Podcast appearances and mentions of marvin moore

"Like smoke through a keyhole"...That's how University of Oklahoma Coach Barry Switzer described the running style of his All-American runningback Joe Washington.Both Joe and his brother Ken were leaders in vaulting the Port Arthur Lincoln High School Bumblebees to Southeast Texas' dominating high school sports power in the early 1970s.Hear Joe and Ken talk about:Moving from Bay City to Port Arthur,Being raised by and playing football for their father, Texas High School Hall of Fame Coach Joe Washington;Big games played by the Bees in the early 1970s;Some of Joe's and Ken's favorite plays, and keys to their success;Port Arthur Lincoln track legend Robert Perry and basketball legend Earl "The Pearl" Evans;Meeting their lifelong sweethearts while students at Lincoln High School;and much, much, more!!The podcast brings up a wide range of names from Southeast Texas, including Coach Joe Washington, Phyllis Washington, Melvin Brown, Coach Dealey, James Gamble, Leroy Leopold, Richard Dick Williams, Cordell Lindsey, Carl Jackson, Wayne Williams, Ellis Wise, Johny Hamilton, Anderson Harrison (teacher), Henry Mayes, Jayne Smith, Roberta Simpkins Moss, Clayton Clark, Jeff Bergeron, Larry Mayer, Glen Como, Anthony Bryant, Anders Harrison (player), Gary Newman, Marvin Moore, Sam Graham, Ronnie Ford, Gary Drake, Chucky Baker, Charles Alexander, Marvin Charles, Reginald Lewis, Calvin Jerry, Nathaniel Mack, Burks Washington, Alphnse Thomas, Joseph Threats, Brent Guidry, Harold Jones, Carlton Richards, Judge Brad Burnett, Wade Phillips, Robert Perry, Earl "The Pearl" Evans, Meadow Lark Arceneaux Washington, Leroy Arceneaux, Charles Getwood, Clifford Landry, Laurence Ann Roberts Washington...and more!!Also included is renowned recording artist Carlos Santana!This ain't no Jive--it's straight from the Bee Hive...Right here on Down Trails of Victory podcast!

This week our guest speaker Marvin Moore. Marvin is the Principal of Salisbury High School and talks with us about "the least of these".

Rhema RESET Series w/Prophet Marvin Moore Jr

Rhema RESET Series w/Prophet Marvin Moore Jr

Pastor Rhodes speaks with Principal of Isenberg Elementary School, Marvin Moore on issues of family, faith and the community that we all are a part of.

In this week’s episode of the church planting podcast Clint Clifton talks with Kenneth Jones on the subject of why church planting is so hard, and why it was so hard for Kenneth. If you would like to learn more about Kenneth Jones you can follow the links below. If you would like to visit the Church Planting Podcast’s new website you can follow the link below.Kenneth’s FacebookChurch Planting Podcast’s Website Transcription ALBERT: This is the Church Planting Podcast. Thank you for tuning inALBERT: Every week we sit down with leaders who are shaping church planting efforts.ALBERT: Here’s your host Josh Turansky and Clint CliftonJOSH TURANSKY: Alright welcome back to the church planting podcast. My name is Josh Turansky. I’m joined here by Clint Clifton.CLINT CLIFTON: Howdy-ho! JOSH TURANSKY: And uh… CLINT CLIFTON: Should we talk about the thing everybody still talks about? The Jesus is King?JOSH TURANSKY: Oh yeah. Yeah. Let’s spend a little bit of time. Kanye. Yes. I was a sheltered home-schooled pastor’s kid. Never listened to Kanye until this album came out. But man, I have, it has been a personal source of encouragement.CLINT CLIFTON: The album JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. And just the story. Like you know, there’s like the ups and downs of church planting and things that are hard. And it’s been surprising, like out of the blue, “Well at least I have Kanye saved”. And I’ve taken encouragement in that. And I’ve enjoyed the album. CLINT CLIFTON: A lot of people, a lot of a people are saying, you know, I don’t think it’s real. Well what would you say to those guys?JOSH TURANSKY: Well man, you do not see the rejection of Paul when he got saved. And it took Barnabas like to say like, “Hey! Here’s what’s going on.” And I understand, I mean you know? Culturally we’ve gotten burned before but, I just don’t think as Christians that the Christian disposition is one of cynicism.CLINT CLIFTON: Well I kind of think the bible speaks directly to this issue. And it says some preach the Gospel out of rivalry as you can see but, as long as Jesus is preached. JOSH TURANSKY: Totally. There you go. That nails it.CLINT CLIFTON: So, it’s really. It doesn’t matter. If I understand that verse right, it doesn’t matter if his born again or not. JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. Yeah. Let me just add, one other thing that has been encouraging is just, his very dependent person. You know? So, it’s been encouraging to see the Theology coming through even just his first album. I mean he has some great…like the exchanged life is in there and just the idea of you know, Christ living you know, His life through us. For a new believer to be talking about that I think that’s awesome. What’s inspiring about artist as a whole is that they usually just do what’s normal. You know they break the rules and their just kind of outside the bounds. So not necessarily you know, Sunday service what he’s doing, but he’s just…I just appreciate the freedom of artist as a whole. And his kind of like the most recent one that I’ve watched in action.CLINT CLIFTON: Ok good. Well we did it, the obligatory talk about Jesus JOSH TURANSKY: Kanye. Yeah. There we go.So, what are we going to do in this episode?CLINT CLIFTON: Well we’re going to talk to Kenneth Jones or KJ as I call him. KJ is a church planter in Washington. And he’s just got the most interesting back story. I’m hesitant to say much about right now ‘cause I just want him to share it and tell it. But this all came out because a couple months ago we were together and he was leading a program with his church and I was helping. Anyway, there was this conversation that was happening. He said the phrase “Church planting’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” And I knew his back story and I said, I knew had been through somethings that I would assume are way harder than church planting and I asked him about that. And you’re going to hear what he has to say about it. So this is Kenneth Jones.JOSH TURANSKY: Let’s jump right in.CLINT CLIFTON: So, you want to lead your church to multiply. But in order to do that you have to raise up new potential leaders from inside your congregation. But how in the world are you supposed to do that with all the other plates you have spinning? Well, the North American Mission Board has created a tool to help you equip the saints for the work of the ministry. It’s called the multiplication pipeline. And it helps you identify and train missional leaders, potential church planters, and potential church planting team members from right there inside your own congregation. The pipeline starts with a simple assessment tool in a three-year online training system follows to equip missional leaders. Learn more about the multiplication pipeline by visiting their website namb.net/pipeline. That’s namb.net/pipeline.CLINT CLIFTON: Kenneth, you and I think have known each other I don’t know for about 5 years or somethingKENNETH JONES: I think that’s about right.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. And of all the church planters I know, you got an interesting back story. So I wanted to talk about you’re back story a little bit but can you just walk us through how you came to faith in Christ and what the circumstances of your life were when you came to faith in Christ? KENNETH JONES: Ah yeah. My upbringing is not at all in the church. Not at all religious. The funning thing, I had to say until I was 25, I really thought that Easter was just about bunnies and chocolates. I have no connection to the resurrection at all. Dad died when I was 8 years old and that left me with a pretty big hole in my heart and in my life led me to a life in high school and College in my mid 20s where I drank a ton. I did just about any drug you could think of. And, ended up in Georgia with a job as a sports caster at a television station in Maycomb Georgia. So, life seemed like it was going well. I graduated College somehow. I was actually doing the job the career what I wanted to do all my life. Got down there when I was 30 years old and life was going really well. And I guess I was about 8 months into my job decided to go out one night after work and drank until about 6 in the morning.CLINT CLIFTON: And at that point in your life you were considering your drinking habit like. Would you consider yourself an alcoholic? Or it was…KENNETH JONES: Yeah. I would. Maybe by definition not necessarily. But I would definitely say I had an alcohol dependency issue and a drug dependency issue. And drank silly until early in the morning. And for some reason decided I would try to go home. On the way home I passed out behind the wheel, and swerved into oncoming traffic. And hit another car head on. And the woman in that car died on the scene. I don’t remember anything about that. I just remember waking up in the hospital and hearing that somebody had died. So yeah, life changed really quickly in that moment. Was out on bond for 6 months and was sentenced to spend 7 years in prison was the sentence. Ultimately got out in 4 ½ but went to prison. I want to get back to your question, how did I come to faith? So, Jesus is a big topic of conversation in prison. And for the first couple of years…CLINT CLIFTON: What do you mean about that?KENNETH JONES: People just talked about Him a lot.CLINT CLIFTON: Inmates?KENNETH JONES: Inmates. In prison yeah. I’ll get a little bit more into that in a second. Yeah, He was just a big topic of conversation. I felt the people that were talking about Jesus were pretty crazy. Someone had shared the Gospel with me and I just said, “That’s the craziest thing I’ve ever heard.”CLINT CLIFTON: Another inmate.KENNETH JONES: Yeah, another inmate had shared that with me. And then just timing, oh I might keep it a little brief here. But you know, things just kind of kept happening while I was in prison that I couldn’t ignore. Had been wrongfully accused of something and was going to be sent to a wing of the prison that I didn’t want to be in. I’ll just put it that way. And the guy who I had my detail with, went to back for me and got me out of that situation. I was, one of my details was as a firefighter, so I actually just get trained in firefighter 1, firefighter 2, first responder. While I was there, ran into a guy who said he was a Christian but read a lot of stuff on Buddhism. And I started reading things on Buddhism. And that gave me a spirituality without responsibility. And one of their tenants is to let go of your control issues. And so, I’m in the process of trying to let go of my control issues and it dawns on me is the reason why I’ve been so standoffish to this Jesus guy is because to embrace Christianity would be to embrace that I don’t have control. CLINT CLIFTON: So, you’re saying that in a sense Buddhism pointed you to Jesus? KENNETH JONES: I’m saying that in a sense Buddhism pointed you to Jesus. God is great.CLINT CLIFTON: That’s cookie. KENNETH JONES: It’s cookie. But also, God can use whatever. Right? And so, see that kind of started the questions in my head. Again, a number of things kind of happened while I was in prison that began to weave questions in my head. I got transferred to a transitional center about three years into my time. And ran into a guy named Marquis Foster there. And again, he was a Christian. But he was younger than me. And he was wild so, we’ve had a lot of conversations. It was me trying to keep him out of trouble. Him basically talking to me about the credibility of scripture. And one day, we were walking to our detail and he just stopped in his tracks and he said “Man. You know it’s a real shame.” “What’s that?” He said, “You really have a heart that God could use if You just let Him.” And that sticks to me to this day. I was in my dorm room with 8 guys in there. And I was cleaning up getting ready for inspection. There was uhm…let me back track really quick, really quick. There was this moment of time months before that, when I came to that realization through Buddhism, this is why I’m not embracing Christianity. I said alright if it comes to me, I’ll investigate this Jesus. And so, months later I was in this transitional center and cleaning up ready for inspection. There’s a Bible sitting on the desk. And I said, “Hey! Who ever Bible this is, you got to put it in your locker. You can’t have it for inspection.” And nobody claimed the Bible. And one of the guys said, “Well, why don’t you read it?” And I remembered saying if it comes to me, I’ll investigate. And so, I said, “Ok. What should I do?” And one of the guys was like, “Well, today’s the first of the month. There’s 31 days this month. There’s 31 chapters in the book of Proverbs. Read the Proverbs.” So, here’s the gist, I’m getting discipled by a lot of prison inmates. Right? We spend a lot of time, I was joking, we spend a lot of time figuring out our best discipleship program and I got discipled by guys in prison. So I started reading Proverbs one a day and they would ask me, they’d have me read, and they’d ask me at the end of the night what’d I read and what I think. And eventually, literally they drugged me kicking and screaming to a Bible study that was happening at the center Tuesdays and Friday nights. And I was just…CLINT CLIFTON: And why were you so resistant? Just the idea of you didn’t be one of those guys? Religious dude? You didn’t want to be a Jesus thumper?KENNETH JONES: Yeah. I mean, well I mean, my whole life I made fun of it. My whole life I mocked and laughed and it was beginning to make sense. But to cross that bridge to, literally what I say was, “Hey I hear that music you guys singing there, and that’s crazy. And I don’t want to do that.” And there was just a hurdle of alright reading. I’m there. That’s cool. But to like to cross that bridge to go to a service, to listen to the music, to sing the music, was a little too weird. Yes, so I went into that bible study. And that was the first time that I’ve ever had somebody open the bible and teach me. CLINT CLIFTON: So that guy, Marquis you say his name was? KENNETH JONES: Marquis Foster. Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: You have been in contact with him now?KENNETH JONES: No. I’ve tried to look for him in Facebook and I can’t find him. I’ve called the prison system and I can’t find him.CLINT CLIFTON: We have an incredibly large listening audience on this podcast. I mean millions and millions of people. So, I’m sure someone out there know Marquis. So just go ahead and let us know if you do.KENNETH JONES: That would be awesome. That would be awesome. Hey Marquis if you’re out there. CLINT CLIFTON: He’s probably out there listening right now. We’d love to connect with you Marquis.KENNETH JONES: Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: Ok so, you are coming alive to Jesus in prison and picked this for you.KENNETH JONES: Yeah. So that was the spring of ’07 that the Lord found me. And just radically change my life forever. I mean obviously, and I know this may seem cliché, but obviously the concept of forgiveness is for someone who is sitting in a prison cell is a pretty big concept. But yeah, He radically changed my life. And that beautiful thing about it is that once I came to Jesus, I still had a year and a half left on my sentence. So, I got to spend a year and half with a bible and Jesus. And so, when I was about to get out, interestingly enough, the guys told me, “Hey when you get out make sure you find yourself a bible and believe in church.” And I was like, “Why would you need to tell me that?” And they were like “You’ll see.” And so, I have seen it. And I though I wanted to, I was like “Hey, I’m going to find myself a small church.” And the Lord in His humor and wisdom led me to North Point Community Church in Alpharetta Georgia which many people know probably one of the 5 largest churches. So, my hope in being in a small church was not granted. But it was a place for me to be. At that time, I was there for about 4 ½ years. And served in a various number of ministries there. And I remember the pastor there Andy preaching one time on Jonah. And he said, “You know, being in the belly of a large fish is probably the scariest, smelliest, darkest, place you could ever imagine being. But the scripture said God sent the fish for Jonah. And I remember thinking at that time that prison was my fish. And so, as you know the story of Jonah, right when Jonah gets out of his fish he says, “God whatever You want me to do I will do.” And I always say, “I don’t want to turn into Jonah 4. But God whatever you want me to do. And so yeah, in 2012 my time, my kind of part time position at North Point that internship had ended. And around the same time was when the Lord was calling me to plant a church in Washington DC through various conversations, from different calls. Yeah so, I packed my bags in January 2013. Had zero plan of what I was going to do. Was scared to death. And the Lord provided me with a job as a young adult youth pastor in Crofton Maryland. Started there in May 2013. Was just looking for our young adults to do something for young adults to serve. Literally I was just starting the ministry they didn’t have it there. And got connected to a guy, a pastor in Annapolis Maryland and had lunch with him. Was sharing this same story with him and he said, “You really need to talk to my friend Mark.” And I said, “Why is that?” He said, “Well I happen to be part of a church planting network. And Mark is our director I think you need to talk to him.” CLINT CLIFTON: And so that was you’re step in to the church planting world. Fast forward to your church planting story which is fascinating but just for the sake of time, you know are leading a church that you helped or found.KENNETH JONES: Yeah yeah. So, by God‘s grace, right that was 2014 and now yeah redeemers city church is a reality. And through network sites North American Mission World and Sent Network and so we started that church in September of 2014. And by God’s grace we’re still alive todayCLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. And you’re in the district which if you’re not familiar with Washington, it’s pretty small geographically. So, you’re inside the district. Tell us about your neighborhood.KENNETH JONES: Yeah. We are in North West; I mean North East DC in a neighborhood called Brook land. Pretty diverse neighborhood it‘s looks like most of DC, it’s kind of in the process of gentrifying. Yeah so pretty diverse neighborhood. And by God’s grace we look like our community. And so, we love celebrating our diversity. Yeah, the neighborhood is about 2 miles east of the Maryland border and just north of the capital.CLINT CLIFTON: And so, it’s a pretty residential area part of the city.KENNETH JONES: It doesn’t look like where we are right now. Yeah. That’s one of our focuses right now. It’s how do we reach families. Because it’s a very family-oriented location.CLINT CLIFTON: And you meet in a school.KENNETH JONES: Yeah. It’s been a blessing that God has given us a place in Brook land to meet at a pretty good price.CLINT CLIFTON: So, isn’t it like crazy cheap?KENNETH JONES: Oh, crazy cheap. I’m not, I’m not going to...could I say it?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. Sure.KENNETH JONES: We pay about $25.00 a week.CLINT CLIFTON: That’s about a $100 a month. That’s a pretty good dealKENNETH JONES: Yeah. What we really do is we cut them a check once a year for $2000.00 and that’s it.CLINT CLIFTON: That’s incredible. Really. Yeah. Well there’s a lot of very angry church planters listening right now. KENNETH JONES: That’s why I was like “Are you sure you want me to say it?”CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. No. I want you to say it. You must be living right? You know? CLINT CLIFTON: Ok, so you know, but, the church planting journey hasn’t exactly been easy for you, you guys have been there and growth has been slow and difficulty. And probably I’m imagining your like most church planters the kind of expectations you have for what it would look like at year 5 or 6 are way different from what they’re actually are. So how you dealt with the difficulties in church planting? KENNETH JONES: Yeah. You’re absolutely right. It’s been, it’s been a roller coaster ride. It’s been a lot of up and down. It’s uhm…so, part of the story of kind of back story of me feeling called to church plant is, I was sitting at lunch with one guy. I’m answering your question trust me. I was sitting at lunch with a guy in Georgia and it was in that conversation that he was really calling me and go and plant a church in DC. And I was like, “Wait a minute. It sounds like you want me to move now and not in like four years which was what my plan was.” And he said, “Well, KJ yeah. Absolutely.” He said, “This will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done. But I’m looking in your eyes and I’m listening to your heart and I can tell that this is something that Jesus had put in your heart. And what I started thinking was, “Well, this guy doesn’t know I’ve been to prison. This surely isn’t going to be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.” But fast forward 5 years, he was right. It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done. CLINT CLIFTON: So, you’re a guy who spent almost 5 years in prison. And you’ve been church planting for almost 5 years. And you’re saying now ‘Yeah. You’re right. The 4 ½ years I’ve done in prison were not as tough as the last 5 years.KENNETH JONES: Yeah. In a lot of ways.CLINT CLIFTON: That’s crazy.KENNETH JONES: Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. So, what are those ways? Let’s talk specifically about what it has been, what specifically has been so challenging about church planting? KENNETH JONES: Yeah, well like what you said, it’s been a lot of up and down. You know? The first couple of years were really really hard. I think in terms of church planting, like there’s just this constant, a constant grind. If we’re comparing it to prison there’s a more constant grind. Emotional, financial, spiritual, there’s a day in day out grind where as in prison really kind of your day is set for you. I think read somewhere sometime that like when you’re in prison, and this is not the little prison, when you’re in prison, you make about 50 decisions a day. And when your out of prison, you make upwards of over 500 decisions a day. And so there’s just this greater grind…CLINT CLIFTON: And then when your church planting you make about 5000 a day. KENNETH JONES: Yeah, yeah exactly. So, there’s that. Right? And I sometimes say, jokingly, like when I was in prison I knew when the time was going to end. And church planting I don’t know when the time is going to end. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. So, your sentence just keeps on going.KENNETH JONES: Yeah, your sentence just keeps on going. Like when I was in prison, I had 4 and a half years, here we’re already 5 years in and we’re still going. And I say that jokingly, but here’s the thing right here. Right? As I think about that right? Paul said, “Do not go weary in doing good.” And I think he says that because it can be wearying to do good. Like Paul the church planter himself. Often, he says, ‘Do not go weary in doing good.” And again, yeah, in prison, the time is finite unless your life sentence. But the work of church planting and growing churches and multiplying churches we do until Jesus comes back. And so, yeah. Do not go weary in doing good. Uhm, I think that in other ways, right? Church planting actually like, it highlights my own sin. What’s been difficult for me is really understanding that I’m not in control. I’ve realized what Jesus has taught me in my church planting journey is that, I’m not in control. And I struggle with that a lot. Like you said, the expectation of what’s going to happen versus what actually happens, teaches you a lot that you’re not in control. And, you know? I can beat my head against the wall and I can try to figure out all these different ways to do different things or to bring more people. But ultimately, if Jesus isn’t doing that then it’s not happening. And then the other thing is, one of the really crazy things that I experience from going being in prison to coming out of prison but I think just makes…helps me realize the difficulty of spiritual life in this world. Is that when I got out of prison, I recognized how loud this world is. Like I said, when I was in prison I came to Christ. I had about a year and a half left where I just had so much quiet. And it was just me, and Jesus, and his Words. And out here the world lulls you into this idea that the hecticness, the loudness, the fast-paced living is normal. And then we get into church planting and we’ve got meetings, we’ve got places we need to be, and all these different things that are going on when you need to get ready for Sunday. We need vision casting, we need the raise and support, we need all these different things. And I think that we can really really really miss out on the importance of being still and being quiet. And so, for all of those reasons, I need to get back to answering your question, for all of those reasons, in many ways, church planting has been harder than being in prison CLINT CLIFTON: Well I think that’s discouraging, I think? KENNETH JONES: That would be encouraging.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. So applying that to the two probably most likely groups of people who are listening to this today. Group 1 would be those guys who are intending to start a church. What do you want them to hear from what you just said? KENNETH JONES: Man, stay connected to Jesus. I think that in a lot of ways we can begin to believe that we are the primary reason for the rise and fall of our church. And what I recognized in just a couple of months ago as I was kind of processing through a lot of this with a friend of mine is, so on the bad, I mean their both bad, so on the negative side of it I guess is, if I’m thinking ‘cause our church was struggling to grow, if I’m thinking that reason the ultimate reason that we’re not growing is because of me, then Lord willing if we do go I’ll also think it’s because of me. And so, learning to, learning to walk in the causal understanding we have responsibilities as church planters. But understanding that ultimately Jesus is the one who builds this Church. So, we really need to stay connected to Him, and allow Him to take the reigns of the process. Allow Him to be our coach, to be our guide to remind us how he has shaped us. Because, especially for someone like me, it’s easy for me to look around at what’s happening in the church planting world, and try to be someone I’m not. CLINT CLIFTON: And the second most likely person who is listening is the guy who is in the same situation you’re in basically. They’ve been working, laboring, and they’re coming face to face with reality that church planting is really challenging. And so what do you say to that guy?KENNETH JONES: Yeah. I’m with you brother. It is challenging. But man, it’s worth it. You know I’ve had morning, Monday mornings where I’ll wake up and I sit on my couch and I wonder if there is anything else, I can do? Is there anything else I can do? And what typically happens is I’m like, “Well, I could plant another church.” And then I’m like “Well, why don’t I just really, just try where I’m already in?” And so, I would just say, like we said earlier in the other one, stay connected to Jesus. Do not grow weary in doing good. I think that it can be easy to, again it can be easy to look around and see other churches growing faster. Other churches just seemingly doing a whole lot better. And what I tend to remind myself in those moments, I’ll be honest, I struggle with comparison. But one of the things I remind myself in those moments that I remember Jesus walking with Peter in John 21. When he’s telling Peter all of the things that he’s going to go through. All the things that he’s going to suffer for Christ, and Peter turns and sees John, and he says “What about him?” and Jesus says, “What does it matter to you what I do with him? I’m talking to you.” And so, if you’re out there, a struggling church planter, like I know it’s hard not to compare. But yeah, John got to live ‘till his 90s and write Revelations. And Peter’s life was different. But both lives glorified God. CLINT CLIFTON: You know, one thing that I get to see now in the role that I’m in that I didn’t get to see when I was a church planter, that I wish every church planter could see is that, no matter how good it’s going in any particular church plant every church planter feels the same. Like, I can’t emphasize enough the feelings and the experiences and the emotions of church planting are the same for the seemingly successful church planter as they are for the seemingly very unsuccessful church planter. And uhm, it’s like a 31:00 vakinghim condition I guess. So, you know, it’s like a carryout in front of us. We’re never satisfied with what it is the Lord has sent out, or our expectations are never quite met. So anyway, so I think the listeners in the service if we didn’t at least let them know how the situation ended up with how the Lord used the wreck and prison in your life. Just wrap that story up for us in some way.KENNETH JONES: Yeah, yeah. So uhm, I think so, one of the things a couple of months ago, a conviction that I had is that the Lord said to me, “Lead the way I need you.” Right? And so, that has transformed the way that I’m leading my church and we are now getting involved in prison ministry. We are actually throwing an angel tree Christmas party event. In about a week in December 13th for kids who have parents who are incarcerated. Getting our church mobilized towards prison ministry. We’re getting involved with CSOSA which is a reentry organization in DC. Beginning to mentor guys who are coming out of the system. And our hope, our goal, our vision I believe the vision that God has given me just recently is that within the next 5 years we would have a three-bedroom unit in which we could have a transitional housing for people coming out of the prison system. As well as a non-profit job placement program and a non-profit counseling center. ‘Cause basically what I thought about in prayer is, what are the things that I needed coming out of prison? And it was housing, it was a job, and it was a community around me.CLINT CLIFTON: And that’s incredible. So, there’s somebody listening today who resonates to that, that they want to help in some way, how can they get in touch with you? What’s the best way to do that?KENNETH JONES: Yeah. I would say through our website – redeemerdc.org. You can email info@redeemerdc.org. That email will get to me. I would love to talk to you if you’re someone who says “Hey! I can provide that housing.” “I can rent a grant.” Or “I can do whatever. I just want to help fund that. I’d love to talk to you.” CLINT CLIFTON: That’s great man.KENNETH JONES: Yeah, that’s great.CLINT CLIFTON: Well I appreciate you KJ. Thank you so much for taking the time. I know it’s a little vulnerable sharing all that personal information about yourself but I have been benefited from your story and seeing God’s grace in your life so thank you. KENNETH JONES: Well thank you. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: Hey Josh. We got to figure out how to get people to write reviews. How do we do it?JOSH TURANSKY: Yes. That means we need to motivate people to take action. You know that’s why podcast have such a hard time. ‘Cause we just don’t do stuff. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah it is. And I don’t either…JOSH TURANSKY: They’re driving right now on the freeway. They can’t leave a review. CLINT CLIFTON: I listen to podcast all the time and I don’t think I’ve ever written a review. Yet I find myself in this position. Like, we really really need people to write reviews.JOSH TURANSKY: We do. And we just kind of, we have a new feed tool. We kind updated some stuff that might be hurting our algorithm a little bit in iTunes. So we really need reviews.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. We do and I don’t know what to do. Maybe we should just pray that God could convince other people. And cause them to go. Another thing they could do is go on our Facebook page and like it. And there’s actually reviews on our feed. You can put a review on our Facebook page. You know? And that’s a good place to go to. That’s all we have to say.JOSH TURANSKY: Good.ALBERT: Thank you for listening to the church planting podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review of your favorite podcast today.JOSH TURANSKY: Today’s episode of the church planting podcast is sponsored by New City Network, The Church Planting Ministry of McClain Bible. A special thanks to today’s guest Kenneth Jones for taking time to join us. Josh Turansky produces todays show. Zukey Bastien was our show runner and her husband Nick was our editor. Thanks to Hudson Turansky and Marvin Moore who provided administrative and web support for the program and last but not least thanks to you for listening through to the end of the church planting podcast. Hey if you’d like to know more information about the show visit our brand-new website www.churchplantingpodcast.org. There you can see past episodes as well as notes as links for today’s show. Be sure to tune in next week as we sit down with Mayor Kevin Brown to discuss what pastors need to know about mayors.

