. I mean because what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to get their thinking straight. But the language and the vocabulary that we use in our churches, and in our systems has a lot to do with what constantly gets recalibrated even in our hearts. Jesus says to the Gentiles, as we said, or says to His disciples, here’s the way that the Gentiles do it. And you remember the context to that you remember, James and John, I don’t know if it was their idea, or their mom’s idea. But Mama James and John goes to Jesus, right? And says, Hey, could you know my boys, you know, be Secretary of the Navy and, you know, and Speaker of the House. And you know when you get this thing going. And you remember that, and the other disciples, they get ticked off about it. Now, I have a theory about that. I think they got ticked off because James and John thought about it first. And because they didn’t get their mamas to show up first, because these guys were jockeying for position just as much because there’s another occasion where Jesus has to do the same thing. But he calls them to him, and he sits him down, and he says, Hey, I know we’ve all been raised in the shadow of temple power. We have been raised under oppression, a Roman hierarchy. And I know that you’ve never seen any type of government or leadership other than power and above. I know you’ve never seen that before, but that’s the way the Gentiles do it. It will not be so among you. We read that text just so quickly, and I think Jesus probably emphasized that like a daddy sitting down with his kids. It will not be so among you. But we need to ask why is it so very so among us today? Because that style of top down, heavy handed, over lording leadership is exactly what’s in the church. It’s had us by the throat for a long time now. And please hear this. We typically pay attention or get upset when a new headline comes up about some leadership abuse. But here’s the thing, and it’s easy to point out, it’s easy to highlight and put the spotlight on very heavy-handed abusers. But here’s the deal; the everyday MO of the prevailing leadership system in the vast majority of our churches, even among those leaders that don’t come across as mean or abusive, they’re still operating under systems that functionally cause an elite individual or group to lord over others. And this was the thing Jesus forbade. The Gentiles exercise dominion, some translations say. Other translations say they lord over one another. And that’s probably really the proper terminology from the Greek, they lord over one another. And we know there’s only one Lord.   LANCE FORD  16:44 So, when you start breaking down some of the way that we do leadership, here’s the thing. Once again, for the church, for the church, it’s to be different. And so, when Jesus comes to tell an alternative story, an alternative system story, he does. And it’s the story of the kingdom. And so constantly, you see these parables Jesus is giving, that just flips, our brains just flips the script. It’s the opposite of the way that we normally do things or the way that we, hey, if you want to be first, let me tell you how to shoot up the ladder, become last. What?! The greatest will be the least, the best will be the servant of all. And make no mistake, the word servant to us doesn’t have much impact. Back in the day, in their day, it had a lot of impact. Because nobody wanted to be a servant. When you’re doing the dirtiest jobs all the time. So, when Jesus washes the feet of his disciples that was scandalous. When he says, “This is the way, this is the way to do it. But when you look in our churches today, most of the people at the top with rank and title, how in the world can you convince me you’re the servant of all, when you have more perks and privileges than anybody else on the team? I mean, you really think Jesus had a donkey parking place for himself, you know, at the front of the temple? Why is it that there’s only one or two people on a staff on a church staff that seem to have the competency or the adulthood enough to be able to set their own schedule? Where does this stuff come from? Now it’s normative in the world for someone to unilaterally have the power to fire somebody. Where in the world do we think that that should be in the church? See, because if I’m a church leader, I can’t control the business world. I can’t control the corporate world, but I can do everything in my power to try to structure and operate this thing according to the way that Jesus in the epistle writer said to do it. Okay? So, if I have unilateral power to fire somebody, that is a violent act. It’s a violent act. And some of you are in here and that’s your story. That’s what happened to you. Because if I do that to you, I’ve affected your entire family. I’ve affected good chance where you live. And I’ve caused you to have to uproot because you’re going to have to go somewhere else and find another job. I’ve affected your spouse; I’ve affected your children. They’re going to be uprooted from their friends and their schools and the stability that they had. It’s a violent act. No one person should have the power to do that. And there is no scriptural menu whatsoever that gives anybody the authority to do that. See, that’s lording over somebody else. I’m acting as lord because I’m affecting your life in a significant way. No one person should have the power to do that.   LANCE FORD  20:33 This is about as quiet as it got when I was speaking to all those Missouri pastors that day. No one should have the power to dictate another team member’s schedule, that’s paternalistic. See, these two items alone are proof of the power of a system story. Because we say we don’t believe that anybody should do that. And yet our systems operate in that way. We constantly accept things that are a direct dis to Jesus. Let me give you one here. Okay. So, I’m basically trying to pull from like three books right now in 35 minutes. I feel like Carrot Top up here. Okay, look at this, okay. Look at this. Now, there’s nothing about me and Carrot Top that have anything in common, right? But I’m just going to try to pull a few things out and just try to wake us up to the systems issue of the leadership system that we have. So, Matthew 23, Jesus says, But as for you do not be called rabbi. For only one is your teacher and you’re all brothers and sisters, and that’s the key right there. You’re all brothers and sisters. We are siblings. The church is a group of siblings. A church staff is a group of siblings. He says, and do not call anyone on earth your father for only one is your father who is in heaven. And do not be called leaders. For only one is your leader that is Christ. But the greatest of you shall be your servant. And then he says whoever humbles himself will be exalted. But woe to you scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites. Don’t you know the scribes and Pharisees always regretted when they showed up to a Jesus talk? Oh, no, it’d be great. I heard this guy’s really exciting. He has great TED talks. And Jesus always gets them. Oh, you scribes and Pharisees that showed up! You hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven for men, for you do not enter in yourself, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in. And that’s the issue is these leadership systems literally shut the Kingdom of Heaven off from people. They shut down people’s giftings they shut down people’s callings. They alienate the anointings that people have had been given, the wisdom and the experience so often, because you can’t speak up because you don’t have the same title, or you don’t have the same rank in the room. That’s the way leadership works. We often tend to view the Pharisees as religious fundamentalist that were obsessed with the law of Moses. But we seldom consider or realize that Jesus’ emphasis on their hypocrisy in setting themselves over their brethren. And when you look at what Jesus constantly was bringing up to the scribes and Pharisees. He’s saying you’re setting yourself over your brethren.   LANCE FORD  23:50 You know, I remember watching the documentary on Hillsong. I think there was two of them, actually. And I remember one of them, or maybe even both of them pointed out how that the Hillsong, New York and I think most of them are this way, but like the front seats were saved for the celebrities and everything. Jesus talks about this. This is stuff Jesus talks about, directly, and we just ignore him. And you know, that’s elementary. That’s just elementary Christianity stuff right there. Elementary Christianity is first off, just do what Jesus said. Just obey Him. And so, when Jesus says don’t call yourself this, don’t call yourself that, don’t call yourself this, don’t call yourself that, He is specifically forbidding rank-based titles and practices that degrade the beauty of our sibling status. He says it’s a blockade to the kingdom. So, we have these totally accepted titles. Senior Pastor. Yeah, it gets quiet in the room because we think that’s normal. Where did that come from?   LANCE FORD  25:10 Listen, when I’ll get in little debates with guys, imagine that. And they’ll say, Well, you prove to me from the scriptures that a woman can be a senior pastor. And I’ll say you prove to me from the scripture that a man can be a senior pastor. We just think this stuff’s normal. And then about 20-25 years ago, there was Robin to the Batman senior pastor showed up; the dynamic duo. And the second part of this was the onset of the executive pastor. And you remember that? Ephesians 4, Apostle, prophet, executive shepherd and teacher and executive pastor. Could you hardly come up with a more hierarchical executive pastor? I’m here to execute. You may be next, right? Where do we get this stuff? I know where we get it. Okay, but we import it straight in. And most churches, they think it’s well, it’s just, that’s just normal. You got to have somebody managing things.   LANCE FORD  26:34 Well, that’s really interesting, because this is where we started getting into the evolution of leadership. Interestingly enough, the word leadership, believe it or not, it’s a pretty new term. It’s a term here’s how new it is. I started about three years ago, well it’s been about four years ago, now, I was working on a new book. And I wanted to kind of research the history. I kind of got this, this burr under my saddle to research the history of the word leadership. And I remember, I’ve  got this little office out in the woods that I built. It’s a little cabin. And I remember the moment I went over to my bookshelf, and I have a 1955 version of the Oxford Universal dictionary. It is this thick, I mean, it I would have liked her brought it, but I would have had to pay for extra on the plane, probably because it weighs so much. So, it’s this giant dictionary, and it has expansive definitions on words that it’s working with. I went to look up the word leadership 1955 Oxford Dictionary went to look up the word leadership, I could not find it. I could not find it. I finally found like an eight-word sentence using the word leadership as a definition for leader, but there was no definition for leadership in 1955 in the Oxford Dictionary. In 1915, Webster’s Dictionary the word leadership is not to be found at all. It’s not there. You start looking back to the earliest dictionaries, the earliest dictionaries that had the word leadership was the mid-1800s. And then there weren’t even any books with the word leadership in the title until the very end of the 1800s. And we’re talking about a very few at that point. Where leadership really came on was in the early 1900s, as the Industrial Revolution kicked on. And as these giant factories started coming up, that operated on quotas and clocks. And so the management system was instilled. And actually, there’s a guy named Frederick Winslow Taylor from Bethlehem Steel, that is credited as really the father of modern management. He wrote a book called The Scientific Art of Management. And basically, bottom line to it was what Taylor was saying was there’s two kinds of people. There’s thinkers and there’s doers and most people are the doers. Most of them are too incompetent to think on their feet. So, he created a Management Worker system so that the managers told workers when to do what, how to do it, when to start, and when to stop. And Taylorism, as it’s called, started moving straight into the corporate leadership structures throughout the 1920s, 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s. And there wasn’t even still a lot of books even with the term leadership until the 1950s. And a few more started coming into the 60s. Today, it’s everywhere. It’s a $50 billion industry,, leadership is.   LANCE FORD  30:31 Now when the Church Growth Movement started in the late 1960s, and the idea, okay, that we need to start quote, doing church a little different, because a lot of the seminaries and a lot of the denominational leaders, were starting to see a slippage in church attendance and participation. And so, they’re kind of, it’s the canary in the coal mine. And they’re like, We got to start changing things. And so, you started having the Church Growth Movement come on, which ended up creating in the 90s, the Seeker movement. Anybody remember the Seeker movement? And the big mistake about the Seeker movement was they made the wrong person the seeker. Jesus said, Son of man goes to seek and save the lost. We’re supposed to be the seekers. We’re supposed to seek the lost. But we thought, well, if we can create cool church, if we can make it innocuous enough and safe enough and nice enough, because you know, really, carrying crosses, it’s not that bad. Because that is the core of what it means to follow Jesus, right? But everything ended up being softened to such a point in the Seeker movement and the Church Growth Movement. But the thing was, was as these churches started growing in the late 70s into the 80s, they didn’t know how to manage them, they didn’t know how to run them. So, guess where they turn to find insight? They turned to the secular world. Why? Because here’s the thing, even by the 1960s, in Christianity, my research, and I’ve tried to be pretty thorough with it, tried to be as thorough as possible. And I’ve tried to go to the sources, and I’ve tried to go to the experts. So far, I’ve only found about 9 to 11 books, in the 1960s Christian books that had the word leadership in them. Okay? So even before that, you’re just not gonna find it. If you were to ask most pastors to name you know, ten classics on doctrine, they could just start naming so many books and authors to antiquity on Christian doctrine. But if you were to ask them to name ten classics on Christian leadership, they would really struggle. Most pastors and Christian leaders that you know how much of a library they point back to Oswald Sanders 1967 book, Spiritual Leadership, but before that, you don’t find anything. So, we turn to the world for it. I mean, if you look back at the history of the Global Leadership Summit, from Willow Creek, and you look at all these incredible spiritual speakers that had pastored churches, neutron Jack Welch, well I’m sure we’re gonna get a lot of Jesus from old neutron Jack I remember walking into so many pastors’ offices and just looking at the books and looking on the shelf and you see in the titles, leadership lessons from Attila the Hun. I’m not making this up. I’m not kidding. Where do we get this stuff? Yeah, you know, that’s a great small group text right there.   LANCE FORD  34:08 So, here’s the thing; it’s the system, Stupid. You’re not stupid. You’re not the stupid ones. But that’s exactly what Paul said. He called it folly. The wisdom of the world is foolishness to God, Paul said. The language that we see throughout the New Testament for a staff is not employ. There are no bosses on the New Testament Church staffs. The language that you see over and over and over throughout the Epistles is coworker, fellow worker, fellow worker, companion, co laborer, shoulder to shoulder. Here’s the deal, the church is not a corporation, it’s a community. It’s not a factory. It’s a family. It’s not a business. It’s a body. It’s not an organization. It’s an organic masterpiece of the fullness of Jesus as a gift to a watching world. That’s who we are. And that’s what every church staff is. If you were to ask and say, Well, you know, so and I’m wrapping it up, because my time is in the red up there now. If you know, and this is a question, I get a lot, So Lance, are you just saying there’s no leadership? No, not at all. That’s not what I’m saying. We need structure. We need systems. But the system that we have is not it. And here’s the deal, as long as we continue to support these systems, and to prop them up and try to just work along with them,  Julie is going to be running this conference for years to come. All the podcasts and the podcasters that are represented here and the writers and people that write stuff like I write, we’re going to have job security for a long time if we continue to prop up this system. I want to be put out of work, don’t you, Julie? It’d be awesome. Wouldn’t it be awesome if you know some time, you got an email, some point down the road, and Julie said, you know, we just don’t need it anymore? Wouldn’t that be awesome? Jesus is knocking on his church. He’s knocking on the door of his church. Thank you.   Read more

Thom looks at the often misunderstood Church Growth Movement and its critics. The post Why Most Critics of the Church Growth Movement Are Wrong appeared first on Church Answers.

Karl Vaters interviews Rick Hiemstra, a former small church pastor, now serving as the Director of Research at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Rick and Karl talk about a wide variety of subjects, including the Church Growth Movement, technology and how it has affected the way we approach pastoring. Some helpful insights include: What has people's attention is what shapes them, and technology has radically altered what has our attention How technology has shaped people's expectation of what to expect from their church and their pastor How technology subconsciously changed pastors from shepherds to content producers The important difference between “growth” and “scale” How small churches are especially suited to meet the changing needs of a world whose attention is so easily diverted And much more. Rick.Hiemstra@theefc.ca evangelicalfellowship.ca Andy Crouch - The Tech-Wise Family Justin Earley - The Common Rule The HTML of Cruciform Love: Toward a Theology of the Internet Online Conversation | After Babel: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World with Andy Crouch & Jonathan Haidt For a Transcript of this episode visit the Pivot Blog  Support This Work: Visit the Website Subscribe to weekly Newsletter Contribute financially at KarlVaters.com/support Visit our Youtube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Karl Vaters interviews Rick Hiemstra, a former small church pastor, now serving as the Director of Research at the Evangelical Fellowship of Canada. Rick and Karl talk about a wide variety of subjects, including the Church Growth Movement, technology and how it has affected the way we approach pastoring. Some helpful insights include: What has people's attention is what shapes them, and technology has radically altered what has our attention How technology has shaped people's expectation of what to expect from their church and their pastor How technology subconsciously changed pastors from shepherds to content producers The important difference between “growth” and “scale” How small churches are especially suited to meet the changing needs of a world whose attention is so easily diverted And much more. Rick.Hiemstra@theefc.ca evangelicalfellowship.ca Andy Crouch - The Tech-Wise Family Justin Earley - The Common Rule The HTML of Cruciform Love: Toward a Theology of the Internet Online Conversation | After Babel: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World with Andy Crouch & Jonathan Haidt For a Transcript of this episode visit the Pivot Blog  Support This Work: Visit the Website Subscribe to weekly Newsletter Contribute financially at KarlVaters.com/support Visit our Youtube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

No one wants to be hated, but Jesus said his followers will be hated by the world. Now, here is a message that tells you how you can avoid all that so that the unbelieving world will love you, not hate you. It is called the Church Growth Movement and it really works wonderfully if your endgame is getting the nod from those people around you who really find the Bible too offensive to their progressive taste. But I am suggesting that we don't go, recognizing that “everyone who wants to live a godly life in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” (2 Tim. 3:12).

We discuss what it means to be a biblical church today and what to look for when seeking a church to attend. We address priorities including sound doctrine, prophecy, truth with love, inerrancy, Acts 2:42, Eph. 4:11-12, confronting sin, and warn about many things to avoid. Daily podcast, relevant articles on issues pertaining to Christians and more can be found on Stand Up For The Truth.

Karl Vaters interviews Dr. Gary McIntosh about Donald McGavran's role as the pioneer of the church growth movement. But don't let the term "church growth movement" stop you from listening. Dr. McIntosh tells us that the origins of church growth are far different than what most of us have been taught recently. Some of the misunderstandings he clears up include: That it came from the heart of a missionary, not a pastor That it was about being cross-cultural, not omni-cultural That it was focused as much or more on the impact of smaller congregations than the building of bigger ones Donald A. McGavran: A Biography of the Twentieth Centurys Premier Missiologist For a Transcript of this episode visit the Pivot Blog  Support This Work: Visit the Website Subscribe to weekly Newsletter Contribute financially at KarlVaters.com/support Visit our Youtube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Karl Vaters interviews Dr. Gary McIntosh about Donald McGavran's role as the pioneer of the church growth movement. But don't let the term "church growth movement" stop you from listening. Dr. McIntosh tells us that the origins of church growth are far different than what most of us have been taught recently. Some of the misunderstandings he clears up include: That it came from the heart of a missionary, not a pastor That it was about being cross-cultural, not omni-cultural That it was focused as much or more on the impact of smaller congregations than the building of bigger ones Donald A. McGavran: A Biography of the Twentieth Centurys Premier Missiologist For a Transcript of this episode visit the Pivot Blog  Support This Work: Visit the Website Subscribe to weekly Newsletter Contribute financially at KarlVaters.com/support Visit our Youtube Channel Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

We discuss what it means to be a biblical church today and what to look for when seeking a church to attend. We address priorities including sound doctrine, prophecy, truth with love, inerrancy, Acts 2:42, Eph. 4:11-12, confronting sin, and warn about many things to avoid. Daily podcast, relevant articles on issues pertaining to Christians and more can be found on Stand Up For The Truth.

Welcome to a funeral for the Church Growth Movement, Pugsters! In today's show Chris explains what the Church Growth Movement was, how it changed the character of evangelicalism and helped to destroy it, and why the movement has been killed by Covid-19, and the Woke-world that has followed. Church Growth was supposed to save the church--so why is it a good thing that it is dead? Join the Pugcast crew as they reflect on what's next for Christianity in the west now that Church Growth is dead.

Welcome to a funeral for the Church Growth Movement, Pugsters! In today's show Chris explains what the Church Growth Movement was, how it changed the character of evangelicalism and helped to destroy it, and why the movement has been killed by Covid-19, and the Woke-world that has followed. Church Growth was supposed to save the church--so why is it a good thing that it is dead? Join the Pugcast crew as they reflect on what's next for Christianity in the west now that Church Growth is dead.

Welcome to a funeral for the Church Growth Movement, Pugsters! In today's show Chris explains what the Church Growth Movement was, how it changed the character of evangelicalism and helped to destroy it, and why the movement has been killed by Covid-19, and the Woke-world that has followed. Church Growth was supposed to save the church--so why is it a good thing that it is dead? Join the Pugcast crew as they reflect on what's next for Christianity in the west now that Church Growth is dead.

Welcome to a funeral for the Church Growth Movement, Pugsters! In today’s show Chris explains what the Church Growth Movement was, how it changed the character of evangelicalism and helped to destroy it, and why the movement has been killed by Covid-19, and the Woke-world that has followed. Church Growth was supposed to save the […]

Welcome to a funeral for the Church Growth Movement, Pugsters! In today's show Chris explains what the Church Growth Movement was, how it changed the character of evangelicalism and helped to destroy it, and why the movement has been killed by Covid-19, and the Woke-world that has followed. Church Growth was supposed to save the church--so why is it a good thing that it is dead? Join the Pugcast crew as they reflect on what's next for Christianity in the west now that Church Growth is dead. --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/the-theology-pugcast/support

On today's My Take, we cover part 2 of the discussion; "Should churches pay their creatives?" In this episode, I give my answers to the question as well as admonish different groups who have a stake in nature of the question itself. Join us as we take a deeper look...--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Give us Your FeedbackBeing a new segment, we would love it if you a gave us some feedback. Join us on twitter @itd_ke and let us know what you think.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Quoted ResourcesTransformational Church: Creating a New Scorecard for Congregations by Ed Stetzer and Thom Rainer--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Thank You!!!Thank you ITD fam, you came though BIG!!! We got the microphone!!! The Shure MV7 with our name on it is now home. I decided to unbox it with and for you. Head over to my YouTube Channel and check that out:https://youtu.be/ceRD8HFjwlk--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 Mic here, more equipment to go....Thank you for your contribution so far ITD fam! You guys are the best. We have one item of the puzzle, here is the rest of the equipment we are trying to get:1 Audio Technica Production Headphones: https://amzn.to/3za6Esf1 Gator 3000: http://bit.ly/gator30001 Rode RODECaster Pro Podcast Production Studio: https://amzn.to/3g1IM3G3 Shure MV 7:  https://bit.ly/shuremv7Check out the support the podcast section below for the link to our donation gateway.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Photo AttributionPhoto by KOBU Agency on UnsplashPhoto by Frank Cone from PexelsGraphics AttributionGraphics designed by Kevin Kung'u--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Support the PodcastYou can support the podcast by using the 'support the show' link below. The payment gateway has secure card and MPESA transactions available:Support the show (https://dashboard.flutterwave.com/donate/0uftcqgzq85z)

On today's My Take, we cover a discussion that has been ongoing in the urban church space in Nairobi Kenya; "Should churches pay their creatives?" In this episode, I look into the church movements and models in the West whose development over the past 50-80 years has impacted how we do church, and how churches interact with creatives. Join us as we take a deeper look...--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Give us Your FeedbackBeing a new segment, we would love it if you a gave us some feedback. Join us on twitter @itd_ke and let us know what you think.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Quoted ResourcesGod's Forever Family: The Jesus People Movement in America by Larry Eskridge et al (2013) Bridges of God: A Study in the Strategy of Missions by Donald McGravan (1964)Your Church Can Grow by C. Peter Wagner (1984) --------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Thank You!!!Thank you ITD fam, you came though BIG!!! We got the microphone!!! The Shure MV7 with our name on it is now home. I decided to unbox it with and for you. Head over to my YouTube Channel and check that out:https://youtu.be/ceRD8HFjwlk--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------1 Mic here, more equipment to go....Thank you for your contribution so far ITD fam! You guys are the best. We have one item of the puzzle, here is the rest of the equipment we are trying to get:1 Audio Technica Production Headphones: https://amzn.to/3za6Esf1 Gator 3000: http://bit.ly/gator30001 Rode RODECaster Pro Podcast Production Studio: https://amzn.to/3g1IM3G3 Shure MV 7:  https://bit.ly/shuremv7Check out the support the podcast section below for the link to our donation gateway.--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Photo AttributionPhoto by KOBU Agency on UnsplashPhoto by Frank Cone from Support the show (https://dashboard.flutterwave.com/donate/0uftcqgzq85z)