In this episode of the Church Planting Podcast Clint Clifton and Josh Turansky get in a call to talk about new churches during Christmas. If you would like to know more about Clint Clifton and Josh Turansky you can go to the links below.Josh’s ChurchClint’s ChurchTranscriptALBERT: This is the Church Planting Podcast. Thank you for tuning in.ALBERT: Every week we sit down with leaders who are shaping church planting efforts. ALBERT: Here’s your host, Josh Turansky and Clint Clifton.JOSH TURANSKY: Hey, welcome to the church planting podcast. My name is Josh Turansky and I am joined by Clint Clifton. Clint. CLINT CLIFTON: Yes, what’s up Josh?JOSH TURANSKY: It’s good to hear your voice.CLINT CLIFTON: Oh man.JOSH TURANSKY: Yes. We’re not in the same room but we’re streaming remotely to one another and man, I can’t wait to get into this episode.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah, this is fun. This was actually your idea, Josh. JOSH TURANSKY: Was it? Wow. I appreciate the credit.CLINT CLIFTON: I think it was. Yeah. We were talking about it and you said, “Let’s do a Christmas episode…help prepare people for Christmas.”JOSH TURANSKY: Well, I am enthusiastic for it. I… Just a little bit of talking we were doing before we started doing our recording. I love this. I love… One of my favorite parts about church planting is the strategy and thinking through what’s going to work and just trying new stuff; and a lot of stuff doesn’t. But…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah, tons of stuff doesn’t work; way more doesn’t work than does work. That’s the dirty secret of church planting by the way, if you’ve not yet planted… You’ll try… For every ten things you’ll try, one of them will sort of work. JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: And you’ll have to improve it a whole lot in order to get it to work good.JOSH TURANSKY: Can I actually share… Can we start off with me sharing what didn’t work for Christmas last year for me? CLINT CLIFTON: Sure, do that.JOSH TURANSKY: Okay. So, we had some few people in the church who wanted to do Christmas caroling. And so we scheduled it, we advertised it, because I live in a community that is ex-catholic… you’ve got working professionals, you’ve got people that really like kind of like a high church.. you have a large number of people that still are attracted to more of a liturgical service. So I thought okay, let’s do something traditional, caroling, hot chocolate, and I put it out there on Facebook, I ran some ads as an event, and we had a pretty good response. But really, nobody outside of our church showed up except for one family that was invited by somebody else on our church. We had a great time, we went around, there was about 15 of us knocking on doors, caroling. We were well received… A couple of like weird comments of people like, “Oh, you know, you’re the caroling group.” So, we get done, I go clean out the hot chocolate mess and we’re driving home. So, we live in a dense, urban environment. I live 5 blocks from our outreach centre where everything started and ended. And the whole street, while I’m trying to drive home, the whole street is closed. And there’s like 600 carolers out about an hour after we had gone out from the Polish club and I guess it’s an annual event. And I told my team, my interns, like I broke my number 1 rule which is like don’t try to re-invent something else in the community that already exists, is already awesome, that we could’ve joined. So…CLINT CLIFTON: You were totally upstaged by the Polish people.JOSH TURANSKY: It was brutal. It was brutal. And I’m still embarrassed that I made that mistake a year later.CLINT CLIFTON: Well, that’s funny. Well, Josh are you one of those guys that’s like really into Christmas? You’re kind of obnoxious about it? Or are you the dad that’s like overzealous about Christmas?JOSH TURANSKY: I enjoy Christmastime a lot. It’s a fun season. I’m sad when it’s over. But I’m also a very goal-oriented person in my life so. It seems like this season just passes by rather quickly. I don’t get to enjoy it as much as I’d like.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.JOSH TURANSKY: How about you?CLINT CLIFTON: Well no, I actually… I was just remembering that I got the reputation early on in our church plant. My… I had a… We had a member who would call me the “ a pastor that ignored all the holidays”. It was as if I didn’t acknowledge that holidays happened. Yeah so, they were always trying to get me to you know like, “Oh it’s veteran’s day, it’s mother’s day, you know let’s do something special.”JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: And I…my inclination was just to trudge through on the you know whatever passage working through… whatever passage we were working through.JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah, I… I know I mean I think that’s kind of how I am too. Very rarely will I get off… Get out of the text that we’re in and do something for… maybe just for Christmas.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. So, what are some strategic things that we can give to church planters in this arena? I mean, specially if you don’t come from much of a church… a strong church background or even if you do, man. You can… there’s… You could all kinds of things are going on the church for holidays. But church planting is very strategic, we’re trying out new things. What can we impart here as wisdom? CLINT CLIFTON: Well there’s a couple things that come to might right off the bat and we actually… A little bit later in the episode, we’re going to listen to a little bit of an audio clip about… from one church planter about what he’s planning to do this Christmas and what he’s done over the last couple of years that have helped. And he touches on some like philosophical ideas, a little bit about how best to leverage a season like that. So, hopefully that’ll be a good conversation starter for us. But, one thing that comes to mind when I’m thinking about church planting and Christmas time is you know, Christmas eve services, those are the things that most churches are doing and they generally work pretty good in terms of people showing up. They give you a genuine opportunity to express the message of the gospel, you get to preach the bible. There’s lots of good things that happen on Christmas eve services. But I always want to say to church planters that maybe one of the only positive things I did in the first couple of years of church planting was I decided not the press the gas on Christmas eve services in our church plant. And that the reason I didn’t do that is because my wife and my family… It was a necessary decision I had to make. I’m either gonna spend Christmas eve and Christmas with my wife and family and be focused on them or I’m going to put all of my energy into getting a Christmas eve service pulled off and getting everybody in my church, who’s already maxed out from me pushing them hard all year long, to spend this one really special holiday that they have with their family, helping me pull off a great outreach in my community. So I think the first thing that I want to say is if you’re a church planter, unless you have the bandwidth for this, even though it is a great opportunity, the best thing you can do for your ministry and for your family is to just decide not to do anything for Christmas for the first few years until you have the bandwidth to do it. So, if you need permission here it is: Until you have the bandwidth, don’t do anything for Christmas in your church plant. JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. Yeah and you’re family… I mean that’s something your wife and your kids will probably be forever grateful for. Specially if church pl… Specially if ministry’s a new thing for your family, church planting is already such a violent thing for a family unit, and the holiday’s are cherished, you know? I know for some pastor’s wives it’s just like it’s sacred time so it’s like, “Oh no, here’s church planting wrecking another piece of what we’ve cherished as a family for years.” I’m sure there will be…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah and unfortunately some church planters see, “Here’s my family wrecking another church planting opportunity, you know?” And, so there’s two ways to look at it and probably if you’re a church planter that’s really zealous about getting a gospel to your community, getting your church origin established, you’ve trained yourself to think like that; like I have to capitalize on every opportunity. And I’m just gonna tell you that this is is the one.. this is probably one, in our culture, in our setting, in our situation that you just need to relax on. Our church didn’t do a Christmas eve service the first few years, our sending church did one and we participated in our sending churches’ Christmas eve service for the first 5 or 6 years. So my family went to it, we attended it, we didn’t you know we didn’t play a role in the leadership of it but we just participated in it; and that was a really great decision. And by the time our church was ready to pull off our own Christmas eve service, we had a group of people in our church clamoring for it; “Hey, let’s do a Christmas eve service.” So it wasn’t like I was trying to drag everybody away from their Christmas tree and their eggnog in order to pull off a worship service. So…JOSH TURANSKY: Well, I think that that is such an important indicator of like your church may be ready, is when you have multiple people that are clamoring for it and your response to those people is like, “Will you… Would you be willing to help with it?” So if you’ve got people that are willing to carry the load and it’s not just another thing that’s going to fall on your kids or on your wife to pull off then you’re getting close to being able to do it. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. I think what you’re gonna see when we listen from to this little interview from church planter and as we talk about this a little bit is basically people fall on two sides of the philosophical spectrum on the outreach Christmas you know situation. Same thing with Easter, either you’ve got total you know what I would consider and think of is like gimmick laden you know silly miss to try to get people to participate, who are not very gospel-minded, you know secular minded people in your community, you’re appealing to their sense of family and fun and trying to get lost people even to engage in your churches’ thing that you’re doing; that’s one idea. And the other one is the one that you were kind of referencing in your community, which describe that a little bit better.. the sort of appeal to traditionalness. JOSH TURANSKY: Well I mean here in Maryland, Baltimore… Maryland is completely like a catholic city. So even though the attendance for the catholic church has declined, you still have an older crowd of people who are you know they’re attracted to a liturgical service some kind of traditional thing. And it’s a transient city too. So, many people have been uprooted from where they grew up. They feel detached in so many aspects of their life that the idea of doing some kind of traditional thing around the holidays or for a Christmas eve is just it appeals emotionally so much to felt need. So there would obviously be a crowd, I think it would be more of a minority crowd, that’s attracted to something really attractional or out of the box or an event. I mean we’ve got… for asking the city another aspect is that Baltimore isn’t a destination for Christmas time or for Easter time in that matter. It’s usually a time where people exodus the city. So, there’s a whole crowd that isn’t even around. The crowd that would’ve been attracted maybe by a gimmicky attractional type thing, they’ve left because around school break or their job in the financial sector is on break and their back in Nebraska or wherever they’re from.CLINT CLIFTON: Right. Yeah so that might be bullet point number 2. So, first big idea is make sure that your congregation’s really ready to do this and you’re totally not maxing out your family and your Christmas in order to pull this off; that would be number 1. Number 2 would be making sure that your community isn’t vacating the city at Christmas time. Now generally speaking, in the U.S. I think if you live in a suburban community, there’s a good chance that your community is gonna swell at Christmas time and if you live in urban area, it’s a good chance that it’s not… everybody’s going to be kind of rushing out to their homes into the suburbs. So, I know in my community… Our community swells at Christmas time. So we’re… It’s sort of hard not to see all the opportunities to capitalize on the Christmas spirit in our community and the receptivity to going to a worship service and the extra time that people have to spend with their families during that time. It’s hard not to want to capitalize on that. But I understand in some of the communities that’s very very different… yeah.JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. I’d come to your neighborhood for Christmas. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah and you can. And you can, Josh. So listen, here’s what we’re going to do right now. We’re going to take a pause for a second. We’re going to listen to Steve Gentry. Now Steve’s the pastor of Village Church in Midlothian near Richmond, Virginia. And Steve’s a good church planter, he’s planted a really solid church there and he’s gonna just kind of tell us what they do for Christmas in Christmas eve in their community and then we’ll come back and talk about that in a bit.CLINT CLIFTON: Have you ever had that experience of hearing a great idea and thinking, “Oh why couldn’t that have been my idea?” Well I had that experience recently when I ran across a company called Space Together. Now, Space Together was founded by a church planter and Space Together is to the church world what Airbnb is to your family. It lets you rent out your church space as easily as Airbnb lets you rent out your home. You can rent out a part of a building for a specific day and time or you can rent out the building in an ongoing way in a time where your facility is underutilized. And Space Together has this great technology that helps you take underutilized church space and create new opportunities for your congregation. Now, exclusively for church planting podcast listeners, Space Together is offering a $1 posting fee. You can post your space on Space Together for just $1 when you use the coupon code “planter”. And if you’re a church planter that needs space, go on Space Together and look at the places they’re offering and maybe you’ll find the perfect spot for your new church. You can learn more about Space Together at their website, spacetogether.com.CLINT CLIFTON: Steve Gentry tell me what you do to reach people at Christmas time.STEVE GENTRY: I think Christmas time is one of those things that a lot of people do, but they don’t think through were outreach is concerned. And we look at every season as to “How can we reach people who are not attending church at this given time?” And one thing that we started doing a few years ago is really looking at Christmas from a multi-tiered perspective. And we do three things. And I think we’ve started doing them pretty well. The first thing that we do is just based on a love that the church staff guys and gals simply have – we love Christmas lights. And everybody on my staff puts Christmas lights up on their house, and we came up with an idea a few years ago. “What if we did a big light display at our Church?” And so we do a, some people call it tacky, we just call it loving Christmas, we just do a huge light display…CLINT CLIFTON: Well it’s kinda like a Richmond thing isn’t it? Yeah. It’s kind of known…STEVE GENTRY: Oh yeah. The tacky lights are huge in Richmond. I mean like a couple of houses in our area have made national television because of their light displays. And we do the dancing lights. So, there’s a soundtrack going on behind it and the lights are moving to the music. And it’s a drive thru display. And we launch it every year with a showing of the movie elf on our property. So, if the weather’s good enough, which is always tricky at the beginning of December, if the weather’s good enough. We have a huge outdoor movie screening and we show the movie Elf. If it’s too cold we move it inside. But we show Elf, launch the Christmas lights and then for the next few weeks. I mean there are dozens of cars everyday that drive through our property to the extent where if I’m out in public and I’m talking to someone that has no connection to the church, no idea who I am, and I tell them “I’m a pastor.” “Ok where are you a pastor?” “Village Church.” “Oh, the Christmas lights church.” And I’ve had that happen multiple times and it builds a real rapport with the community.CLINT CLIFTON: All right. So, tell us how you bridge that to anything good or spiritual ‘cause elf and Christmas tend to…STEVE GENTRY: Oh yeah. The bridge is that at the end of the light display there’s an invite to our Christmas eve service. Last year we had four different services and a few years ago we just decided “Let’s not do anything traditional. If they’re doing it down the street let’s not do it.” And I had the idea of “What if I geared our Christmas eve service towards my kids?” No one wants to work Christmas eve. If you’re a pastor be cool with that. You don’t want to be there Christmas eve. You’re working. You’d rather be at home; you’d rather be at a Christmas party. And also, my kids probably rather I not be working on Christmas eve too. And I had that thought of ‘Man, if my kids would love our Christmas eve service, then all kids are going to love our Christmas eve service.’ So, we threw out everything that we would think was a boring element for our Christmas eve service, and we made it full of up town tempo, culturally-relevant songs. We show Christmas movie clips, Santa Claus comes out at the end. One of our worship leaders does a great job of Tom Petty impression. And so, we do at the end of the service we do a huge send off with It’s Christmas Time Again. And he does it in the best Tom Petty voice that he can do it. Santa Claus comes out, he’s given out candy canes, we do milk and cookies in the foyer after the service is over, I do it’s about 13-minute Gospel presentation right in the middle of it. And I always do it in an unexpected outfit. A few years ago, people started wearing Christmas suits that looked like tacky Christmas merch. And before it was as big as it was, we were special ordering these suits to come in, and I would always just show up on stage wearing one of these suits. It gets harder and harder every year to kind of throw people for a loop for what I’m gonna be wearing. But every year I fool ‘em. When they walk into the foyer, I’m dressed like I would be dressed every Sunday morning. And people were looking like me “Oh man I can’t believe you didn’t do it this year. I wish you had done it this year.” Then when I hit the stage, I’m wearing something wild and crazy and I share the Gospel and it’s awesome. Last year we kicked it up a notch and I actually wore a Christmas onesie to preach and…CLINT CLIFTON: That’s kicking it up a couple notch.STEVE GENTRY: They kicked it up a few notches but every year we just try to bring the Gospel to the people on our community in a new and relevant way that they’re unexpected. And our Christmas eve services are our biggest service of the year. We experience a bump of about 200 guests on Christmas eve. Many of them have not been to any other church service that entire year. And they come in and have a good time. The big thing for us, their kids are gonna have a good time. And everyone’s going to walk away knowing that Village Church believes that Christmas is about the redemption that they can have through the gift of salvation through Jesus Christ. And that’s why we do every bit of it. And we use Christmas as a huge outreach every year.CLINT CLIFTON: Ok cool. Thanks.STEVE GENTRY: Thanks.CLINT CLIFTON: Alright so uh, Steve, man he gave us a lot of bunch of ideas there. Well first of all I wanna say that Steve’s super creative in what he, the thought he’s put in what they do for Christmas is admirable. I think you know; I’ve been asking for the past couple of weeks, I’ve been asking church planters “Hey what do you guys do for Christmas? What do you think about doing for Christmas?” And I get a lot of blank stares. And it’s November. So that, that’s a little bit like worrisome. I don’t think pastors or church planters were thinking ahead about that at all. So, first of all, the fact that his thought through like he has, there’s a couple of things that you know, that he talked about and maybe like even the whole of what he talked about that I think you know a lot of church planters that I interact with would’ve been turned off by or would have said “Man, I’ll not ever do that in my ministry.” And he was basically sort of unashamedly , trying to make his service fun. He even said fun for his kids. He wanted to make a service that his staff, family, and his kids would want to come to. And so that meant things like playing modern video clips from movies like Elf and other things that are funny being as non-traditional as possible. And so, yeah that’s, he definitely was like on the side of things that his, “Let’s go after connecting with the person who’s not necessarily spiritual but they really value spending time with their family and having fun in Christmas time.”JOSH TURANSKY: And I think what’s good about that is you, you gotta decide who’s your, who’s the primary people that you’re serving through it. Like are you creating a service for you know, high church? Low church? Are you thinking of the people that normally you see every Sunday or are you minister the people in your community? So, and then you, you know, you double down on that. That’s what I appreciate about what was being said here. It’s word-determining. This is the strong direction we wanna go, we’re gonna be intentional with it. And yeah. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. He did double down on it. And I think that’s interesting to. That’s a good point you make right there. So, he’s not like a guy that I think of as like really gimmicking kind of out there in terms of his practices. He’s the guys that loves the bible. He teaches the bible verse by verse. He is a solid kind of exegetical bible teacher. He also, isn’t really a flashy guy himself. He’s kind of just the guy that his church grew not because of like tons of charisma but because he wakes up everyday and does the right thing. He evangelizes to his disciples, builds his community, build his staff, you know? He’s a really solid church planter. But his chosen like you said to double down on, he’s gone all in on “Let me just do whatever I can to provide you know, something that my community really wants to come to.” So, he’s sorta putting on the pragmatism of “What does my community want to get involved in for Christmas time?” and allowing his church or leading his church to meet that need and so…JOSH TURANSKY: Now do you think, do you generally think that the church planters should be looking into make the Christmas eve service an outreach or a church worship event? Like just generally speaking.CLINT CLIFTON: Well I think, you know thinking about Steve and his situation, he made a decision. The decision was, it’s gonna be an outreach program event. And the goal is to make a positive impression and get an opportunity to share the message of the Gospel with some unchurched non-Christian people on my community. Now, other churches make the decision to make Christmas as sort of sacred time of Jesus’ birth. A time for everybody to come and adore Him. No pun intended you know. To adore Christ, to cherish Christ, to celebrate His uh, His birth, uh, his incarnation. And I think the thing to say is that both of those options are valid. And you know, there’s a lot of temptation in Modern Evangelicalism to look across the bough at one thing and criticize if it’s not particularly your uh, approach. Uh, but the fact that Steve made a decision, he sort of doubled down on that approach means that he gets a chance to preach the Gospel and communicate the Gospel to probably 200 or 300 individuals. Every Christmas that you are on you may not get the opportunity to because we’re not doing that. So he’s not doing evil or wrong by going after that in the same way that you’re not doing something evil or wrong by having a sacred time with your congregation were you really , celebrate the incarnation. I think it’s important though to not try to hit both of those targets because you’re gonna do one of them pretty poorly if you try to hit them both.JOSH TURANSKY: Oh man, isn’t that true? If that’s really the case. Now in your own setting, at Pillar Church, what do you guys typically do for a Christmas eve service?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. We have, I would say ours is probably a targeted a bit more probably celebrating the incarnation, and we’re imagining that the people that are with us are primary believers. But we’re keeping in mind they’re the believers, the members of our church, we’re keeping in mind the fact that probably they’re gonna bring their family members with them that may not be as committed to the Gospel or committed to Christ or… So there’s that clear, always a clear call to the Gospel at out Christmas eve service. Another thing that we do that I think I would commit is that we really do put a focus on children in that Christmas ever service. We do a couple of things differently that we do normally in our worship services. Kids come up front. There’s this focused kid’s time. So, it’s maybe a central tenet or message of the Christian Gospel that’s presented in a way to communicate to the children. And the children are literally up-front listening to it in some creative way. But we’re imagining that those messages are going beyond them to the adults who are sitting behind them. And they’re hearing those messages too. So, it’s not gimmick in the sense that we’re like you know, putting lights on our suit. But it is kind of, you know, utilizing the fact that there are children there and that it’s a nostalgic time for children uh, to try to leverage that; to get the Gospel message even to the adults who are in attendance.JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. Now I just imagine you dressed up as Baltazar as one of the three wisemen in the pageant every year.CLINT CLIFTON: No, we don’t do a pageant. No. I’ll say, if you haven’t realized this yet, when you do anything with kids in the suburbs. Anything with kids, your attendants like dramatically increases. So, I mean, literally on the day that we do parent-child dedication or a day where we have you know, a kid reading scripture; or , some kids doing something in the worship service; or even get a word in it someway, our attendance is like notably up by 10, 15, 20, 25% depending on how many kids we have on stage. So, just keep that in mind, those are, doing those things is a time when you often do get an audience with others.JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. I’m glad you brought that up. I’ve seen churches were they’ll like you said, invite the kids up, read a Christmas story to the kids, or even have the message really speaking almost to the kids with the parents as almost the secondary audience. That really seems to resonate with adults. And it does bring in a lot of people.JOSH TURANSKY: So what else comes to mind when you’re thinking about Christmas other things church planters, you know… I feel like with what we’ve covered already, we’ve covered a lot in framing this up. Is there anything else? ‘Cause there’s the settings that different guys are in as they’re planting is very different. There’re different stages. Is there anything else strategically that guys should be thinking about? Principles that they may wanna keep in mind , as they’re considering the Christmas season? JOSH TURANSKY: One thing that you did mention kinda in passing, which was just thinking about this in advance. Like, when in the year, ‘cause we’re actually doing this kinda late. I mean, hopefully by the time this comes out people already have a plan for this year going into Christmas. When do you make these plans? CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah, I would say if you don’t have a plan right now, don’t let that make you go “Oh, I’m too late this year.” You probably can do something at this point. But yeah generally speaking I think church planters plan way too late for almost everything they do. I would really encourage you to like the practice we got in a couple of years ago is like have you know, setting up your calendar for the year at the end of the previous year. So you should absolutely be at least putting in those big pieces on the calendar so that as you get closer to them you could prepare. JOSH TURANSKY: Okay. Those are some great points, were excited for you guys out there celebrating the Christmas season leading your community in that worship. , Clint. Final words? Thoughts CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah, I would say if you do something cool at Christmas or if you have some kind of cool outcome from it, why don’t you send us an email and tell us about it. Or, just record a simple audio message on your phone. and email it over to us. And if we like it we’ll put it on the podcast JOSH TURANSKY: Great. Awesome.So much of what we do these days in ministry today takes place online. So, we need somebody to help us with the digital aspects of our ministry. Well I found a great partner in 180digital.com. These guys are ministry guys, they love the gospel and they love the church and they’re super good at what they do. So I want to encourage you to go to over and check out their website it’s 180digital.com. They do all kinds of stuff and they work with big and small churches. So, right now, they’re offering our listeners 20% off of any website or branding project just for mentioning the church planting podcast. So, go over to their website and check it out – 180digital.comALBERT: Thank you for listening to the church planting podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review of your favorite podcast today.Today’s episode of the church planting podcast is sponsored by News City Network, The Church Planting Ministry of McClain Bible. A special thanks to today’s guest Josh Turansky and Clint Clifton for sharing their thoughts. Josh Turansky produces todays show. Zukey Bastien was our show runner and her husband Nick was our editor. Thanks to Hudson Turansky and Marvin Moore who provided administrative and web support for the program and last but not least thanks to you for listening through to the end of the church planting podcast. Hey if you’d like to know more information about the show feel free visit our brand-new website www.churchplantingpodcast.org. There you can see past episodes as well as notes and the links for today’s show. And be sure to tune in next week as we sit down with Bryan O’day from the Praetorian Project.