Luecke Contra Baptism I would like to thank the Rev. Dr. David S. Luecke for providing a stark contrast between his Church Growth Movement (CGM) approach to liturgy and sacraments vs. what Gottesdienst has been not only advocating, but putting into practice for going on thirty years. His undated piece “Avoid Sacramentalism in Ministry” from his What Happened to our Churches? blog is a case in point. This article is a valuable example of why Gottesdienst exists, and why the work of pastors and the laity in the ongoing restoration of biblical theology and reverence in worship is not only needed, but is making a difference. He begins his piece by pointing out that the local Baptist Moody radio station “dropped broadcasts of the Lutheran hour” because of The Lutheran Hour's emphasis on “Baptism as a key to salvation.” He laments this as a “first-class communications problem,” and the fault for this “error” was “with Lutheran preachers.” He accuses Lutheran pastors of holding to an ex opere operato theology of Holy Baptism divorced from the Word and from the Holy Spirit. Luecke sums up his explanation of how salvation works, that the Holy Spirit works through the Word, and the water merely “visualizes” the Word. He never mentions Jesus or the cross in his mini-presentation of the ordo salutis in his own words. In fact, Dr. Luecke has a strange articulation of his confession of the Holy Trinity: All Protestants affirm the Trinity of Three Persons in One God, a concept very hard to understand. Calvinist focus on the First-Person God the Father. Lutherans emphasize the Second-Person God the Son. God the Spirit has been much neglected mostly because his role as Lord and Giver of church life was not needed when lively church life was heavily institutionalized. The rapidly growing Pentecostal movement of the last 100 years features the Third-Person Spirit. For Paul Christ and the Holy Spirit are inter-changeable. He attributes the same function in one place to Christ and another place to the Spirit. For Paul the Spirit is Christ present with us now [emphasis added]. Dr. Luecke's assertion of Lutheran pastors severing faith from Holy Baptism is a straw man argument. He never sites any source of this apparently rampant false doctrine among Lutheran clergy, in which Baptism is treated as a magic ceremony independent of the Holy Spirit, the Word of God, and presumably, our Lord Jesus Christ who told us to “make disciples” by baptizing them in the first place. And Dr. Luecke blames the Lutherans (Walt Kowalsky was right!) and acts as if being removed from the Moody radio station is a bad thing. In reality, The Lutheran Hour deserves kudos for not being afraid to confess our theology. Were a Baptist to read the Small Catechism's seven questions and answers on the Chief Part of Holy Baptism, he would reject it as false doctrine. I was raised in the Baptist Church. I'm grateful for the biblical instruction that I had as a child, as well as learning who Jesus is and why the cross matters. The people of my little Baptist congregation were confessors of the Gospel. That said, Baptists and Lutherans believe entirely different things about Holy Baptism. Moody's doctrinal statement is utterly silent about the sacraments. Dr. Luecke admits that Baptists reject infant baptism, mirroring their snarky tone about “sprinkling water on a baby” having nothing to do with one's “relationship with God.” Dr. Luecke also uses the curious term “water baptism” - a distinction often used among charismatics to distinguish actual baptism from a laying on of hands that accompanies “speaking in tongues” (which they call “baptism of the Spirit”). As an aside, Dr. Luecke says that he doesn't have the “gift of tongues,” but he recognizes modern glossolalia as valid in a response to a person who claims to “speak in tongues”: I did not intend to belittle something that has been a defining feature for millions of enthusiastic believers. I intended just to say that I have not been given that gift. I am appealing to a much broader audience than those who have had the experience of speaking in tongues. I gave my understanding of it as an emotional expression. Many Lutheran pastors have hostility toward charismatics from the conflicts involving charismatics in congregations in the 60s and 70s. I respect charismatics for their energy. Yours is the first expression of your prayer language being very rational. God bless your gift and the Giver. Moody is also to be commended for their faithfulness to their theology. They recognize what Luecke doesn't want to: that neo-Evangelicals and Lutherans have incompatible theologies of baptism, and of the sacraments in general. Dr. Luecke longs for a kind of faux unity by having The Lutheran Hour either compromise our theology, or dishonestly put it under a bushel. Dr. Luecke recognizes the inroads of the liturgical renewal that began in the middle of the twentieth century, as North American Lutherans began to dig out of the Pietist hole that their forbears, trying to fit in with a contemporary Protestant culture, fell into decades earlier - a cultural upheaval when the English language displaced the German during and after World War One. He describes his discomfort with “young pastors” and their “tendency toward sacramentalism” - which he defines as “treating the sacraments as more important than the Word.” Again, this is a straw man. The problem is actually the opposite of Dr. Luecke's complaint. While it is still not uncommon for a Lutheran congregation to have a Service of the Word without Holy Communion, I have never heard of a Service of the Sacrament without the Word. Can Dr. Luecke point to a single example of a Lutheran Divine Service that skips the Bible readings, omits the sermon, and heads right into the Eucharist? But we do see, again and again, especially in non-liturgical “church growth” congregations, the omission of the Sacrament rather than the omission of the Word. In some cases, non-liturgical churches boast about their “seeker sensitive” approach that pushes the Sacrament of the Altar to the fringes, perhaps only celebrating it once a month. I cannot imagine how malnourishing such a bland diet would be. It is a repudiation of our confession that Holy Communion strengthens our faith. And this is why Christians from time immemorial gathered on the Lord's Day for the “breaking of bread” - that is until men of Dr. Luecke's generation and inclination decided that what we needed was less Holy Communion. As to the accusation of “treating the sacraments as more important than the Word,” Gottesdienst's print journal is immersed in the Word of God. I've been the sermons editor for more than a decade. Every issue includes sermons. We insist that preaching be bound by, and centered on, the biblical text, the Word of God, as opposed to anecdotes, cutesy stories, emotional glurge, object lessons, or pop culture commentary. We also have regular columns devoted to the exegesis of Scripture. I have been to many Divine Services and other prayer offices at Gottesdienst events. The Word is always powerfully preached and proclaimed. I have never seen Dr. Luecke in attendance at any of them. This is a common straw man among our critics, that we - as I heard recently - pay more attention to “the proper form of a stole to proclaiming the pure Gospel” - and that this explains the decline of Christianity in our country, in the west, and around the world. This mirrors Dr. Luecke's Theology of Glory, in which he asserts that the number of the butts in the pews is in direct proportion to the faithfulness of the preacher and the correctness of the church's method of worship. The fact of the matter is that the editors and bloggers of Gottesdienst are parish pastors, some having been for decades - not primarily professors, experts in industrial organization, bureaucrats, theorists, academicians, or consultants about how to grow a church. And in the course of years of actual parish ministry, one sees the power of the Word of God, through preaching, through Baptism and the Lord's Supper, through Confession and Absolution, through praying the Psalms, through the liturgy, on deathbeds, in times of personal and family angst, in tragedy, in bringing Christ to bear in the midst of the Culture of Death and a world that is repulsed by the cross. Actual parish pastors baptize the babies - sometimes with an eye dropper. They also bury the babies and console the grieving parents who are comforted by our emphasis on baptism. They also baptize adults, and in some cases, the elderly. They teach the Word in Bible classes, in youth catechesis, and in sermons - week in and week out. They bring both Word and Sacrament to shut-ins and to the hospitalized. They proclaim the Word of God as their parishioners breathe out their final breath on this side of the grave. And in fact, we are so focused on the Word of God, we use the traditional liturgy! Your Lutheran Service Book (LSB) has the biblical references embedded in the liturgy on every page. The Church has used the liturgy for well over 1,500 years precisely because the liturgy is grounded in the living Word of God. In fact, the deviants from the liturgy are those who move away from the Word into the realm of either reason (as many of the Reformed do), emotion (as many neo-Evangelicals do), phony signs and wonders (as many Pentecostals and Charismatics do), or magisterial mysticism (as many Roman Catholics do). Dr. Luecke suffers from the Grass Is Always Greener syndrome - as do many cradle Lutherans who take their treasure for granted. As a convert, I see the futility of lusting after popularity by adopting worship alien to our confessions. I have been there, and done that - with all of its strengths and weaknesses. The reality is that we have the best of both worlds in our Lutheran confession: a rigorous cruciform theology informed not by direct revelation, the magisterium, or by a complex matrix of popes and councils, not by logic and reason, not by ginned up emotion and navel-gazing, but by the Word of God, sola scriptura. And we retain the biblical practice of baptismal regeneration and of the Lord's own words concerning His Supper (as the great I AM proclaims the great THIS IS), as well as retaining the biblical practice of Holy Absolution according to our Lord's institution. Dr. Luecke presents a false either/or dichotomy that offers us only option A) The Word or option B) the sacraments, without an option C) all of the above. And in fact, the real, fully-lived Christian life is not a multiple choice quiz, but rather an essay, a narrative, that is, the Gospel of Jesus Christ: His incarnation, birth, ministry, passion, death, resurrection, ascension, and the consummation of His coming again in glory. I would agree with Dr. Luecke if his critique were a caution against the danger falling into ex opere operato (seeing baptism and all other liturgical acts as a work severed from faith). For this warning is strewn about the Book of Concord. It is one of the chief criticisms of Rome. And where I see it is in the good intention of grandparents whose faithless children will not baptize or raise their own children in the faith. And so pious grandparents, lovingly desperate for the salvation of their grandchildren, will sometimes inquire about bringing their grandchildren to church to baptize them independent of the parents' wishes or intention to raise them as Christians. Sometimes grandparents will ask about doing a sort-of secret emergency baptism themselves (a situation so common that an episode of All in the Family depicted Archie Bunker doing this very thing). Their motivation is love. But we have to gently remind them that baptism is not a silver bullet, that faith matters, that like a seed that is watered, the ongoing life of the seedling requires ongoing care lest it die. Those with any time in the pastoral office has had to encounter this real-world situation. But Dr. Luecke is instead condemning those who worship by means of the liturgy, in “traditional churches,” and especially in “highly liturgical churches” and their pastors who emphasize Holy Baptism in the life of the Christian. Dr. Luecke refers back to Dr. Luther's famous dictum that when he was tormented by the devil, he would made the good confession: “I am baptized.” Dr. Luecke cautions, “This can be taken to mean he relied on the act of water baptism for his identity as a believer.” This shows that Dr. Luecke doesn't understand the Lutheran confession of Holy Baptism. Baptism is our identity as a believer. It is how disciples are made. It is the objective declaration of God of His objective work of regeneration. Otherwise, Dr. Luther would not refer back to it, but would rather exclaim, “I have faith.” The problem is that faith is subjective. It is impossible to quantify. Holy Baptism is objective. It is binary: you either are, or you are not. And Holy Baptism delivers faith. Nowhere in the Scriptures are we taught to sever the two, nor are we to treat baptism as a mere human act publicly acknowledging our faith (as is the Baptist confession). Rather, we confess baptism as “the washing of rebirth and renewal by the Holy Spirit.” To be baptized is to be born again. And in our first birth, we draw our first breath in the world. In our second birth, we draw our first breath in eternity. How can a Lutheran remove baptism from his identity? Baptism and faith are intertwined, but it is baptism that is the objective, extra nos reality to which a person whose faith may be tried and frayed can point. And that reality delivers faith as a gift. The remembrance of baptism strengthens our faith. Faith is not substitute for baptism. This is a theology alien to our Lutheran confession. I remember listening to the radio on a long drive across the entire state of Pennsylvania and the only thing I could pick up was a religious station. A Baptist pastor was preaching a thunderous fire-and-brimstone sermon, but at one point in his preaching, he broke down in tears. He could not determine if his faith were sufficient. He was broken and demoralized, and had no objective means of faith, nothing outside of himself and his own sinful works to which to anchor himself. This is the crabgrass that Dr. Luecke is peering at over the fence, convincing himself that it is greener. And it is, like the “sign” of “speaking in tongues,” a navel-gazing subjective self-validation of one's salvation as opposed to the objective, divinely-focused nature of Holy Baptism as a reality of the New Birth in a Christian's life. Dr. Luecke criticizes the mid twentieth century rediscovery of the liturgy as a blessing to the faith and life of the individual Christian and of the Church, as a “wrong turn.” He creates another straw man that emphasizing “renewing the forms and rituals of public worship” is antithetical to “the Word of God itself” and to “relationships.” This is not only factually untrue, it is a weird display of mental gymnastics. For ritual doesn't take away from relationships. In fact, all forms of relationships involve ritual. For example, I don't know if Dr. Lueke is married or not, but if so, I would be willing to wager that this entrance into a sacred relationship with his wife was accompanied by ritual, and it was probably quite traditional. She probably wore a wedding dress as opposed to a pair of blue jeans. Likewise, he was probably wearing, if not a tuxedo, some form of suit and tie (a form of male vesture dating back to the Pagan French Revolution). The wedding service was likely liturgical, as opposed to being ex corde. Interestingly, in my experience, weddings are an example in which Baptists actually follow a more liturgical form than the usual loosely-liturgical Sunday service. Words are read out of the book, and the couple and the pastor engage in a formal rote recitation. And likewise, married- and family-life involves a lot of rituals. I don't know if Dr. Luecke has children or not, but if so, I would bet that every year on the natal anniversary of his wife and children, the family would gather for a liturgy of sorts, a ritual involving a special meal, candles, and the singing of a particular traditional song. And far from standing in opposition to the idea of relationship, such rituals are like glue that bonds relationships. I wonder what Dr. Lueke thinks of the traditional ritual of celebrating one's baptismal birthday with the lighting of a candle and saying certain prayers. And of course, there are many social liturgies, like the Pledge of Allegiance and the National Anthem, fireworks on the fourth, handshakes, retirement dinners, clinking glasses together in a toast, the seventh-inning stretch, the starting pistol at the beginning of the race, clapping at the conclusion of a recital, eating popcorn at the movie theater, etc. All of these rituals foster relationships. They do not impede them. In the Church, we often refer to the Lord's Supper as “Holy Communion.” It is a “communion,” a ritual act of relationship between believers and God as well as believers to each other. How liturgy is seen in opposition to such relationships beggars belief. Nearly every act of human relationship involves rituals, formal and informal. Social iconoclasm leads only to the breakdown of civilization and the destruction of the faith - not to mention a destruction of relationships through deracination and atomization, creating a vacuum to be filled with a selfish desire for personal entertainment and the treating of “butts in the pews” as an impersonal, ego-driven barometer of faith and faithfulness. Dr. Luecke displays a shocking ignorance of history and of the Bible itself by arguing that “the roots” of our liturgical rituals: go back to the fourth century when the now-official Christian church began adopting special rituals, robes, and parades with incense of pagan worship. Pagan worship was meant to impress the gods, so they would look favorably on human efforts. Quality was important for that purpose. Emphasizing those rituals led to the sacramentalism that forms were more important than the Word of God itself. And herein lies the heart of the matter of Dr. Luecke's iconoclastic rebellion against the liturgy and the sacraments - and to be blunt, his rebellion against the Word of God itself. While some of our specific clerical vestments have their roots in the Greco-Roman world of our Lord, the apostles, and the Pagan (and later Christian) Roman Empire, the idea of liturgical vestments when ministering in the presence of God is an Old Testament idea. That which Dr. Luecke dismissively calls “robes” and other liturgical accoutrements are, per his argument, of Pagan origin to “impress the gods.” If Dr. Luecke were to read Exodus and Leviticus, he would learn what God's preferences are. When He appeared to Moses in the burning bush, God instructed Moses to remove his sandals, as this was a place of holiness - set apart from the ordinary because of the miraculous presence of God. He did not tell Moses “come as you are” or champion casualness as a virtue in the presence of God. And our Lutheran confession of the Lord's Supper is that it is a miracle, that Jesus is truly present in an incarnate, physical form occupying space and time. It is His same body born of the Virgin Mary, the same blood shed on the cross. It is not a symbol. It is not a “spiritual presence.” It is a miraculous manifestation of God in our midst: God in our sanctuary, God on our altar, God given to us to eat and drink and take into ourselves bodily, according to His Word and institution. This is why our churches are called “sanctuaries” - holy places - no less holy than the Holy of Holies in the tabernacle and temple. Why we would treat this most sublime gift and reality with anything less than complete awe and wonder and reverence can only be described by one word: disbelief. When the time came for the Lord to dwell among His people by means of His miraculous presence, the Lord Himself instructed that a beautiful tabernacle be constructed, with specific instructions for top quality items of beauty to be used in a liturgical setting. The priests were to be vested as they carried out their ministry, with fine linen, gems, and colorful cloth of superlative workmanship. God's house was to be adorned in the finest of silver and gold and other metals, with beautiful fabrics and artwork. And there are also liturgical instructions regarding ordinations, daily and weekly worship, and an annual calendric cycle. And it is impossible to read the Lord's worship preferences and not come away convinced that God prefers liturgy, ritual, beauty, reverence, and yes, “quality” when it comes to His presence on earth. There are no examples in Scripture of the miraculous presence of God being accompanied by come-as-you-are casualness and an entertainment emphasis. And there was also incense. Incense is a powerful image, the use of which is mandated in Old Testament worship, is referred to in Psalm 141 as symbolic of prayer, was presented to our Lord by the Magi, was part of our Lord's ritual of His burial, and is also mentioned numerous times in the Book of Revelation. Incense is not of Pagan origin, but Pagans copied it from the worship of the true God. The words “incense” and “frankincense” appear 110 times in the ESV translation, including both God's delight in it, as well as his condemnation of it being offered to false gods, or even to Himself by those who were not called to lead worship. Dr. Luecke's brand of de-emphasis of baptism, his anticlericalism and his innovationism is the real problem in the Church. It must be stamped out by constant and consistent catechesis (including by the teaching that happens by means of ceremonies), by a renewed biblical literacy, by a rediscovery of our Book of Concord and our Church History, by liturgical preaching, by embracing not American sectarianism but our Evangelical Catholic confession of the traditional, unchanging, apostolic faith, and by rejecting the idea that popularity is what determines righteousness. This latter one is the rotten fruits of the Church Growth Movement's libido numerandi and lusting after the ego-stroke of big churches and big budgets. Can you imagine if we raised our children to cultivate a desire to be popular? Would we advise our sons to do drugs? Would we advise our daughters to be promiscuous? Why do CGM advocates embrace worldly popularity as a gage of “church success.” Have they not read our Lord's words? Enter by the narrow gate. For the gate is wide and the way is easy that leads to destruction, and those who enter by it are many. For the gate is narrow and the way is hard that leads to life, and those who find it are few. These two verses are a repudiation of Dr. Luecke's entire career as a CGM advocate. I would posit that if he has baptized one baby in the course of his ministry, he has done more good for the growth of the kingdom than his entire corpus of books and articles. And when our Lord returns to this decimated, fallen world finding only a remnant of believers, He will not scold us for not being worldly enough, with our churches being too small, with not enough butts in the pews - but will commend His Bride for her faithfulness to His Word, promise, and command: Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age.