In this week’s episode of the Church Planting Podcast Clint Clifton interviews Svava María Ómarsdóttir about what it is like to be a part of a church plant in Iceland, and why it is so hard. If you would like to know more about Svava and there church you can click on the links below.Svava’s Facebook Svava’s ChurchTranscriptionALBERT: This is the Church Planting Podcast. Thank you for tuning in.ALBERT: Every week we sit down with leaders who are shaping church planting efforts. ALBERT: Here’s your host, Josh Turansky and Clint Clifton.JOSH TURANSKY: Hey, welcome to the Church Planting Podcast. My name is Josh Turansky and I’m joined by Clint Clifton. Clint, how are you doing?CLINT CLIFTON: I’m excited about baseball, which is very unusual.JOSH TURANSKY: That’s right. We’re recording this right after a massive world series win.CLINT CLIFTON: By Washington Nationals. It was amazing.JOSH TURANSKY: And that was an incredible comeback…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah and you know…JOSH TURANSKY: By the Washington Nationals.CLINT CLIFTON: I don’t care about baseball at all. I don’t care about sports at all. But man, it was exciting. I was up until midnight watching sports, which is just not a thing that has ever happened.JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. CLINT CLIFTON: Man it was…JOSH TURANSKY: I watched it too. I didn’t watch the whole series but man, I watched that…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah there were two awesome thing about it. One was afterward, just the streets of Washington DC… I mean, you see the streets of DC full all the time when people are protesting you know? Spun up about something. I didn’t know our city had capacity to celebrate like that. It was awesome.JOSH TURANSKY: Wow.CLINT CLIFTON: It was really awesome to see our city like unified and joined together. And if I… You know, I’ve usually been kind of like a, “Sports, I don’t really see the point.” But man, it was really unifying and very exciting to see. And then the second thing was our planters-the planters in our city, you know, unbeknownst to me, guys that I worked with, they got together and went and watched the game unprompted. It wasn’t organized officially. But they couldn’t afford tickets to the game. So, they actually got tickets to the Wizard’s game the same night. They went to the Wizard’s game and they stayed after the Wizard’s game in the arena and they watched the nets played on the jumbotron in the arena.JOSH TURANSKY: Brilliant.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. It was amazingJOSH TURANSKY: Brilliant. That’s awesome.CLINT CLIFTON: And just watching them have fun together and… which was awesome.JOSH TURANSKY: Man, well congratulations. That’s a huge victory for your hometown, man.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.JOSH TURANSKY: In DC. So, this episode is a interview that you did with Svava. And…CLINT CLIFTON: Say her name about as good as you say Thabiti.JOSH TURANSKY: Gee, thanks.CLINT CLIFTON: It’s good. That’s good. I’m not good with pronunciation either.JOSH TURANSKY: Okay so tell us how do you know Svava? Which is spelled S-V-A-V-A. I mean, I gotta get a little credit.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah, it’s Svava. So S-V-A-V-A.JOSH TURANSKY: Svava.CLINT CLIFTON: Yes. And how I know Svava.. So, our church-the church that I planted, became burdened for the nation of Iceland. When we first started church planting, maybe a year or two into our work, my wife and I actually moved over to Iceland; long story, I can’t give you the whole thing. But the long story short is we moved over there, we started a group, and then we just have been consistently for the past 13/14 years, endeavoring to see the Gospel spread in Iceland and churches be planted there. There’s a little to know Gospel vibrancy or Gospel work going on there. And so, Svava is one of our church planters’ wives there. And the only Icelandic church planter we have-his name is Gunnar, and he’s really found on the internet and on Instagram under the name icegunns, but…JOSH TURANSKY: What?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. Anyway, these guys are just really dear to us. We love them very much and have spent a lot of time with them and they’ve gotten through some incredible suffering over the course of their church planting journey and God has sustained them in an unusual way. And so, they were visiting the United States staying in our home and we got an interview with Svava about that why she was here last summer. So it was a little bit dated and it was originally a video. So you might here a little bit in there that kind of refers to it as a video. But, I want you to check it out anyway.JOSH TURANSKY: Awesome. Well, let’s jump right in to this interview with Svava.CLINT CLIFTON (ADVERTISEMENT): Are you a pastor that wants to lead your church to reproduce? Well, I’ve got something for you. It’s called church planting thresholds. Church planting thresholds is a simple, step-by-step, Gospel-centered guide that will help you guide someone from your congregation to lead a church planting team out somewhere else. Many pastors tells me that they don’t have the expertise, they don’t have the money, they don’t have the resources they need to start a new church; well I don’t think that’s true. The only resource you need to start a new church is a ready leader. So even if your church is very small and you don’t have a lot of resources at your disposal, if you can disciple a man to lead a team of people out from your church to start another new church, then you have all that you need to reproduce. Church planting thresholds will help you do it. Church planting thresholds is available in English and in Spanish. It’s even available as an audiobook. You can find it at amazon or at audible.com. CLINT CLIFTON: Svava, thanks for spending time talking to me today. You and your husband Gunnar have been a huge blessing and encouragement to me, and my family, and my church. And I just wanted to take a moment to help others get to know you and what the Lord’s doing through you guys. So, tell us where you’re planting a church and how long you’ve been doing that.SVAVA: Well, planting in Iceland; the land of Ice. We don’t live in snow houses though. CLINT CLIFTON: Okay. Good, good. That’s good to know. Not igloos, right?SVAVA: We’ve been planting… Well, we’ve had the church since 2011 in December.CLINT CLIFTON: Okay. So, what’s the spiritual climate of Iceland like? Give us an overview.SVAVA: Well first and foremost, it’s very dark. People just don’t believe in God. That’s… yeah. It’s… People are very like… It’s very like you kind of just believe what you want. You know, everything… All religion’s all the same. And even in the Lutheran churches. Yeah, so that’s a pretty… I mean, you wouldn’t… Sadly to say, you wouldn’t… You couldn’t even go to a Lutheran church there and expect a good sermon most of the time.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah adn for… And in most places, if somebody were to like wander into a state church and say, “Tell me how to become a Christian.” Would they get accurate… an accurate depiction of the Gospel? SVAVA: Most likely not.CLINT CLIFTON: Most likely not, yeah. So, Americans might think about Iceland that… You know, like you’ve mentioned, they live in igloos and really don’t like have the internet or books. You know… Tell us what it’s like to live in Iceland.SVAVA: Yeah, we have… I don’t know. We have cinemas? CLINT CLIFTON: So you basically… I mean you…SVAVA: We have… I mean we’re, yeah. It’s just yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah so it’s not… It’s not unlike most of Western Europe or even he United States. Like you have… It’s a very modern society.SVAVA: Yeah. We have Dunkin Donuts, Krispy Kreme. Yes.CLINT CLIFTON: What else is there? So, you and your husband began to feel in 2011 that the Lord was calling you to plant a church. How did you feel about that initially?SVAVA: I was just… I said yes, but I was not really in it until a little bit later. Yeah, it was… It took me a while. It took me a while. Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: And Gunnar, your husband, he was getting most of his growth… It was happening through listening to American pastors on podcasts and you weren’t listening to the same podcasts. So how was Gunnar trying to bring you along with the way he was growing?SVAVA: Well, it took 2 years. Yeah. He was just battling through those thoughts by himself but then eventually, he surrendered and talked to me about it. I said okay but didn’t really support him right away but then I mean I just kinda said yes and then just kind of kept on doing what I was doing.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. Nothing really changed. Now describe kind of where you guys were as a couple, where you were in your career at the time God started calling him to do this.SVAVA: Yeah. Well, he was working at the grocery store, I was working 50 like a half… It’s called part time job at a child care at a gym. And we were living in the church, in his dad’s church actually. His sister was running the church at the time. And we were living in the…one of the children’s ministry rooms.CLINT CLIFTON: Okay. So, you say he was working at a grocery. He’s not like running the grocery; he’s stocking shelves. Yeah. So, and… you guys weren’t on a good footing financially. You weren’t on a good footing… You weren’t on track with your career. With careers.SVAVA: Yeah. We moved like two or three times before we came to that ‘cause we didn’t really have… couldn’t afford any apartment at the time so that’s why they offered that for free. Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: So essentially, you’re living in a church building in a children’s ministry classroom in a church building as a young, married couple. Yeah.SVAVA: And then pregnant with our son.CLINT CLIFTON: The first child. Okay. So Svava, when you and Gunnar set out to plant the church, it’s called Loftstofan. And when you started to plant the church, tell us what the very early stages of that church looked like.SVAVA: Yeah. Well, we were then 4, and then people kept adding like… slowly. But basically, we were just having them on our house. Everything, the whole church was at our house. Yeah, like, you know… life groups, and Sunday service, just anything.CLINT CLIFTON: When you say at your house, you’ve gotten an apartment by this point or you’re still?SVAVA: Yes. We… yes. We moved to the apartment, thankfully. And yeah, just Mikhail tagging along and yeah we have baptism there…CLINT CLIFTON: In your house?SVAVA: Yeah. Baptist people in our house. CLINT CLIFTON: Where in your house did you baptize?SVAVA: Oh yes. In our bathtub. CLINT CLIFTON: In your bathtub?SVAVA: Yes.CLINT CLIFTON: So you gathered all the people from your church in your bathtub?SVAVA: Yes. We actually… Yeah. I remember us cramping all in there. We’re just wanting… You know… Just so excited when we’re baptizing our first member at that time and the water just like splashed on the floor. And yeah, it was really fun.CLINT CLIFTON: It sounds really fun actually. So things were going well with the ministry but I got an email from Gunnar during this time frame and I remember him just describing how he felt like he wasn’t doing a good job as a husband and a father because he wasn’t providing for the family. I remember him saying he felt like he was burden on the society that he’d been there to bless, that he was a burden on his parents, and that he wasn’t being a good husband or father because he wasn’t able to provide for you guys. ‘Cause he wasn’t really focusing on his career, he was focusing on the ministry. And so that was a difficult tension for you guys. SVAVA: That was very difficult. I mean, after we moved away from the church, living from the church and to the apartment, that was probably soon after that he just decided that he was gonna quit his job and do the full time ministry. You know? And then he started to raise money and I mean, that took a long time so that email that you’re talking about, it was maybe 2 years after we moved. Maybe, yeah. 2014, right? And so, I mean, we didn’t… we basically didn’t have any salary. So basically living off of…lived off of his mom. Mostly she pay for all of our groceries. We ate at the halfway house that she was cooking at everyday of the week. And my mom and dad, they gave us like monthly allowance, maybe to just kind of you know be able to do something and just provide for Mikhail. Yeah. It was a very daunting… CLINT CLIFTON: Difficult season.SVAVA: Yeah. It was a very difficult season. Yeah. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. So I think a lot of people who set out to plant churches experience some measure of this. You know, Lord’s called us to do this. They’re concerned about how they’re going to be provided for financially. But you guys, even through the ministry was starting to go well and there was a strong sense that Lord’s calling you to do this, there were real difficulties that you guys were facing at this time. And I remember in that email that Gunnar sent, he basically put an ultimatum in the email. So we were serving as like a supporting church; a church that was helping and… to encourage you guys and help you through. And in the email, he essentially said, “I’m going to give it 12 more months and then if things haven’t changed, I’m gonna quit the ministry.SVAVA: Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: And so, it was difficult for him enough to verbalize that even though the Lord had called him to this, he didn’t feel like it was right for him not be providing for his family. SVAVA: Yeah. I mean I can’t even imagine just being a man and feeling the need to… wanting to provide for his family. But I think even…. I remember when we talked about it, I think the reason why we said like after 12 months, even in the midst of like the very deep hardship, we still say like you know… 1 year and 2/4 months, you know. It’s because we didn’t want to quit.CLINT CLIFTON: Right.SVAVA: Yeah. CLINT CLIFTON: Right.SVAVA: We wanted to keep going.