Libido Numerandi In his masterpiece The City of God, St. Augustine uses the term libido dominandi, which might be translated as “the lust for domination.” It is Augustine's term for fallen man's inclination to lord over others, to play God by seeking to control other people. There is a variation of this libido that seeks power and the praise of men by an appeal to numbers: libido numerandi. Even animals turn to this form of self-aggrandizement in making themselves look big - often as a defense mechanism to frighten away predators, or as an appeal to a potential mate. But especially among fallen men, there is a determination to dominate others by an assertion of self-promotion: be it physical size, strength, influence, wealth, or the number of people in one's organization. This libido numerandi is everywhere. Companies will routinely boast in their advertisements that they are the world's largest this or that, the biggest such and such a firm in the country, or the Number One seller of widgets in the state. And this libido is all too common in the church. It is the main lust displayed by the Church Growth Movement (CGM), and has become justification for a lot of mischief - even abolishing the Mass and the usual public ceremonies, like the order of the readings, vestments, etc. - all in the name of boosting numbers. Of course, we are called upon to evangelize, but we are also called upon to seek and save even the single lost sheep, and not just make a play for ever larger numbers of people for the sake of numbers itself. In our Lord's parable, the shepherd leaves the ninety-nine on the plain to find one of his flock that isn't even a new “recruit,” but rather a member who has wondered off. This legacy maintenance approach to ministry must seem a strange strategy indeed to the CGM advocate, who would likely rather be leaving one behind to look for ninety-nine new members, not to mention the vault of heaven resounding over a mere net gain of only one member! And this is part of the curse of the Church Growth Movement - people just become numbers, tallies on a spreadsheet, abstract targeted goals in a corporate jargon-filled mission statement. The now (thank God) defunct Ablaze!™ program, that was sold not a program but as a “movement”, created such a dehumanizing secular marketing approach by laying out a numerical goal of a hundred million “critical events” to be racked up (defined as telling people about Jesus, but not defined as actually baptizing someone). It was pure libido numerandi. It downplayed the means of grace, it reduced people and human interactions to the place of tick marks in a database and a number to be reported by the suits at meetings, and completely forgot about the Holy Spirit and the Doctrine of Election. How different than our Lord's Parable of the Sower, in which the seed is cast far and wide in a way that looks foolish to the world, unconcerned with numbers, and not reporting them to a website or to the bureaucrats in the home office. And the sower doesn't research to find out the best place to cast. He doesn't use the techniques of modern agribusiness to bump up the fertility of the soil. He doesn't employ genetic modification to make his seeds more “effective.” He doesn't even use the latest and greatest technology. He just tosses the seed everywhere, seemingly recklessly, and he just leaves the results up to God the Holy Spirit. The sower's job is to be faithful. And that is another thing that the lust for numbers ignores. Which church is more “successful”? Is it Joel Osteen's stadium full of tens of thousands, or is it the little LCMS congregation that uses the liturgy, the hymns, and is normed by the Bible and the Confessions and has maybe a couple dozen people in attendance? Is the metric for success, for a “healthy church” (in CGM lingo) based on the number of people present, or the degree of fidelity to the teachings of our Lord Jesus Christ? One rank example of the libido numerandi was when a previous district president said that he hoped my congregation would grow to 900 members in a year. How he came up with that number is a mystery. Maybe it was a subconscious reference to Oral Roberts's 900 foot Jesus. Our building holds a couple hundred. Why would we want to be that large? Why wouldn't it make more sense to have another congregation or two (or more) - providing responsible pastoral care - if there were that many members? And why not focus on the kind of growth that sees our members grow in the maturity of their faith, in their Christian life, in their sanctification, in their knowledge of the Bible and the confessions of the church? In their love for the liturgy and their children's growing up immersed in the means of grace? Why is success seen merely as numerical growth? Another example is when pastors (and not just pastors) get together, one of the first questions is “How big is your church?” Or the really revealing way in which this question is often put: “How many do you worship?” If that isn't not only libido numerandi, but outright idolatry, then nothing is! The object of our worship is the Most Holy Trinity, not the number of people in the pews. There was even a well-known pastor who would get into discussions online about theological matters. You could tell when he was losing the argument, because he would look up his opponent's congregation's statistics (which are, inexplicably, published online) and then berate him if his church had a net loss of members over the past year or over the pastor's tenure at that congregation - as if that had any validity as a theological argument. Well, according to libido numerandi, it makes perfect sense. There is that nasty little libido in all of us to lord over others by an appeal to our own perceived greatness. And in our culture, size matters. It calls to mind when David's census did not go well, and God punished his libido numerandi: “Satan stood against Israel and incited David to number Israel…. But God was displeased with this thing, and He struck Israel…. So the Lord sent a pestilence on Israel, and 70,000 men of Israel fell” (1 Chron 21:1,7, 14). It also calls to mind the account of Gideon's conquest of Midian with only 300 men. God deliberately shrunk Gideon's army so as to conquer their libido numerandi: “The Lord said to Gideon, ‘The people with you are too many for Me to give the Midianites into their hand, lest Israel boast over Me, saying, my own hand has saved me'“ (Jud 7:2). But according to the Word of God, the Spirit blows where He wishes. The Church expands, the Church contracts, and in the long run, the Church will drastically shrink. Jesus Himself said so. There is not a direct relation between faithfulness and size, and to the contrary, when one lives in a hostile culture, there may well even be an inverse relationship. This is not to say that we should strive to make our churches small, or denigrate those whose churches are growing. These things are typically beyond our control. Contrary to the premises of the CGM, numerical growth is often related much more to the secular demographic increase or decrease of a local population than anything we do. And that is also a temptation to the Church Growthers. Many years ago, I received a beg letter from a proposed church plant. In making the pitch, it appealed to the fact that the target subdivision demographic was suburban, well-to-do, and comprised of many young families. The implication is that your money won't go to waste, because there is a better chance of success among people with money and kids. So the older people, the less-fortunate, and other outcasts who are not as likely to be an attractive demographic for investment can just do without evangelism, I suppose. The sower went looking for good soil, and limited his planting there, it seems. Should we assume that God blesses such an approach to evangelism? Bishop Vsevolod Lytkin commented on the monetary inefficiencies of mission work - especially in his milieu of the vast terrain of the Lutheran diaspora in Siberia: Speaking pragmatically, mission work always brings financial losses for the church, but we do not go to collect offerings. We go to proclaim the Word. The worldly considerations and calculations of gains and losses, financial, or in terms of numerical bragging rights, do not enter the picture in evangelism that is done out of love for the lost. If we were to spend a million dollars and not one member joins the congregation, it is not for us to call it a success or a failure. The Word of God does not return empty. “We go to proclaim the Word.” - and to do so faithfully. The rest is up to God. Our boast is not in “how many we worship” or the balance sheet of our latest building project. Our boast is in Christ our Lord. We must strive to replace our lust with love. And true love is not concerned with such details as numbers, personal vainglory, prestige, or impressiveness in the eyes of the world.

A Tale of Two Synods When someone posted the above video of the Texas District that was shown at the Texas District Convention, I responded on social media in a tongue-in-cheek manner, saying that Lutherans would do well to have such polished productions as this obviously non-denominational presentation. I thought about responding here at Gottesblog with satire, sarcasm, and gallows humor. After all, the jokes do just write themselves. The Texas District logo not only appears to depict three martinis, they get increasingly out of proportion and dizzying as you navigate from the first to the third. This could not have been by accident. Some graphic designer was obviously being cheeky. For in a very real sense, this illustrates a practical way to deal with the district - especially at convention. Although the genuine Texas beverage might be a 64 ounce bucket of margaritas, I don't know how well that would translate to a logo. So the three-martini motif will just have to do. I thought about comparing the entertainment-based music and emotional imagery in this video - rooted in the spoken word of vague non-sequiturs instead of the incarnational reality of Christ coming to us to forgive us and transform us for eternity by means of His physical presence. And this is manifest not only in His historic enfleshment, His birth, cross, death, and resurrection, but also in His ongoing sacramental presence with us in the miracles of Holy Baptism and the Holy Eucharist - two themes that, though central to the faith, are pushed to the margins in this video. Instead, this objective ground of faith is jettisoned in favor of emotion and slick production. In this, the comparison to the Texas-sized Neo-Evangelical megachurches of the highways and byways of the Lonestar State - where indeed everything is Bigger - is unavoidable. It is no accident that the Reverend Father Joel Osteen is a Texas pastor with a Texas-sized church that is the envy of Church Growth Movement moguls everywhere. Indeed, the lust of our baby-boomer CGM experts for Bigness and the reduction of individual human souls to a Big number in a ledger or on an annual statistics form is insatiable. No Cialis needed for this passion. I thought about performing a Rick-roll-like trick by inviting my reader to click on the link to the Texas District highlights, but replace it with the magnificent satirical video called “Contemporvent” or perhaps “The Worship Song Song.” Both make the point well. I also thought about all the angles I could play because it is Texas. And I do love Texas. I love the history and heritage, the independent streak of the people, the sense of Bigness in everything, a zest for life, the unique foods and cultures and byways. Texas is a quintessential part of the South, which I hold dear. And Texas is (along with South Carolina) a state where you are just as likely to see the state flag as the US flag - and it may well even be flying on a pole of the same height as Old Glory. It is a state where people, following the observation of President Obama, “cling to their guns” and “religion,” not to mention to their Whataburger, beef brisket barbecue, and big honking belt buckles. When I once traveled to Texas on business in my former life a long time ago, being on a company per diem, I ate a one-pound T-bone for lunch, and a two-pound T-bone for supper. You can get away with such things when you're in your twenties. I also bought myself some cowboy boots. I did not buy a cowboy hat, but did wear my boots up north. My Texan friend who lives in North Carolina always brought his pregnant wife to Texas to give birth many times in the Lone Star State, thus assuring the transmission of his Republic of Texas citizenship to posterity. And I think that is a good and noble thing. It is part of what makes Texas unique. These delightful quirks of Texas and Texans could have provided fodder for explaining the quirkiness of the LCMS in the Republic. Lutheranism has a long history in Texas - both in its German and Slovak heritages. But sadly, there is nothing endearing in the modern context about jettisoning the liturgy and our rich theology that are truly evangelical, and trading them for the pottage of non-denominational Christianity. Besides, those accents in the video suggest that there is a lot of carpetbagging going on. But after considering all of these angles, I decided to take a different tack. I'm still a big fan of dark humor and throwing stones at the dragon, for if nothing else, it breaks up the monotony, and sometimes gets other guys hurling a pebble or two. And who knows, there might even be a David out there whose stone hits the beast in the right spot. And even if it doesn't put the monster out of our Missouri, the encounter could end up in a viral Steve Inman video for entertainment purposes. And that's not for nothin'. But there is also something very serious and sad about this video. It shows that Pietism is still very much alive and well in our synod: the ginning up of emotion and the downplaying of the sacraments, the transformation of worship into entertainment instead of the Church's timeless participation in the eternal liturgy that binds heaven and earth together - that unites the Church Militant with the Church Triumphant, offering a sacrifice of praise to our Lord Jesus Christ, who is the sacrificial Lamb whose blood saves us and who breathes the Holy Spirit, the Lord and Giver of Life, into us. And this is not a metaphor, but rather a flesh-and-blood reality by means of the ongoing miracle of God performing signs and wonders in our midst because His Word is still sounding forth, still creating, still redeeming, still sanctifying - still reconstituting the universe, and still drawing us into the incense-filled inner-sanctum of the very throne-room of God, where Isaiah once lay prostrate in fear, but where he was comforted by the purification delivered to his lips by a messenger bearing a burning coal from the holy altar. Of course, to the Pietist, this is just boring stuff from an old book. That's our grandfather's church. To them, we need music, really exciting, awesome, fist-pumping, epic music - guitars and drums and emoting vocalists and a guy running a sound-board. And that music should be repetitive, it should cause one's heart to skip a beat, it should tug at the heartstrings, it should induce dopamine so that a proper decision for Christ can be made. It should be the kind of music that fills the modular interlocking church seats the same way that stadiums are filled - thus also paying homage to the CGM Fetish of Bigness. This is Texas, after all. According to Pietism, we need pastors dressed just like us, who are excitable, who are dynamic, who are not stuffy and reverent and catholic. We need awesome vision-casting, leadership, leadership, leadership, and apps. We need high-tech. We need screens and PowerPoint. We need passion and programs and fun. Did I mention excitable pastors? We need to use the word “amazing” a lot - and new turns of phrase, like “on ramps for Jesus” (which is perhaps a Texas response to Oklahoman Carrie Underwood's “Jesus Take the Wheel”). We need to de-emphasize “what goes on in these four walls” and focus on drawing people into the church from the world by not only going into the world, but by looking like the world. The centrality of the Sacrament and the traditional liturgy really just get in the way of being “missional.” The video had a lot to say about mission work, but it lacked authenticity. It just looked like well-heeled Texas suburbanites getting together with other well-heeled Texas suburbanites for brisket and music. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but that's not really “missions.” Being missional is a big buzzword, but real mission work doesn't much resemble watching NFL games while scooping peanuts from a tin bucket at a Texas Roadhouse. One fellow brought up the topic of Christian worship during communism and compared it to using Zoom during the pandemic. As the kids say, “Yeah, no.” In fact, authentic Lutheran mission work is being done in the former Soviet Union. Here is a video showing how this missionary endeavor is carried out in Siberia, and how it is done in an authentically Lutheran way: Note the Christological and sacramental focus of Siberian mission work. (Let's just keep this between us girls, but Siberia is even bigger than Texas). As a bonus, here is a video of Siberian Bishop Vsevolod Lytkin speaking at a faithful Texas congregation, Faith Lutheran Church in Plano. This is quite the contrast to the Texas District video of the Cult of Bigness and the desire to adopt Neo-Evangelical worship. Sadly, I often hear from faithful confessional Lutherans, seeking authentic Lutheran worship using the hymnal, who drive sometimes up to a hundred miles on Sunday morning, passing a wasteland of non-liturgical LCMS congregations, all in order to find a church that is liturgical, confessional, and reverent. It is a huge sacrifice, but it is worth it - especially to young families who want their children learning the catechism and being formed by the miraculous presence of Christ instead of being molded by vacuous entertainment. Sometimes, people have to face hard choices of either finding a Wisconsin Synod congregation (and promising to break prayer fellowship with the rest of the family and be subjected to a low view of the office of the ministry), or even attending Masses of a continuing Anglican tradition and forgoing the Holy Sacrament for a while. As I noted earlier, this desert of decent LCMS congregations in some places has led some of our laity - often young families with children - to physically move to where the liturgical parishes are. As my colleague Fr. David Petersen advises, there is another option: to start a new church. We need faithful lay people to consider such a drastic step - even if it means foregoing the Bigness and suburban wealth of the Texas-sized LCMS church up the road. For this isn't about everything being Bigger - in Texas or elsewhere - it is about fidelity to Word and Sacrament, in doctrine and ceremonies. It is about teaching the people what they need to know about Christ. And even Osteen's Texas megachurch began very small - as did most of our LCMS church plants. In hostile districts, a confessional and liturgical congregation may well get snubbed by the districtocracy, even as money flows like the mighty Mississippi to church plants that downplay authentic Lutheranism and instead employ gimmicks. But remember, that the confession of the “one holy catholic and apostolic church” is located within the third article of the Creed - as the Holy Spirit is the “Lord and giver of life.” It is not mammon or district bureaucracy that quickens the church. It is not gimmicks or marketing that grows the church. For God Himself “has brought down the mighty from their thrones and exalted those of humble estate.” Man does not live by District alone, and in fact, in our Lutheran tradition, both its history and its confessional writings, church bureaucracy is sometimes a hindrance to the Gospel. And when it is, it is best ignored. Certainly, our sixteenth century ancestors, who were attacked and harried by the worldwide, rich, and powerful church bureaucracy of the day, knew what it was to oppose them and stand as a “little flock” being implored to “fear not the foe.” The adoption of Neo-Evangelical practices indeed leads to Neo-Evangelical doctrine. Lex Ordandi, Lex Credendi is not just a tee-shirt slogan for seminarians and geeky pastors. It is an ancient and wise observation that bears out our Lutheran forbears' retention of the ancient ceremonies rather than throwing caution to the wind in search of something new. That is why Article 24 begins with the bold statement: Falsely are our churches accused of abolishing the Mass; for the Mass is retained among us, and celebrated with the highest reverence. Nearly all the usual ceremonies are also preserved, save that the parts sung in Latin are interspersed here and there with German hymns, which have been added to teach the people. For ceremonies are needed to this end alone that the unlearned be taught [what they need to know of Christ]. ~ AC 24:1-4a One thing that is hammered home by this video is that we are two synods (at least). Can you even imagine one of the pastors in the above video standing in the pulpit and reading the above quote from our confessions to his parishioners? Or how about the Texas District President reminding his congregations that they are committed to this confession. We can lie to ourselves that we are actually united as a synod. It just isn't so. There is no way that I would visit and commune at the kinds of LCMS churches shown in this video. Nor would my parishioners. They would be scandalized. And there is no way that most of those folks would ever commune from my hand at the altar that I serve. We have a paper fellowship, at best, and a tenuous unity and koinonia based not on doctrine and ceremonies, but on a common bureaucracy and shared employment benefits. And as more and more congregations jettison Concordia Plan Services, even that link is being weakened. In some cases, the only thing holding the synod together is a sense of nostalgia and branding. The Rev. Prof. Kurt Marquart of blessed memory suggested that we need a divorce in our synod. That would certainly be more honest than what we have now. And as painful as “The Walkout” and the subsequent breakup of the LCMS was in the 1970s, it was the honest thing to do. But maybe there is another way that we could order ourselves more honestly. Perhaps what we need is to abolish the districts and circuits as they exist (as they reflect 19th century technological limitations). But why must our districts be geographical today? Why not reorder ourselves according to what we have in common - especially in matters of worship. And if we have two or three, or even five or six, subdivisions of synod, so what? We currently have two non-geographical districts. We could have non-geographical “districts” where there is genuine agreement in doctrine and practice, and we could all keep the name and the benefits package. And if, down the road, it would be better to actually cut our ties, it would be easier to do in such a system. For right now what we have is not unlike what we have in the United States. Instead of federalism, we now have nationalism. And so US elections become a “winner take all” endeavor. And the losing side, which is typically very near fifty percent of the population - is held hostage to the faction that is bigger by only a percent or two (if that). Instead, we could decentralize our synod and let congregations have closer ties with other congregations that share their doctrine and practice - not unlike the situation in 19th century America, where small synods went into fellowship with one another. One “district” may specify that only the ordo and hymns in the hymnal may be used. Another “district” may make it all optional. Yet another “district” might compile its own requirements as to what is permissible. Our “district” conventions would be much less the way of power struggles, and the Divine Services at the same would not be places of protest, either against the services with guitars and streamers, or with chasubles and incense. Such a scheme would provide homogeneity in matters of doctrine and practice, while allowing the synod branding and employment benefits to be shared by all. In such a structure, synod would not dictate from above, and “districts” could recognize fellowship with other “districts” based on their own criteria. There are certainly dangers in such a polity. And there are likely unintended consequences. But what we have now is not working. We are engaging in a Mister Rogers style Land of Make-Believe fantasy that we are not in a state of impaired fellowship, and we are not involved in a power struggle between at least two opposing factions. By decentralizing the conflict, we can encourage church plants by “districts” without regard to geography, and our “district” mission funds could actually go to new congregations that reflect our confession and worship - whether Pietistic or confessional, whether normed by guitar or organ. For what we have now is 35 civil wars and games of one-upsmanship - where the winners are determined by political means: running for office, navigating parliamentary procedure, and engaging in backroom arm-twisting of the kind we see in the secular political world. At any rate, though we in The Gottesdienst Crowd are often marginalized and mocked by our Bigger brethren in synod (and sometimes that is a matter of the waistline and not only the waste-land), though our churches are generally smaller and often face financial struggles, let us not lose heart. Let us continue to be normed by the Bible and the Book of Concord, and let us continue to confess in Word and deed not only what Jesus has done for us, but what He continues to do for us in the Divine Service, where He comes to us in a literal and miraculous way that needs no distraction by entertainment or some Big New Awesomer Way of Doing Church. We don't need a new way of doing church. We need Jesus. We don't need entertainment. We need authentic worship. We don't need gimmicks. We need faith. And for you, dear reader, both layman and pastor, the following video (Have you seen the video?), produced by Gottesdienst, thanks to a grant from the LCMS, is an example of how “ceremonies teach the people what they need to know about Christ,” and how our bureaucracy can indeed teach the ceremonies to the pastors and laity alike. Instead of “contemporvence” grounded in entertainment, you will find reverence grounded in the reality that Jesus continues to join us in the miracle of the Holy Sacrament. And that reality is even bigger than Texas.  