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah I mean, I remember feeling that way as a church planter. I remember there was period in our church planting journey where I was you know earning extra money by uhm, by doing odd jobs and things like that to try to make ends meet. And it just felt unsustainable, it felt impossible to continue. Yet on the other hand there’s this strong clear calling and I mean do you think that that’s part of God’s work in our lives to put us through that sort of difficulty. I mean as you look back on it do you see that as a season of grace or…?SVAVA: A season of grace totally. I mean I think I wouldn’t be able to say that if we didn’t have God’s grace. You know? We’re still wanting to just fight through the adversity. I think that’s not a far on doing. God. Mhm. CLINT CLIFTON: So, now looking back at that email, I remember there’s this one portion of the email where he says he has 47 Kronas in the bank account. By the way how much is 47 Kronas?SVAVA: It’s uhm, less than one dollar.CLINT CLIFTON: Less than dollar. And he describes that all the dash lights on his dash are so he has so many lights on his dash telling things that are wrong with the car that it looks like a Christmas tree. And I remember he said the wind was blowing so hard and howling so hard when you were sitting in the car having this conversation. And the windows wouldn’t roll up or down. They were just broken. And so the wind was just whipping in the car. And he was just at like at the pit of despair. He was in you know, at the bottom of the barrels. SVAVA: We sometimes stop at the side of the road. He went out pulled up the…CLINT CLIFTON: Pulled up the window. SVAVA: Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: And he was saying normally we would just like look at each other and laugh at how broke we are. He said that this time it didn’t feel funny.SVAVA: Uhm, it was becoming quite a long time. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. And I mean I think you know, there’s a church planner wife who’s watching this today or a church planter who’s watching this today and they’re in this season. You know, it’s just not funny anymore, like what do you say to them?SVAVA: Uhm, I would say uhm, that God’s grace is sufficient. Uhm, I would say that uhm, definitely reach out to someone you have around you that you can talk to because, when we did that, when he sent that email, it’s somehow like you guys contacted us after that. And it somehow God kinda restored our energy by just vocalizing how we felt. And, yeah, I think it’s really just be very dependent on the Lord and be open about how you feel. I mean… CLINT CLIFTON: So, the ministry was going well, but your financial reality is in your family were really challenging. And Gunnar essentially said I can keep this going about another year but I don’t think I can go beyond that. I don’t think that it’s sustainable. But at the end of a year things hadn’t gotten better. By many measures they’ve gotten worse. Can you just walk us through what happened after this?SVAVA: Well, Mikhail got diagnosed uhm, Autism at 1 ½ years old. Uhm, at that point I had already felt that something wasn’t quite right with him. Uhm, I didn’t wanna verbalize it because uhm, I just didn’t wanna say out loud that something was wrong. And so, when that diagnosis came uhm, it was still hard even though I knew but it was like I said it’s just that thing hearing somebody else say like your child is not healthy. Your child is not okay. Mhm. Those were difficult. And then…CLINT CLIFTON: And then beyond the autism diagnosis a little while later…SVAVA: And then, a year after Seiros is born. So its 2016 he gets diagnosed with cancer. Uhm,CLINT CLIFTON: He Mikhail.SVAVA: Yeah. He Mikhail. Yeah. And uhm, that was just I mean in a month before he stopped walking because that’s one of the signs or symptoms of the cancer – leukemia. And uhm, I can’t even describe I mean I have, there were people coming over that summer that uhm, have like come again to Iceland they’ve said “Hey! Remember I met you there…” and there’s just…CLINT CLIFTON: Nothing?SVAVA: No. It was just yeah. Yeah. It was just really hard. And, Uhm, on top of that I mean the financial situation had gotten a little bit better. But I mean, we were already tired you know? And then just boom! There came this big blow. And then, I get pregnant in the midst of the cancer treatment. And I mean, I do not have get easily pregnant. And I just had the biggest bump ever. And, still just God’s grace through that. I mean, there was a time where uhm, at the end of my pregnancy I couldn’t hold Mikhail because he couldn’t walk. And we couldn’t go outside for like many many weeks uhm in a row because yeah, I just couldn’t carry him anywhere. And there was this friend who came to my house and she said to me “So this is your life now. Like you know, you just, you’re just in here? All the time?” And when she asked me that, I just got so thankful like... just that question reminded me of how God had just sustained me through all that time. And I hadn’t even thought about that. The thought didn’t even cross my mind of you know, being just I don’t know just content. And that’s just amazing.CLINT CLIFTON: So, you’re saying she said kind of like uh, I can’t believe this is your life now and she received…SVAVA: Yeah, of course she looked at me like it was hard. I mean of course it was hard but still like God just filled me with this incredible peace you know?CLINT CLIFTON: Well so, I’m just interested in this you know in this progression of you know, Gunnar sending as an email saying ‘I can’t go any further here’ and then things getting unimaginably more challenging and difficulty. And somehow someway God’s sustaining you through all that. And the church growing, in the midst of all of that. And I mean I don’t think there’s any way to look back at the difficulties that you guys have gone through that process and not just say “Wow! God has been amazing to uphold them” uhm, especially when you’re in a situation where you’re so far away from supporters and friends and… That wasn’t the end of the difficulties.SVAVA: No. And then uhm, I gave birth to my son Solomon. And uhm, he was just supposed to be to have a torn esophagus. That’s why I was so big. He wasn’t swallowing the water. And uhm, so we were just already had in our mind that he was having the surgery and then two weeks later we were gonna go home. CLINT CLIFTON: So when Solomon was born, immediately you guys realized, something wasn’t right. SVAVA: Yes. Uhm, as soon as he came out the uhm, it’s like the air in the room shifted. Yeah. And then they took him away and I saw Gunnar was a little bit worried at that time. Uhm, I didn’t really think anything of it though. Until later, when they came after we got back to our room, and the doctor came and told us that he just wasn’t moving and then. Uhm he was alive but he wasn’t moving very well. And he couldn’t support his tongue by himself. Had a little difficulty in breathing. Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: Okay. So, you’re immediately hit with something major is wrong but you didn’t know what it was.SVAVA: No. Not until 5 months later.CLINT CLIFTON: 5 months? 5 months. That’s a long agonizing 5 months.CLINT CLIFTON: And what was Solomon like during that time? Was it becoming clearer and clearer that his body wasn’t right?SVAVA: Yes. Uhm, they didn’t I mean at the time for the first like weeks of his life they said they were it could be very uhm, dangerous his condition. Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: Like life threateningSVAVA: Yeah. Life threatening. Yeah. So, didn’t know what to expect. So, they didn’t want to get our hopes up.CLINT CLIFTON: So, you didn’t know what was wrong with him? You didn’t know if he was going to live or die?SVAVA: No. Not reallyCLINT CLIFTON: And 5 months later you got the diagnosis. And what was that? SVAVA: Uhm, so he got diagnosed with genetic mutation in his sex chromosome. Which basically means that his brain isn’t fully developed. It will like affect his personality, his speech, and his movement. And then he has, hypotonia which is muscle weakness. That’s why his really limp. And he has shorter feet. Yeah. But that’s kind of the basis of it. Yeah so.CLINT CLIFTON: And so, what are the doctors telling you that means for Solon’s future?SVAVA: Uhm, yes so, his condition is that his the third one in the world who has been diagnosed with this condition. And so, they don’t really have any files about how he will progress. And the two other persons they can’t compare him because each…CLINT CLIFTON: each is different.SVAVA: Yeah. So, we don’t really know. Where just, it’s another thing where we just learning more and more about you know? Just really depending on God’s working out the plan for his life. And trusting that He just exactly knows what He’s doing. CLINT CLIFTON: So, the way you say that it’s almost. You sound almost as if your anticipating in a positive way how God’s gonna support you and take care of you and that’s seems like an amazing thing for somebody who’s going through the level of difficulty that you have. SVAVA: Yeah. I actually didn’t have that uh, after he was born it wasn’t until uhm, maybe 6 months later where I just had really uhm, I had begun counseling at that time. And I was just kinda avoiding, I didn’t want to face my feelings, I didn’t want to face the hardships, didn’t want to think about that hardship during that time. And it was just one day were God kinda forced me into alone time situation with Solomon. And we were at home, and that’s just when I couldn’t contain my feelings anymore. They just poured over me. I just started crying, crying, crying over him. And just mourning. And that’s when uhm, it was almost like I felt just like God kinda just breathing over me. It’s almost tangible. Just like He was just breathing over me. That verse where Paul talks about uhm, you know there’s nothing compared to the glory that is to come? Basically uhm, it’s just like how uhm, my soul just got filled with that truth. And I believed it with every bone in my body. That’s why I think it’s just from that moment I have been given this just that hope, that just never ceases. It never yeah. That was an amazing moment.CLINT CLIFTON: Svava a lot of times the church planting families feel isolated they think about giving up because they feel isolated and they feel alone. You guys are literally isolated. You’re in the North Atlantic on a rock and there are no other church planters there in your country and you’re doing it all alone. And sometimes they fill as if they’re full of fear about the future. How money will happen in the future, How the church will grow. And you guys have faced all those fears. And I wonder uhm, having been in these 7-8 years now and looking back what would you have to say to the church planting family in the midst of those fears right nowSVAVA: Well uhm, after everything has happened, I mean I was definitely fearful of the future. And uhm, just in that unknown has been really hard. But uhm, I can just day that God will give you the means and provide you with grace and the wisdom that you will need each point of time you’re going through. He will do that. Uhm, it doesn’t necessarily look like sometimes He will but I can just speak with confidence that He does. I mean He like I told you earlier with the moment with Solomon He just provided. You know? With just that one word, it just provided everything that I need to just be uhm, hopeful about the future. Yeah. Rely on God’s promise. Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: Svava thank you very much for your candor and your willingness to share your heart with me today. I appreciate you very much.SVAVA: Thank you for having me.ALBERT: Where do church planters come from? Well they don’t come from seminaries and they don’t come from a factory. Church Planters come from congregations. Their developed by Pastors who love and are prepared for Gospel ministry and sent out. But many churches don’t know where to begin and many Pastors are overwhelmed with the day to day duties of Pastoral ministry and don’t have time to put together a robust training program for the people in their congregation to be equipped. The North American Nation Board is helping with this. They have developed a thing called the Multiplication Pipeline. And it’s a three-level training course that takes place through multiple years for you to have the material and the guidance to get somebody in your congregation ready for church planting. The Multiplication Pipeline is available on NAMB’s website, you can find it at namb.net/pipeline.ALBERT: Thank you for listening to the church planting podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review of your favorite podcast today.Today’s episode of the church planting podcast is sponsored by New City Network, The Church Planting Ministry of McClain Bible. A special thanks to todays guest Svava for taking time to join us. Josh Turansky produces todays show. Zukey Bastien was our show runner and her husband Nick was our editor. Thanks to Hudson Turansky and Marvin Moore who provided administrative and web support for the program and last but not least thanks to you for listening through to the end of the church planting podcast. Hey if you’d like to know more information about the show visit our brand-new website www.churchplantingpodcast.org. There you can see past episodes as well as notes and the links for today’s show. And be sure to tune in next week as Clint and Josh sit down to discuss the best practices surrounding Christmas services.