I compare four definitions of what it means to be an Evangelical, discuss the Church Growth Movement with Jeff Porte, Lead Pastor of Centerpoint Church in Kalamazoo, and talk about Christian political involvement with R. J. Morelli, Pastor of Temple Baptist Church in Kalamazoo. Then I close out season 1 by summing up where I personally stand in the religious maze.For more information visit https://www.religiousmaze.org NOTES Centerpoint Church of Kalamazoo, Michigan. https://www.centerpointkzoo.org/ Full Interview with Pastor Porte. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKXxJROmTeU Temple Baptist Church of Kalamazoo, Michigan. https://www.templebaptist-kalamazoo.org/ Full Interview with Pastor Morelli. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVIChCC2Qwo Bryan E-book “The Gospel-Shaped Heart.” https://www.religiousmaze.org/teaching/gsheart

Rapp Report 109 Dr. Philip Attebery is the Dean at Baptist Missionary Association Theological Seminary. He has written on discipleship and served in youth ministry. Andrew and Philip talk about why discipleship matters and why it is important. Discipleship is a missing element of the American church. They discuss the difference between the Church Growth Movement and a healthy church. Dr. Atterbery was involved in writing a series of manuals to train people to disciple others call the DiscipleWay. This is a tool to teach people to teach others. DiscipleWay is a leadership training to equip people to equip others. Andrew and Philip discuss a seminary education and its importance. As the Dean, he explains his role there at BMA seminary. If you are interested in attending a seminary check out https://www.bmats.edu. BMA offers online degrees and named the most affordable seminary in 2018. Join a G3 Expository Preaching Workshop in your area   Enter the Christian Podcast Community contest This podcast is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and all our resources strivingforeternity.org Listen to other podcasts on the Christian Podcast Community: ChristianPodcastCommunity.org Support Striving for Eternity at http://StrivingForEternity.org/donate Please review us on iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rapp-report/id1353293537 Give us your feedback, email us info@StrivingForEternity.org Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/StrivingForEternity Join the conversation in our Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/326999827369497 Watch subscribe to us on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/StrivingForEternity Get the book What Do They Believe at http://WhatDoTheyBelieve.com Get the book What Do We Believe at http://WhatDoWeBelieveBook.com

Rapp Report 109 Dr. Philip Attebery is the Dean at Baptist Missionary Association Theological Seminary. He has written on discipleship and served in youth ministry. Andrew and Philip talk about why discipleship matters and why it is important. Discipleship is a missing element of the American church. They discuss the difference between the Church Growth Movement and a healthy church. Dr. Atterbery was involved in writing a series of manuals to train people to disciple others call the DiscipleWay. This is a tool to teach people to teach others. DiscipleWay is a leadership training to equip people to equip others. Andrew and Philip discuss a seminary education and its importance. As the Dean, he explains his role there at BMA seminary. If you are interested in attending a seminary check out https://www.bmats.edu. BMA offers online degrees and named the most affordable seminary in 2018. Join a G3 Expository Preaching Workshop in your area   Enter the Christian Podcast Community contest This podcast is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and all our resources strivingforeternity.org Listen to other podcasts on the Christian Podcast Community: ChristianPodcastCommunity.org Support Striving for Eternity at http://StrivingForEternity.org/donate Please review us on iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rapp-report/id1353293537 Give us your feedback, email us info@StrivingForEternity.org Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/StrivingForEternity Join the conversation in our Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/326999827369497 Watch subscribe to us on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/StrivingForEternity Get the book What Do They Believe at http://WhatDoTheyBelieve.com Get the book What Do We Believe at http://WhatDoWeBelieveBook.com

Rapp Report 109 Dr. Philip Attebery is the Dean at Baptist Missionary Association Theological Seminary. He has written on discipleship and served in youth ministry. Andrew and Philip talk about why discipleship matters and why it is important. Discipleship is a missing element of the American church. They discuss the difference between the Church Growth Movement and a healthy church. Dr. Atterbery was involved in writing a series of manuals to train people to disciple others call the DiscipleWay. This is a tool to teach people to teach others. DiscipleWay is a leadership training to equip people to equip others. Andrew and Philip discuss a seminary education and its importance. As the Dean, he explains his role there at BMA seminary. If you are interested in attending a seminary check out https://www.bmats.edu. BMA offers online degrees and named the most affordable seminary in 2018. Join a G3 Expository Preaching Workshop in your area   Enter the Christian Podcast Community contest This podcast is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and all our resources strivingforeternity.org Listen to other podcasts on the Christian Podcast Community: ChristianPodcastCommunity.org Support Striving for Eternity at http://StrivingForEternity.org/donate Please review us on iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rapp-report/id1353293537 Give us your feedback, email us info@StrivingForEternity.org Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/StrivingForEternity Join the conversation in our Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/326999827369497 Watch subscribe to us on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/StrivingForEternity Get the book What Do They Believe at http://WhatDoTheyBelieve.com Get the book What Do We Believe at http://WhatDoWeBelieveBook.com

Rapp Report 109 Dr. Philip Attebery is the Dean at Baptist Missionary Association Theological Seminary. He has written on discipleship and served in youth ministry. Andrew and Philip talk about why discipleship matters and why it is important. Discipleship is a missing element of the American church. They discuss the difference between the Church Growth Movement and a healthy church. Dr. Atterbery was involved in writing a series of manuals to train people to disciple others call the DiscipleWay. This is a tool to teach people to teach others. DiscipleWay is a leadership training to equip people to equip others. Andrew and Philip discuss a seminary education and its importance. As the Dean, he explains his role there at BMA seminary. If you are interested in attending a seminary check out https://www.bmats.edu. BMA offers online degrees and named the most affordable seminary in 2018. Join a G3 Expository Preaching Workshop in your area   Enter the Christian Podcast Community contest This podcast is a ministry of Striving for Eternity and all our resources strivingforeternity.org Listen to other podcasts on the Christian Podcast Community: ChristianPodcastCommunity.org Support Striving for Eternity at http://StrivingForEternity.org/donate Please review us on iTunes http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/rapp-report/id1353293537 Give us your feedback, email us info@StrivingForEternity.org Like us on Facebook at http://www.facebook.com/StrivingForEternity Join the conversation in our Facebook group at http://www.facebook.com/groups/326999827369497 Watch subscribe to us on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/user/StrivingForEternity Get the book What Do They Believe at http://WhatDoTheyBelieve.com Get the book What Do We Believe at http://WhatDoWeBelieveBook.com

In this sermon, Pastor Schwertley expounds upon Paul's message to the Ephesian elders. What it means to live a Christian life, the Church Growth Movement, and more is discussed in this particular sermon.

While the modern Church Growth Movement is focusing on World Peace, it is our imperative to realize Jesus did not come for that end. Listen in on His real purpose.

On today’s walk we talk about the problems with the Church Growth movement and why it usually results in big churches that are devoid of Christian behavior.

On today's show Doug talks about why the church growth movement needs to die. This is a strong, provocative show about some of the fundamental problems with a movement that is not growing the church or bringing more leaders into the harvest field. Doug pours out his heart calling for a better way to engage a giant problem in the American church. This show will most likely offend and encourage.

  Join us Wednesday July 26th for great conversation on whats happening in the world of Christianity and the local church as we discuss this great article "10 Roadblocks to Church Revitalization" http://churchleaders.com/pastors/pastor-articles/306949-10-roadblocks-church-revitalization-thom-rainer.html Pastor Micheal Henderson Joins Dana at the desk The conversation starts at Noon.... don't miss it!!!!! A talk show that "breaks the chains off the norm" to promote a realistic conversation with God and his people. You can also watch the simulcast on Ustream at http://www.ustream.tv/…/taking-the-limits-off-with-dana-dev… or on Facebook Live on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/TTLORADIO/ Follow “Taking The Limits Off” on Twitter @TTLORadio We are now on INSTAGRAM, follow us TTLORadio

Date:  June 14, 2015Speaker:  Rev. Dr. Matthew RichardText:  Make 4:26-34Context:  Sermon at Zion Lutheran Church of Gwinner, NDManuscript:  CLICK HERE

Our passage backtracks in time to the scattering of believers after the persecution of Stephen. It is God who expands His Church. Compare God’s progress report on the expansion of His early Church to today’s Church Growth Movement and the compromises necessary to post growing numbers as an indication of success. Is it human methodology or transforming Truth that grows God’s Church? Learn the history of Phoenicia, Cyprus and Antioch where the Jewish believers fled and evangelized to the Jews. Follow Barnabas, the encourager, sent from Jerusalem to Antioch where he summons Paul for help and where the followers of Christ were first called Christians. See how the Church supports its own when Jerusalem suffers famine. Understand the focus of real growth in God’s plan for His Church. Hear an answer to claims of those who have “been to heaven and back” and write a book about it.

. JAMES SUNDQUIST  The "Church Growth Movement" which has become known as the Purpose Driven Church, is primarily the world outreach of Willow Creek Church in Chicago and Saddleback Church in California. The touted religious leader of this paradigm religious earthquake is Rick Warren of Saddleback  James Sundquist has written a number of documentaries exposing the Purpose Driven Church and Church Growth Movement teachings and practices; and the infiltration of Carl Jung and Psychology into the church in which he demonstrates these to be a clear and present danger to the church.

Pastor Hal Mayer

Introduction: The Weak and the Strong This morning we're looking at Romans 15:1-3, and we're looking here at the issue of how the strong should minister to the weak. Two of the greatest ideological enemies, of Christianity in the 20th century, were communism and Darwinism and both parted company with Christianity on the issue of how the strong should relate to the weak. First communism in 1875, German philosopher Karl Marx summed up the communist ideology with this phrase, "from each according to his ability to each according to his need". What people don't realize is how rooted in Christianity that idea is. One professor at Southeastern called communism a Christian cult or heresy, and it is with God removed. The ethos of Christianity of taking from the strong and giving to the weak. The only problem is, it was coercive enforced by the government, not given freely. From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. Provision and Sharing in the Old Testament You see at first in the time of the Exodus, when the manna came, bread from heaven laying all over the ground. How easy would that be? Those of you struggling with your jobs, you don't have to do it, you just go out and collect dinner from the ground. Of course, it's the same for 40 years, but it was still an open provision of God, and God commanded that they go out and collect as much as they needed just for the day. And it says in Exodus 16, "This is what the Lord has commanded, 'each one is to gather as much as he needs. Take an omer for each person that you have in your tent.' And the Israelites did as they were told, some gathered much and some gathered little. And when they measured it by the omer, he who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little." The idea is this, the young strapping Israelite men, would go out and collect far more than they needed and they could bring it back to grandma or grandpa, the weak in the tent. And there would be plenty in the tent for everybody, they didn't need to worry about tomorrow for God will provide again tomorrow. And so, he who gathered much didn't hoard it. They didn't keep it for themselves, but they used it freely and openly for the weak in their own tents and the weak in the community, and so the strong ministered to the weak, they gathered as much as everyone needed, and the next day there was more provision. And so he who gathered much did not have too much, and he who gathered little did not have too little. Provision and Sharing in the New Testament Church Paul used the same principle in urging the Corinthians financially. As he said, "God has been abundant to you and given you more than you need. The saints in Jerusalem, or the church at Jerusalem, they don't have enough. And so there should be equality. He who gathers much, shouldn't have too much, and he gathers little should not have too little." But the basic idea is that the strong are using their strength, the resources that God has given them in service of those that don't have, in service of those that are weak. And so, we get a glimpse into the life of the early church, their life together. So beautiful in Acts 2:44 and 45. "All the believers were together and had everything in common, selling their possessions and goods they gave to anyone as he had need." Now, some people say that sounds like communism. The difference is they wanted to, they delighted to do it. They did it because they wanted to build up the strong or the weak and make them strong, that they wanted to take their needs, whatever they had and make them available to those that had needs. It was voluntary. So also in Acts 4:32, "All the believers were one in heart and mind." See that's different than communism. There it's forced on you or you going to jail if you resist. But there, they said, We wanted to do it. They were one in heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they shared everything they had. And Paul set the example on how the strong should be ministering to the weak. In his farewell address to the Ephesian elders, he said, "You yourselves know that these hands of mine have supplied my own needs and the needs of my companions. In everything I did, I showed you that by this kind of hard work we must help the weak, remembering the words the Lord Jesus himself has said: 'It is more blessed to give than to receive.'" So what is the context of this teaching in Romans 15:1-3, on the strong and the weak. Well it's in the Book of Romans and in 11 chapters Paul lays out that magnificent doctrine, the Gospel of our salvation, whereby sinners like us can be made just in the sight of God, and then can be sanctified by the ministry of the Spirit for the rest of our lives until at last we are glorified, and fully saved in his presence. Sin no longer has any touch on us, we will be in redeemed bodies, we will be living in a new heaven a new earth, the full glorious salvation. "Oh, the depth of the riches, the wisdom, and the knowledge of God. How unsearchable his judgments Paul says, and his path beyond tracing out." Romans 1-11, the glorious doctrine of our salvation. Then Romans 12-16 is the application. How then shall we live? And we've been seeing again and again the issue is how Christians should be treating other people. There's a horizontal aspect here. How we should be dealing with those outside the church, how we should be dealing with those inside the church, and all of it to the glory of God. Now, as we've been looking at Romans 14, and now into chapter 15, it's amazing, we will find that Paul gives almost a chapter and a half to the issue of how strong faith-filled understanding Christians should deal with those who haven't arrived yet, on the issue of disputable matters, and his yearning is to keep the church united. A spirit-filled, holy fruitful church, not fracturing, not dividing or fragmenting, nor rumbling into different factions and groups that have different views on debatable issues. But rather that they should stay together. And why? Because this is the ordained instrument of Almighty God for the destruction of Satan's empire and Satan would love nothing better than infiltrate the local church and get it squabbling and bickering on debatable issues, so that they cannot do the glorious ministry God has in mind for them to do. And so we have this church at Rome. The church at Rome was a mixed church. There were Jews and Gentiles, both believing in Christ, both loving Christ. But they were having a hard time it seems, reading between the lines, having a hard time staying together. The issue with the laws of Moses, the Jewish lifestyle, the Jewish culture and the ceremonial laws. How much was that going to be part of the church's life? And Paul desires the strong Christians to help the weak, and not allow any, not one of Christ's precious ones to slip through the cracks. There they were in Rome, in the imperial city surrounded by all the trappings of worldly power and success, surrounded by the imperial majesty of Rome, surrounded by paganism, and wickedness. And there were the Jews with the lure always to go back to the synagogue, the old covenant lifestyle. And so there were forces pulling on that church to just crumble and fall back into what they had been before. It would have been so easy for this fragile coalition of Jew and gentile church to fragment and for pieces of the crumbling structure to fall away and be lost forever. And so he's writing about the issue of the strong and the weak. In Romans 15:1, he says, "We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves." I. Darwinism vs. Christianity: The Strong and the Weak Now, that second great attack on Christianity was Darwinism. You've heard of the slogan connected with Darwinism, the survival of the fittest. It's not something that you find in the origin of the species is something rather that British economist Charles Spencer, after reading Darwin's work came to. He came to understand this concept of the survival of the fittest. And Darwin embraced it. He thought the law of natural selection, a little hard to grab on to, and so that was a good slogan, a fit slogan for his views. The survival of the fittest. Now this economist Spencer apply the idea to all areas of life, but especially to his area, economics. And what he was saying is, in the principal of economics companies which offer better goods and services survive better in the marketplace and tend to accumulate an ever-growing market share, poorly adapting companies will be forced out by better adapting ones. They will be killed by the competition. Have you seen some of those ads in which there are people sitting around as dinosaurs? They're literally dinosaurs. And the idea is, if you don't stay with the program technologically, you will become obsolete. It's the idea of the survival of the fittest, it's a dog-eat-dog world out there. The powerful and the strong rip to shred the weak and the infirm, and leave them for dead. It's a brutal world out there, the brutal world of nature. Alfred, Lord Tennyson when he was writing some poems was grieving over the early death of a friend, a young man, and he was grieving over it. And he was talking about and used a very famous expression, talking about nature red in tooth and claw. There's a sense of viciousness out there in the world, the strong devour of the weak. Evolutionary thinking that links humanity to brutal domination of the weak at every level. A little boy torments a spider, he in turn is tormented by his bigger brother. They in turn perhaps abused by their parents, maybe the wife abused by the husband. At societal levels, one society is stronger economically, more powerful militarily, they're going to invade and start building an empire and so it is in the world, the strong devour the weak. They crush them and destroy them. The Vision of Daniel and World History And so, Daniel in Daniel 7 sees a vision of all of world history, and he looks out and he sees the great sea and the Four Winds tormenting the surface of the sea, churning it up. And up out of the sea, come four great beasts and these are empires and the fourth of those beasts we interpret to be Rome. And up it came out of the ocean, a great beast. Daniel 7:7. After that, in my vision at night, I looked and there before me was a fourth beast terrifying and frightening and very powerful. It had large iron teeth, it crushed and devoured its victims and trampled under foot whatever was left. That was Rome. And that's what these people lived with, that's what they understood, the power that was Rome. It was a beast, and at the center of it all was the city of Rome. Rome was the eternal picture of might makes right, of the beast of government crushing and devouring whatever is weak. And so the world for 500 to 1000 years, East and West lay trembling in chains at the feet of this beast. That's what the world does with its strength, that's what the world does with its power. It uses it to dominate the weak. That is natural my friends, but God is calling the church to be supernatural. God is calling the church to look at strength and weakness very differently. And so we have to look at Romans 15:1-3 as a call from God Almighty to the church to think differently about power and about strength. Christian obligation then is the strong need to bear the weak. Now from the very beginning, God intended that we, the human race dominating because of our intelligence, not because of our physical strength, there are animals stronger than us. The Powerful are Called to Protect the Weak, not Dominate But because we are created in the image of God, he intended us to take a position over the physical creation similar to his own. We create in the image of God, and so God called on Adam to serve and protect the Garden of Eden. Genesis 2:15 in the Hebrew, that's what he's there to do. He's to help the garden be everything it can be. To put his strength and his power at the disposition of physical creation, and enhance and nurture it, not destroy it. And this is exactly how God is with us, isn't it? The Almighty God omnipotent creator and what does he do with his power except serve us? I love it in Isaiah 40, probably one of my favorite chapters in the Old Testament. What an incredible chapter, in Isaiah 40:10-12, it says, "See, the sovereign Lord comes with power, and his arm rules for him. Behold, his reward is with him and his recompense accompanies him." That's the almighty power of God, omnipotence on the move, that's God. But the very next verse says this, "he tends his flock like a shepherd. He gathers the lambs in his arms and carries them close to his heart. He gently leads those that have young." The tenderness of God, it's harnessed power applied to the benefit of his people. And then the very next verse, we go back to omnipotence, "who has marked off, measured the waters in the hollow of his hand, and with the breadth of his hand marked off the heavens? Who has held the dust of the earth in a basket or weigh the mountains and the scales or the hills in the balance." This is amazing, here's almighty, omnipotent God and he's carrying you gently like a lamb in his arms, that's the way God is. So Paul is teaching in line with the consistent pattern of the Bible, strength and power are meant to serve and to protect the weak not to dominate. And so we have a developed... In the Bible, a developed theology of strength and weakness. The word weakness here, that's in this verse, has a powerful heritage in the New Testament. Frequently translated sickness or frailty, it relates to humanity and sin, all the effects of sin on us. All human beings are weak and sick because of sin. Jesus said, "It's not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick, I'm not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance." And it says so beautifully in Romans 5:6. "You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly." Do you think of yourself today as mighty and strong and powerful? Well you're not. You're not. And neither am I. We were at one time powerless, and when we were powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. That's what it says, same word. This is precisely why Christ came into the world to carry our weaknesses. The same Greek word is used in Matthew 8:16, 17, speaking of Jesus' miraculous ministry. When evening came, it says many who were demon-possessed were brought to him and he drove out the spirits with a word and healed all the sick. That word sick is the same one we're dealing with here. This was to fulfill what was spoken through the prophet, Isaiah, he took up our infirmities and carried our diseases. Do you see that the same idea of carrying of picking it up and carrying it? "We who are strong ought to bear the frailties of the weak and not to please ourselves." That's the picture of Christ, the very thing he did. Jesus' healing ministry was therefore a visible picture of his spiritual work of salvation from the weakness and disease of sin, itself. The blind cannot see, the deaf cannot hear, the mute cannot speak, the lame cannot walk, the dead cannot do anything. The picture of our inability and weakness, that's what Jesus chose for the canvas on which he's painting his omnipotence, he could have done all kinds of miracles, but instead it's in the context of our weakness, his power is made perfect. And so he heals. Now, even after we've come to faith in Christ, we're still weak aren't we? Anyone want to come up and testify otherwise? You want to come up and say I'm mighty and strong and have no need of Christ any longer, I can make it from here. How long do you think you'd last? But the demons come. I don't need anything from God, I'm fine, whatever the devil wants to do to me, I can make it from here. You really want to say that we are still frail and weak even still, we still have the flesh, don't we? There's that fleshly yearning after wickedness, it's still in us. And Christ is our merciful and faithful high priest and he went through a bodily life so he could help us in our weakness. He could intercede for us and point the way to holiness. Someday however, oh, isn't someday a wonderful day for a Christian? Someday we'll be free from all weakness. That which is sown in weakness will be raised in power and we'll be done forever with sin. We'll be done forever with temptation. What a glorious thing that is. In the meantime, it seems good for us to know how weak we are. Don't you think? Doesn't it seem good for us to be reminded consistently how weak we are? And so the apostle Paul, even makes a whole theology of weakness in 2 Corinthians, in 12:10, he says, "When I'm weak then I'm strong." You know why? Because when I'm weak then I realize I can't do it on my own. I must have Christ, I'm totally dependent on him, he's the vine I'm the branch, I must have him. "When I'm weak then I'm strong." What is Paul saying in Romans 15:1-3? But let's make it collective. When we are weak, then we're strong. When we bring our weaknesses together, and somebody else' strength compensates for somebody else' weakness. The body is bound together. But if the strong despise the weak and say, "You can't carry my shoes, I can't believe you don't have the New Covenant figured out by now. Why don't you come back when you get it figured out. In the meantime, we're moving on." Oh, it will fragment. It will fragment. And how arrogant is it to not realize it's not going to be long before you're the weak one and you need some strong one to come help you. And so Paul is in effect saying, this idea of weakness and strength is to bind the church together. Now who are the strong and weak in this passage, what are we talking about? Well, I think the strong are mature Christians who have fully understood the balance that I was preaching about in Romans 14, who understand Gospel freedom from legalism. They don't need to follow all those rules and regulations, any longer. Not talking about immoral issues, not talking about wickedness, or sin. But we are talking about debatable issues, they've got it, they understand. They know, they have understood the message of Galatians. They understand Gospel freedom. They also understand Gospel purity, they're not lurching off into sin, they're walking holy and godly and upright lives. But Paul is urging them to add a third thing, understand Gospel unity understand it's not enough just for you to be the strong one for you to have a good grasp on those things. What about your brother, what about your sister? Help them, stay with them, don't give up on them, keep them together. That's what he's doing. Now notice Paul includes himself isn't that wonderful? "We who are strong ought to bear with the failings of the week." He's including himself. And that's a reasonable. He was arguing from that perspective in Romans 14, he knows that he can eat anything. He understands the ceremonial law, he wrote the Book of Galatians, he understands freedom, he's including himself in the strong, but he's saying, "We ought to bear with the weak." Not called to merely “put up with” the Weak, but Rather to Carry The Failings of the Weak Now literally, this word "bear with your," it doesn't mean put up with, that's not what we're talking about, "we who are strong not to put up with the failings of the weak." The NIV's translation is a little unhelpful here. There's one little word here that I think ought to be removed. And in other translations it is, in the New American Standard it's not there. Because I think it's a better translation in this case. In Romans 15:1 says, "Now we who are strong ought to bear the weaknesses of those without strength and not just please ourselves." Not bear with, bear them. Pick them up and carry them. That's what it means, carry them. Not bear with. Not put up with. March of 1942, the Japanese Imperial Army was in the process of conquering the Philippines, they captured some 70,000 American and Filipino troops in Bataan and forced them to march through horrendous conditions over 65 miles to a railway depot where they'd have probably one of the most horrific railway rides in history. Was an awful time and it came to be known as the Bataan Death March. The heat was scorching. Many of the soldiers marching had tropical fevers or dysentery. The Japanese guards refused them any water, no water at all. And diseased and weakened man began to stagger, fall behind or collapse in the searing heat. And this only infuriated the Japanese guards more who had no respect for them at all. Japanese soldiers hardly ever surrendered and so they had no respect for a soldier that would surrender. And so for them, as far as they were concerned, they were dead men already. And so if they would stagger or fall out, they would just be bayoneted, immediately. Well, it wasn't long before the soldiers recognized that if a buddy is staggering and weak, you got to hold them up, you got to carry him basically. And so they'd have arm and arm and they would basically drag some people who barely could stand up. Because they knew if they would let him go, they're dead. Are the stakes any less for the church? Are they any less? Do we have any less vicious enemies of the temptations, any less for us, should our concern for each other be any less? We're supposed to strengthen the feeble knees. And the arms that are about to give way it says in the Book of Hebrews. We're supposed to care about each other. Jesus didn't come to save 90% of the elect, my friends. He said that all that the Father gives him will come to him. And of all that come to him, he will lose none, "but raise them all up at the last day." And he includes us in that work. We're supposed to notice how people are doing, it's supposed to matter if somebody's staggering and falling. What's going on in their lives? We're supposed to watch over one another in brotherly love. Who Are the Strong and Weak Here? Now, it's interesting how we play the different roles for each other at different times. Who are the strong and the weak here? Well, probably, the majority of the strong were Gentiles who understood the New Covenant, they understood what Christ had done, they understood the law of Moses, they understood because there really wasn't a big issue for them. "Oh, so I don't need to do all that stuff that I've never really been doing?" Okay, well good, good news, that's wonderful. But what about the Jews? "You mean I don't do that anymore? I've been doing it all my life." What a struggle for them. But what's so interesting is the whole idea of bearing the weak was reversed back in Romans 11. Remember there the analogy of the olive tree and there's a root structure there. And the root structure is Jewish, my friends. Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. And he's talking there to the Gentiles sating, "Look, don't be arrogant about the branches that have been stripped of. If you do, consider this, you [Gentiles] do not support [or 'bear' same Greek word] the root, but the root supports you." And so I began to meditate on this whole thing and now I thought sometimes we play one role and sometimes we play another. And it is arrogant to think you're only ever strong helping these weak people around who just don't seem to get it. If you have that attitude, it's not going to be long before you will need some ministry from a strong person. God will humble you. We are to be together, we are to help each other make it through this world. That's exactly what's going on here. II. A Life of Pleasing God by Pleasing Others And so how do we do that? Well, we do it by living a life of pleasing others. Specifically, pleasing God by pleasing others. Look at these three verses, "We who are strong ought to bear the failings of the weak and not to please ourselves." See the word "please" there? "Each of us should please his neighbor for his good to build them up for even Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, 'the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me.'" So the theme here of these verses is, "Who are you living to please? Who are you seeking to please?" That's what it's about. Now, that brings us into the area of pleasure, the area of pleasure, we're talking now about pleasure. We have a great struggle with pleasure, don't we? We're struggling with it, it's a fight for us. America is a pleasure crazed nation. Industrial Revolution, technological advances created multiple labor-saving devices. One thing Karl Marx said that I found interesting, "A society that makes useful things makes useless people." I found that interesting. And so as technology advances after a while you find yourself with lots of time on your hands. Labor-saving devices produces lots of time. What are you going to do with that? Well, technology has the answer to that too. I find it amazing when younger people can't find a way to get through a beautiful afternoon without doing something electronic. Don't you find that amazing? I remember when I was a kid, there was nothing electronic. Alright? There were things electric, but we weren't allowed to use them. You know, TV and all that. Go outside, it's a beautiful day. But it's a problem for us, not just for the kids, for everybody. As a result, recreation then becomes a purpose in the center of everything. Living for the weekend. Result of this is an attitude of extreme selfishness. Every person relentlessly seeking their own pleasure. And some of this pleasure craze sadly has seeped into the church decades ago. AW Tozer wrote this, "The abuse of harmless things," by that he means lawful things that you're allowed to do. That's a Romans 14 issue. "The abuse of harmless things is the essence of sin. The growth of the amusement phase of human life to such fantastic proportions is a portent, a threat to the souls of modern men. It has been built into a multi-million dollar racket with greater power over human minds and human character than any other educational influence on Earth. For centuries the Church stood solidly against every form of worldly entertainment recognizing it for what it was, a device for wasting time, a refuge from the disturbing voice of conscience, a scheme to divert attention from moral accountability. For this, she got herself abused roundly by the sons of this world. But, of late, she has become tired of the abuse and has given over the struggle. She appears to have decided that if she cannot conquer the great God entertainment she may as well join forces with him and make what use she can of his power. So today we have the astonishing spectacle of millions of dollars being poured into the unholy job of providing earthly entertainment for the so called sons of heaven." AW Tozer, decades ago. What would he say now? There's a whole movement, the Church Growth Movement, of which Willow Creek and their model is leading the way. And if you go to that kind of a church you can find a cappuccino bar, you might find a food court in a church. Can you imagine a food court in a church? But it's there. I was reading about one church and actually went to their website and watched some of their worship service. Granger Community Church in Indiana. Begins with about a five or seven minute rock concert and then after that laser light shows, they give away iPods. This guy, the pastor, walks around with one of those things at a ball game that fires out T-shirts into the crowd. I'm not doing that, it's not going to happen. I don't know what I would hit anyway. Tertullian during the time of Roman persecution said, "The blood of martyrs is seed for the church." Church Growth Movement said, "No, entertainment is seed for the church. That's how it grows." Well, I'm not sure what you're going to grow with that. Are you going to grow people that are really denying themselves, taking up their cross and following Jesus? That's genuine discipleship, genuine conversion. I worry about it both in terms of evangelism and discipleship afterwards. What are we showing to the church? God is not Against Pleasure Now, let's talk about it for a minute. The issue here is first and foremost not about pleasure itself. There's nothing wrong with pleasure itself. May I say to you that God is the ultimate pleasure being in the universe? You may be surprised about that, but did you know that God does everything after his own pleasure? It says in Psalm 1:15, verse 3, "Our God is in heaven, he does whatever pleases him." That means he's pleased about everything he's doing. So pleasure's not wrong. Our God is a God of delight, of joy, of rejoicing, of celebrating. Like when the prodigal son comes back, how many parties did they have in heaven? Lots of people being converted right now. And God is leading the way, there's more joy in the presence of the angels of heaven over one sinner. God's doing the rejoicing. He is the heavenly Father saying, "Quick do this... We got to celebrate." God is a God of pleasure, we should not think he's not. Our own salvation brings him great pleasure. Meditate on that. Luke 12:32, "Fear not little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom." he delights in it, he enjoys saving people. And salvation itself for you and me culminates, Psalm 16 verse 11, "You have made known to me the path of life, you will fill me with joy in your presence, eternal pleasures at the right hand of God." Oh, God is not a God against pleasure, not at all. As a matter of fact it's because he wants you to have real pleasure at his right hand that he wants you to be stripped of all these worldly lusts which do not provide ultimate pleasure. They're a dead end, they kill pleasure in the end. And that's the nature of idolatry, taking a good gift from God and worshipping it so it becomes the center of your life. Romans 12:25, they "worshiped and serve created things more than the Creator who's forever praised, Amen." And so there are repeated warnings in Scripture against giving yourself over to earthly pleasures. It's idolatry. In James 5 it says, "Come now you rich, weep and howl for the miseries that are coming upon you, you have lived on earth in luxury and in pleasure, you have fattened your hearts in a day of slaughter." 2 Timothy 3:4 warns about being lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God. Hebrews 11 talks about Moses who chose to be mistreated along with the people of God rather than to enjoy the pleasures of sin for a short time. And so the solution here is to recognize that God himself is the ultimate pleasure. And all of the good gifts of God can come or go as he pleases. But God is our reward, he is our pearl of great price. He's our reward at the end of the Christian life, God himself. So God's not against pleasure, that's not it. The issue is not pleasure itself. Pleasing Others Is a Higher Priority than Pleasing Ourselves Secondly, the issue here is not pleasing others versus pleasing God. Now that's wrong, it's called being a people pleaser. You know what I'm talking about? Being a people pleaser there is having other people as your audience and you're going horizontal and you're trying to live to please them forgetting what God thinks. That's the danger of legalism by the way. When you start getting into a legalistic lifestyle, it's like, "Hey, somebody noticed what I've done. I was wholly over here. Did you see it? I gave a bunch of money to the poor." There's an announcing with trumpets. It's the whole problem with legalism, it's very horizontal. Your audience is other people. So Paul talked very plainly against this in Galatians 1 verse 10 where he says, "Am I now trying to win the approval of men or of God? Or am I trying to please men? If I were still trying to please men, I would not be a servant of Christ." Now, that's not contradictory of what he's teaching here in Romans 15. That's not the issue either. It's not that we're going to please others at the expense or rather than pleasing God, that's not it. Well, what is it then? Well, the issue is pleasing ourselves rather than pleasing others, that's the issue. The issue is, will you live a life that feeds your own desires to the expense of what it's doing to your brother or sister? That's the question. Selfishness is the enemy of Christian unity that Paul is seeking to destroy here. Christian freedoms can be selfish things, selfish pleasures. And so Paul's calling on Christians to be willing to please others for their sake. Look at verse 2, "Each of us should please his neighbor for his good to build them up." This is a call to deny personal pleasures and freedoms and privileges for the sake of Christian unity. It is the call of the cross. "If anyone would come after me, he must deny himself and take up his cross daily and follow me. For whoever wants to save his life in this world will lose it." It's the Christian life, it's the call of the missionary life. First Corinthians 9:19. Paul says, "Though I am free and belong to no man I make myself a slave to everyone to win as many as possible." You've heard perhaps the story of those Moravian young men in the 18th century who wanted to reach some slaves on a West Indian sugar plantation and willingly voluntarily gave up all their freedoms, sold themselves into slavery and worked alongside these slaves out in the field to win them to Christ. Put that picture in your mind, giving up on pleasing yourself so that you can please others. III. Christ the Ultimate Example Now obviously, Christ is the ultimate example. Christ did not please himself. Look at Verse 3, "For even Christ did not please himself." Christ is the powerful one. We, the weak ones, he, the strong one. Used his strength to help the weak. Christ, the perfect example. Now don't misunderstand, don't think Christ was displeased to save us. God the Father, pleased; Christ disgruntled. Don't get that picture. Actually it says in Psalm 40, "Here I am, I delight to do your will oh God." He says, "My food is to do the will of him who sent me and finish his work." He delighted in it, he delighted in saving us. It says in Hebrews 12:2, "Let us fix our eyes on Jesus, the author and perfecter of our faith, who for the joy set before him endured the cross, scorning its shame and sat down at the right hand of God." He delighted to save us. That's not it and that's not what we're saying here. Don't think of Christ as reluctant or opposed to the will of God, the Father in the salvation world. He delights in it, but above all things he's setting his pleasure aside so that he can please God and please us. That's the point. And he says in John 6, "I've come down from heaven not to do my own will, but to do the will of him who has sent me. And this is the will of God that I shall lose none of all that he has given me, but raise them up at the last day." He was there to do the Father's will. And the culmination of that we see so beautifully in Gethsemane, don't we? When Jesus falls on his face with blood coming off of his face praying with intensity that we cannot even calculate saying, "Father, if it is possible, let this cup be taken from me, yet not what I will, but what you will." Again don't think of Christ as unwilling, but he's setting his own pleasure and his own will aside to serve the father. And notice how it says, "even Christ did not please himself." One of my favorite Christmas songs is, "I wonder as I wander." Ever heard that one? It's a beautiful song, very sweet, sweet song. Came right from, I think, the state, North Carolina. It's a folk song. Beautiful and one of the verses said this, "If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing, star in the sky or bird on the wing. Or of all God's angels in heaven for to sing, he surely could've had it, 'cause he was the king." So if Jesus had come down from heaven and reclined on silk pillows like a Turkish Sultan and demanded that we human beings wait on him hand and foot, he would've deserved it. He deserved it, he's the son of God. But even Christ did not please himself. It's the very same thing that Jesus said, he put the word "even" in there. "Even the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many." Christ did not please himself. Rather he came to serve we who are weak and needy. He could have used his power to serve himself. Like in the desert after fasting 40 days and 40 nights. If you're the son of God, turn these stones into bread. He wouldn't do it. He didn't use his miraculous power to save himself. He didn't get down off the cross when they called them to prove himself. He did not use his miraculous power to please himself, he didn't use his teaching ministry ability to please himself, he was the greatest teacher in history. No one ever spoke the way that that man did. He was spellbinding in his preaching. And what does he do with it? Well, he purposefully teaches things that will offend the vast majority of his hearers so they just go away and stop wasting his time and theirs. In John 6, "I tell you the truth, unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you." Oh boy, can you imagine someone believing... Person taking him aside and saying, "Jesus, you know you've been doing really well up until today. That was bad teaching right there. What are you doing?" Even the disciples, the apostles, they did not understand what he was saying. Jesus didn't please himself for this teaching ministry nor did he please himself when he died on the cross and nor did he please himself even in his resurrection. He came back and gave many convincing proofs to his disciples that he was alive for their benefit, for their sake's. Christ's focus here is accepting abuse meant for God and for God's people. Look at verse 3, "For even Christ did not please himself, but as it is written, the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me." Psalm 69, as it is written, it's clearly a Messianic Psalm with many prophecies about Christ. John 2 quotes this when Jesus was cleansing the temple. And it said, "for zeal for your house has consumed me and the insults of those who insult you have fallen on me." Do you know what the effect of his cleansing of the temple was? Well, at one level, the effect was to get the Jewish mafia, the high priest and his family and all that that were making huge money on the temple concessions. So enraged with Jesus, they wanted to kill him. Did Jesus not know that would happen? No, he knew very well that if he cleansed the temple, the insults of those who insulted God would fall on him and kill him. And not only that, but he sends it out to us. The insults we deserved even from God himself for our sin fall on him, he is our substitute. He dies in our place and takes our abuse. But it doesn't even end there, even for the redeemed, whenever a non-Christian persecutes a Christian, it's him they're persecuting. And so he says, on the road to Damascus, "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" "Who are you, Lord?" "I am Jesus whom you are persecuting." The insults of those who insult you have fallen on me. The unity between the Son and the Father, the unity between the Son and the church, that's the idea. It's getting out of yourself and caring about the glory of God and what's happening to your brothers and sisters in the Body of Christ, that's why he quotes this. Now, what application can we take to this message? IV. Application First, can I urge you to assess yourself on the issue of the strong and the weak? First of all, do you see yourself as weak? Do you see yourself that way? I mean relative to Christ, needy of his ministry every moment. Secondly, when you are strong relative to other believers, are you using your strength to minister to them? Are you using your spiritual gift to build them up? When you see someone discouraged you pat them quick on the back, "Well, pray for you." And off you go. Or do you sit down and invest in their lives? Do you care enough to know what's happening to your brothers and sister spiritually? "We who are strong ought to bear the failings of the weak and not please ourselves." We come now to a time of the Lord's Supper. To me this is a time for us to remember how weak we were apart from Christ. To look backward at what Jesus did on the cross and how he gave his life. This celebration is for Christians. For those who have made a profession of faith in Christ testified to it by water baptism. If you have not come to faith in Christ yet, don't take from the Lord's Supper, but while the Lord Supper's going on, cry out to Christ. He is very merciful, he will save you from your sins. Look to the cross, look to the blood of Christ, look to him and be saved, trust in him. The rest of you who are believers, as you're preparing your hearts, think about how you're living toward the body of Christ. Are you out of fellowship with anyone? Is there a relationship that needs fixing? Are you using your spiritual gifts to build the body of Christ? One of the ideas of the Lord Supper is we all take from the same loaf there's one body together, we are all partakers of Christ. Look horizontally and then look to the future, the time when your weakness will be swallowed up in victory, when Christ will come again and all of his saving work will be finished. Close with me in prayer.