In this episode of the Church Planting Podcast, Clint Clifton sits down with Thabiti Anybwile to discuss his testimony and hear what he has to say about his church planting journey. Thabiti Anyabwile (MS, North Carolina State University) is a pastor at Anacostia River Church in southeast Washington, DC, and a Council member of The Gospel Coalition. He’s the author of several books, including What Is a Healthy Church Member?, Finding Faithful Elders and Deacons, Reviving the Black Church, and others. He and his wife, Kristie, have three children.CREW MEDIA CPP – THABITIALBERT: This is the Church Planting Podcast. Thank you for tuning inALBERT: Every week we sit down with leaders who are shaping church planting efforts.ALBERT: Here’s your host Josh Turansky and Clint CliftonJOSH TURANSKY: Hey welcome to the church planting podcast my name is Josh Turansky. And that clicking noise you here is Clint Clifton…CLINT CLIFTON: Hey Josh.JOSH TURANSKY: …were recording this uh remotely. And uh Clint uh where are you recording from? What’s your space look like? CLINT CLIFTON: Well I’m in DC right now. I’m in my, in my office. Uhm good awesomeJOSH TURANSKY: I’m in my office which is the basement of a real houseCLINT CLIFTON: YeahJOSH TURANSKY: All the pipes and the wires lead uh, in here it’s very exciting.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. Everything looked cool in BaltimoreJOSH TURANSKY: It does. And this and this sound, this recording will be great as long as no one flushes the toiletCLINT CLIFTON: Oh yeah. Well it’s kinda cool like a uhm a graveyard or something. You know its like a little bit scary…JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. CLINT CLIFTON: …but coolJOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. I love it.CLINT CLIFTON: You know I was in New York city all week. I uh stayed uhm down just right there by the Empire State building a for a meeting and boy that’s a scary city. Holy smokesJOSH and CLIFF: JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. Oh it that there’s nothing like New York city it’s it’s cool.CLINT CLIFTON: I’m so glad I don’t live there. Cause I was pretty excited going I’ve been I’ve been there quite a few times but I was excited that I had a little down time with this meeting kinda walk around and boy I mean it’s yeah it’s a it’s a its’a not place I probably not like to live.JOSH TURANSKY: Yeah… CLINT CLIFTON: But I’m thankful that couple-minded people go move there but…JOSH TURANSKY: AmenJOSH TURANSKY: Yeah. It’s always amazes me that people will plant a church in such a dense area but then I think people probably think well I was nuts for planting in Baltimore so…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.JOSH TURANSKY: God give you grace to go to the place you’re called to yeah so.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah, He does.JOSH TURANSKY: This episode we’re gonna talk with Thabiti eh, Thabiti AnyabwileCLINT CLIFTON: JOSH TURANSKY: Did I did I pronounce that right?CLINT CLIFTON: That was like no not at allCLINT CLIFTON: It’s Thabiti uh commonlyJOSH TURANSKY: ThabitiCLINT CLIFTON: Commonly uhm you know messed up and uhm we talked about this just a little bit in the interview but, uhm ah Thabiti was born as Ron Burns which is so interesting people always asking where’s he from? And he answers North Carolina like he’s a uhm ethnically speaking standard uhm African-American born in North Carolina uh… JOSH TURANSKY: YeahCLINT CLIFTON: …with the name Ron Burns. And uhm, so his he’ll share some of his testament as to how he came to faith and or not didn’t came to faith excuse me. Converted to Islam and changes his name uhm…JOSH TURANSKY: Ah that’s rightCLINT CLIFTON: when he converted to Islam. And uhm so yeah. Fascinating man and like one of the most fascinating guys I’ve ever hung out with. Brilliant and that’s about itJOSH TURANSKY: He came on my radar. Sorry. He came on my radar when uhm, the black lives matter thing was going on and really hadn’t reached to uh a loud point. I think that was in 2015 and 2016. And he wrote uhm from his perspective as he was coming back from DC…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahJOSH TURANSKY: …and his concern about racial issues.CLINT CLIFTON: YeahJOSH TURANSKY: I think he wrote that on uh the Gospel Coalition website.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. Yeah he regularly writes on Gospel Coaltion. His probably one of the clearest voices in African-American Evangelical from an African-American Evangelical poppette perspective. He has a ministry called the front porch. Uh that’s ah you know writes and uh communicates uhm on social issues whole wide range of things and he’s he’s both brilliantly sort of kind of been pastoral and uhm sharp in his rebuke. You know in a way… JOSH TURANSKY: mhCLINT CLIFTON: …yeah its just a few people can pull off being that sharply uhm like you know exact with their rebukes. Ah but also, full of pastoral wisdom and kindness and gentleness. He’s very gentle man and uhm and his in a neighborhood in Washington that’s you know uhm no known you know for murder crimes and he went right into the thick of it and…JOSH TURANSKY: mhCLINT CLIFTON: …his really planted a fantastic church there called Anacostia River ChurchJOSH TURANSKY: Yeah wow powerful. So this is your interview that your did with him. You sat down with him had this discussion uhm let’s jump right into that right nowHave you ever had that experience of hearing a great idea? I mean a truly great idea and thinking “Oh! Why couldn’t that have been my idea?” Well I had that experience recently when I ran across a company called SpaceTogether. Now SpaceTogether was founded by a church planter and SpaceTogether is to the church world what AirBNB is to your family. It let’s you rent out your church spaces easily as AirBNB lets you rent out your home. You can rent out a part of the building for like a specific day and time or you can rent out the building in an ongoing way in a time where your facilities is under-utilized. And SpaceTogether has this great technology that helps you take under-utilized church space and create new opportunities for your congregation. Now exclusively for church planting podcast listeners SpaceTogether is offering a $1.00 posting fee. You can post your space on SpaceTogether for just $1.00 when you use the coupon code planter. And if you’re a church planter that needs space go on SpaceTogether and look at the places they’re offering and maybe you’ll find the perfect spot for your new church. You can learn more about SpaceTogether at the website spacetogether.comCLINT CLIFTON: Alright Pastor T thank you for joining me today. THABITI ANYBWILE: It’s good to be with you man. Thank you for having meCLINT CLIFTON: Yes so I wanna talk about your church planting journey at Anacostia River Church in Washington. But before we do that you have such an interesting back story do you mind uh sharing a little bit about where you came from? How you came to faith in Jesus?THABITI ANYBWILE: Mhm. Grew up in the barbecue capital of the world – Lexington, North Carolina. More pork barbecue than any place in the planetCLINT CLIFTON: Is that vinegar-based?THABITI ANYBWILE: Oh no. That’s Eastern North Carolina I’m from Lexington North Carolina …CLINT CLIFTON: Oh right. Okay. Oh okay so its tomato-based. Oh manTHABITI ANYBWILE: So we got Lexington in Dallas right. So It’s the good stuff. Uhm this is a civil war between me and my wife. She’s from Eastern North Carolina so uhm. But I grew up there small town, North Carolina, bible belt. Youngest of 8 children. Uhm, All I really knew and in uh about the faith was uhm when my older brothers was getting into trouble…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …they went to church.CLINT CLIFTON: OkayTHABITI ANYBWILE: Trying to get themselves together. CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: So church was a little bit more like rehab. CLINT CLIFTON: No.THABITI ANYBWILE: So uhm and and I saw that cycle of my older brothers in and out kinda of trouble and some moral reform and things of that sort.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm I got in trouble for the first time in my life really uhm as a rising junior in high school.CLINT CLIFTON: OkayTHABITI ANYBWILE: And uh had been like an ace student in a small-town athlete all that kind of stuff. And I thought “Oh man I’m in trouble. I don’t like this feeling. I’ve broken my mom’s heart. What should I do?” and a thought came to me ‘I should go to church.’CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: Go to this little church and I think the Gospel is pretty much assumed?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: and not made clear? And uh I attend that church for 3-4 months and I thought “Okay. I need to make this stick.” So I joined the church responded to an alter call still not understanding the Gospel. Uhm become a member of that little church in some ways being socialized into the church. Bur wasn’t Born Again.CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: And the outcome of that was uh a year or so later. Uhm I stopped attending. Went back to my sin. Uh went off to college angry young manCLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm there I met some Muslim men who introduced me to Islam. CLINT CLIFTON: Well.THABITI ANYBWILE: And converted to Islam. Practicing Muslim for about 4-5 years. CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: Before hearing the Gospel preached at a local church here in the DC area. My wife and I had miscarried our first child. A few months before Uhm Islam itself has started to crumble… CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …Uhm theologically for me. CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: So I had had to sort of moved to a period bouncing between Agnosticism and Atheism. CLINT CLIFTON: OkayTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm and were sitting in this little church and this pastor preaches uh an exposition Exodus 32CLINT CLIFTON: OkayTHABITI ANYBWILE: And it was a long Gospel. Uhm you know as he preached on idolatry from that golden passage. CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uh I had come to realize. Islam was idolatry and I was convicted…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …And he preached Christ from that passage and for the first time the Gospel clicked…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …made sense. By the spirits working my heart.CLINT CLIFTON: And why were you in DC?THABITI ANYBWILE: Came to visit my sister-in-law. CLINT CLIFTON: Oh you were just visiting.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uh we were. It was interesting After the miscarriage I was sitting in that home a lot of days when I should have been at work just really depressed. Because that had been the sort of the birth of that child had a become our hope…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: And uhm, and so we lost that baby and so we were then hopeless. And then we were away. Then this preacher comes on television. He had a regular show on B&T. And uh he’s just preaching and it’s like someone had rewritten the bible. So the Lord started drawing me by His word. And so we discovered that Temple Hills… CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …was just outside of DC southeast DC where were are now. And my sister-in-law lived here. So we decided to come and visit my sister-in-law and then go to that church in Sunday. And uh the Lord ah met us in that church. My wife and I both were converted that Sunday. CLINT CLIFTON: And was that Eric Cragnon at that time? Who was it at the time?THABITI ANYBWILE: No no no it’s a guy names John Cherry. CLINT CLIFTON: John CherryTHABITI ANYBWILE: No no no it’s a guy names John Cherry. He’s gonna be with the Lord now. His son is is pastoring the church currently. So yeah we were converted under Pastor Cherry’s uh preaching. And uh began to grow under his his teaching and preaching.CLINT CLIFTON: WowTHABITI ANYBWILE: VIa these things that the kids won’t remember the call cassette tapes. CLINT CLIFTON: cassette tapes.THABITI ANYBWILE: All that all that good stuff but that’s…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …but that’s how the Lord saved usCLINT CLIFTON: Were you brushed over the uh the uh time of Islam in your life. That was a prolonged period of time. How long… THABITI ANYBWILE: Spent 4-5 years. CLINT CLIFTON: 4-5 years and…THABITI ANYBWILE: Yeah.CLINT CLIFTON: …and the and you took your Islamic faith seriously.THABITI ANYBWILE: Yeah. Absolutely. So I was a bit of campus Saul.CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Because I had this experience in this little church that left me thinking Christianity was falseCLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm and so, I would describe myself as an enemy to the cause really. CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm zealous for Islam I lead uh at the time were a number of uhm college peers into Islam… CLINT CLIFTON: Oh.THABITI ANYBWILE: …was was zealous for the religion.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. So much so that you’ve changed your nameTHABITI ANYBWILE: Yeah…CLINT CLIFTON: ExactlyTHABITI ANYBWILE: Well that’s pretty typical to Muslim converts. CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm and I didn’t choose an Arabic attribute. Normally you would choose an Arabic attribute…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: But at the same time this was also the hayday of AfrocentrismCLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm so like my Lefie Ashanti, 91 barr Names most of your listeners would not know.CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: Who were in the late 80s and 90s at the forefront of Afrocentrism. And so the other thing that’s happening for me is I’m discovering sort of my own ethnic and racial…CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: …heritage. And so I chose the chose an African names.CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Thabiti is borrowed from the Arabic but is a Swahili name it means loosely translated a True man…CLINT CLIFTON: AhTHABITI ANYBWILE: An upright man. And Anyabwile means God has set me free. YeahCLINT CLIFTON: And so the the logistics going through your name change like that you were in CollegeTHABITI ANYBWILE: Mhm.CLINT CLIFTON: And so you talked to your family about that. You did that legally.THABITI ANYBWILE: I did.CLINT AND THABITI: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: It’s it’s scary how easily it is legally. At the time you go down to the courthouse file uh name change certificate…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: posted on the courthouse not its been going for 5 days. Come back get it stamped and now you’ve legally got a new name. CLINT CLIFTON: Wow.THABITI ANYBWILE: So I I think they should make it tougher than that CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: But at the time that that process was simple. It was interesting the whole period of Islam with my family. As I said I would’ve regarded as my family as as nominally Christian.CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm in my little town in North Carolina nobody never met a Muslim. You know and when I came home and talking about Islam. Uhm there was lots of kind of concerned curiosity.CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: My mom when she’d grow concerned like that she just kinda listens. I would I would learn years later that she just prayed for me…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …spent years praying for me. Ah my siblings as I said I was the youngest of 8 kids. Their love language public ridiculeCLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: So uhm my siblings were like “Oh you’re not gonna eat this pork-chop sandwich?” CLINT CLIFTON: Oh. YesTHABITI ANYBWILE: You know and so and so uh there were lots of ribbing got lower questions “Why do you this? What does this mean?”CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: that kind of thing. You know?CLINT CLIFTON: Do you think they saw it as phase? As a phase?THABITI ANYBWILE: Uh probably. My siblings probably thought of it more as a phase. But my mom I think mom took it seriously. CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: As I said my mom uh prayed uh faithfully for me. CLINT CLIFTON: Okay that’s interesting. I know there’s a lot to talk about in that category but uhm a few years ago you were pastoring a church in Grand Cayman Island…THABITI ANYBWILE: MhCLINT CLIFTON: …so tell us about that ministry. And why you decided to transition from that into church planting?THABITI ANYBWILE: Yeah went there 2006 with no return ticket. I mean you get called to serve in the Carribean you don’t plan to come back so... Uh lovely church there yeah Saint Seth the uh first Baptist church of Grand Cayman. And at the time was a membership of uh I don’t know 300 to 350 people. Uhm from probably 35 Nationalities. Very diverse church. Uh International church. Uhm loved the gospel, loved each other, loved the country. And so it was a sweet 8 years serving with the men there on the eldership. Serving with the saints there at the church. And as I said we didn’t, my wife and I didn’t go with the idea that this we’re gonna be here for couple years and come back…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …We went to live the rest of our lives there. My son was born there. So he would regard himself as a CaymanianCLINT CLIFTON: MhTHABITI ANYBWILE: In his in his heart. Uhm, but probably about we were there for 8 years probably ‘bout year 5 or 6.CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Through a set of interest things I found myself involved in uh I realized that some of what I thought was happening in a way of church planting and training guys for uh the ministry. In predominanty African-American context, wasn’t happening widely as I I had thought. CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: There was a lot more work adjacent to those contexts. But not a lot of work in those contexts. At least from my sort of theological kind of tribe.CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm and so that began a season of praying and fasting for me and my wife. And I committed to my elders there that ever I had a serious thought about doing something other than pastoring that church…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: … they’d be the first to know. So my wife and I had a relationship retreat at the end of which she asked me the money question She said, “If you’ve never pastored in a predominantly African-American context were you could do some of the things the Lord had called you to do… CLINT CLIFTON: Mh.THABITI ANYBWILE: …training guys and planting other churches and so on but you are faithful for the rest for your ministry. And you never did that, would you, would you regret it?CLINT CLIFTON: Mh.THABITI ANYBWILE: And it’s about 2 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday morning and I was half-sleeping when she asked the question. And I sat up straight in the bed wide awake and thought “Yeah. I would regret that.”CLINT CLIFTON: Wow.THABITI ANYBWILE: So that Monday I began contacting my elders and said, “I just had a serious thought.” CLINT CLIFTON: Mh.THABITI ANYBWILE: About maybe doing something different. And we spent about a year together. Uhm praying, thinking through the ministry there…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …Thinking through what it would mean to come plant some place else…CLINT CLIFTON: Mh.THABITI ANYBWILE: thinking about the neighborhood the Lord began to draw us to… CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: And so they were really the counsel of men who helped me discern the sense of calling…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …And that and at the end of that year, uhm they affirmed that sense of calling.CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm they were kind enough to say basically. “We would rather you stay here.”CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: “But we don’t detect any sin in your motives…”CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: “And we see the need that you see…”CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: “And we’ll be supportive if that what the Lord calls you to do.” And so yeah that’s how we wound up making the decision to come back States side. CLINT CLIFTON: And you came back to your community you’re from Washington. Uhm, tell our listeners that doesn’t know Anacostia about Anacostia.THABITI ANYBWILE: Yeah. It’s the part of Washington that they’ve never visitedCLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm Washington really is a tale of two cities.CLINT CLIFTON: Mh.THABITI ANYBWILE: A river runs through it. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Used all the clichés in the book title, right?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: The Anacostia River sort of divides what most people think of as Washington when you think of monuments and Capitol Hill and the white house…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: From the eastern and south-eastern part of the city. CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: which is entirely residential. Yeah it’s a food dessert…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm has no significant business industry to speak of. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Is 92%? 94% African-American… CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …would trail the rest of the city if the median income of the city is $92,000.00? I think it’s like $92,000.00 household income it’s like $92,000.00 median income in this part of the city. Minimum income in this city is $32,000.00. So this is the uh poor uhm section of the city…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …with all the problem that come with that. With density and poverty come crime, struggling schools all those kinds of things. Uhm so this is the neglected part of Washington DC. You know?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. And uhm what was it I know you said you wanted be in a primarily African-American community, but what was it about Anacostia specifically that made you come here? THABITI ANYBWILE: Yeah. Well its interesting. Southeast DC, Anacostia in particular, was going back to the 80s.,,CLINT CLIFTON: Mh.THABITI ANYBWILE: …when my sister-in-law lived in here, that was our introduction to DC…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. THABITI ANYBWILE: We knew nothing about the monuments…CLINT CLIFTON: Right. THABITI ANYBWILE: and anything of that sort. My sister-in-law lived in uh if you’re from DC you would notice a place lived in uh high-rise building called Mulberry Plaza on Good Hope road. Uhm and so we used to go visit her and get off the highway. Start immediately dodging the crater-sized potholes and make our way to Mulberry Plaza. This is back in the days where you need an invitation to come to the Southeast. It’s the height of the crack epidemic, the violence was out of control. Uhm, but their beautiful people who live here like my sister-in-law, right? And so we used to spend our time here in Southeast. This was back again late 80s and 90s. So when we fast forward 20 some years. When we started thinking about planting and asking the question where, people were making lots of suggestions. You know?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. THABITI ANYBWILE: ‘Why don’t you go to Charlotte? Or this place? Philadelphia da da da?’ And none of them seem to stick subjectively. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. THABITI ANYBWILE: And ironically, we had uh a couple come here from the Cayman Island. I had performed their weddings some years before. He’s from England. And he comes, and with his little soft British accent said “Have you thought about Anacostia?” And I’m thinking to myself “What do you know about Anacostia?” right?CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: But flares go off. And that might be it. And it’s interesting as time went on that though just began dominating my heart…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. THABITI ANYBWILE: with sense of Anacostia. This is where Fredrick Douglas made his home. CLINT CLIFTON: Yep. THABITI ANYBWILE: With rich history. Uhm this is in some ways, I would argue are the cultural capital of African-American DC.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. THABITI ANYBWILE: From Go-go music to mumbo sauce and all the things that Washingtonians love…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm, for all of its difficulties there’s just a lot of culture here…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. THABITI ANYBWILE: There’s a lot of richness here. There’s a lot of historical heritage here. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: And wonderful people here. And so our heart just began to be drawn inexorably towards Anacostia. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. But for a church planter. And the experience I have with church planters you are way over the age than what’s expected. I mean you have…THABITI ANYBWILE: that’s a very polite way of calling me old I appreciate that. CLINT CLIFTON: …and uh kids and their teens. And uhm you look living uh living a presumably comfortable life in uh in Cayman that transition couldn’t have been easy.THABITI ANYBWILE: Well, God’s just been gracious with us. Uhm, it’s been hardest for my son who was born in the Cayman Islands. Who only knew is flip-flops and shorts and snorkeling and beaches. I mean that was uh, that was his life and he loved it. His a bougie kind of kid. CLINT CLIFTON: THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm He knew nothing about States, and life here. And certainly nothing of an inner city and the problems here. So, he’s the one who’s had the hardest transition…CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: back in the States. The girls have lived here before in DC…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm. THABITI ANYBWILE: Capitol Hill. We were in a different church and so on. So they had uh, we left when they were 6 and 8. Came back and they’re like uhm, 14 15.CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm. THABITI ANYBWILE: But they had some categories.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm, so they adjusted a bit better. Uhm, but God’s been gracious to us. So the sense of of things being hard, uhm have been met with God’s kindness. And we haven’t felt as as I’m sure many other folks would sometimes feel and that sort. So we hadn’t felt sort of uhm, the hardest things. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: I mean you’ve showed up uhm on a morning to do this conversation. My staff literally two blocks from the office… CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …just witnessed a shooting and a man bleeding in the street. Alright, so hard stuff has been happening all the time all around us. But God has comforted us. And been kind to us. And that sense of being in the middle of His calling?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Has just given us great liberty and great security even in the midst of a lot of hard things. CLINT CLIFTON: I guess if there’s a person listening would you address them to call to plant and they’d be wrestling with a call to plant in a place that’s hard for them to imagine them and their family being happy. And what would you have to say to them?THABITI ANYBWILE: Yeah man, Clint Imma tell you what, part of what scared me in the Cayman Islands.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uh in that process of discerning whether or not to stay or not?CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: It became really clear to me that I could stay and be really comfortable…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …and that there’d be no challenges there. And nobody prodding me along spiritually to grow. Uhm, and that seemed to be a slow pleasant path…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …to a potential kind of spiritual deathCLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm so I was quickened by the idea that I shouldn’t need to be where my own soul sank.CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: In a place that made me live in a more lean way…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: uhm that broke the tentacles of the world…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …off of my affections and desires. That if I wanted to live in comfort, I was living for the long thing…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …and If I were living at the expense of Gospel proclamation in communities that needed the Gospel…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …uhm, then I was doing a sinfully selfish thingCLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm and so, the Lord just dealt with me and my heart in those ways… CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm. YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …and uhm and and so the idea coming as an older guy to plant a church in a tough neighborhood when I could’ve chosen uhm a softer path if you will. That that didn’t feel like any sacrifice to me because I needed it for my own soul…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …And I was convinced because of the reality of Hell and judgment…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …that it needed to be done. You know? In in all kinds of communities. But in in this community that we felt called to especially. CLINT CLIFTON: Did it take convincing with your wife and children?THABITI ANYBWILE: No that that my son was the slowest to get he was like “Why are we doing this?” Yeah. CLINT CLIFTON: How old was he?THABITI ANYBWILE: He was 6 at the timeCLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: You know? So he’s now the classic third culture kid…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …in between and and not really at home. But he took convincing. Uhm, but no my wife’s all-in men. And my wife will go through a wall for the Lord…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …and for the Gospel. And so, we shared this sense of calling that to us was affirmation. But I’ll tell you the other thing uhm planting as an older guy…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …Right? When you planted as a younger guy there’s a sense of which much of your life is still being aimed at uhm, stability and security and a sense of arriving.CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: …You planted an older guy you you’ve been living on that plain for a little bit.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Right? And you’re looking around and thinking “Okay is this it?” Uhm and, and I think out of that maybe older guys ought to have a clearer sense of what’s eternally important? CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm and older guys ought to have maybe a more settled maturity that keeps them from being fattish…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …or easily discouraged or other things. CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: That maybe younger guys fail. So actually, we need more older guys planting churches. Uhm and maybe given the last 10 15 years of their ministry. Uhm to getting new work started in a way that hopefully gives them balances and ballast.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah that’s really good. I I have planted unwisely when I was 24 years old. I was unprepared in so many ways. And uhm, tourists have kind of been ingracious to me, and I grew through out the process but uhm I’ve told guys over and over again if I had to do it I certainly would have spent a lot more time uhm, preparing and sort of sharpening the axe so to speak, getting ready but the, we don’t have many uhm church planters in your age category. But the ones that are in your age category are more effective free-fall church planters. Yeah, generally speaking. And uh, definitely less tossed about the kind of difficulty struggles that come along with church planting. They’re more sober minded what they’re going into.THABITI ANYBWILE: I pray so. I hope so. But hopefully you’ve workedyou’re your theological commitments…CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: …you’ve worked out your ministry, philosophy, you know you’ve you’ve done that you know, in the ministry perhaps someplace else. Uhm, you’ve you’ve walked through the ups and downs of of caring for people Pastorally. And uh you perhaps then have a more well-formed sense of you’re not just church planting but your Pastor planting. You know you’re trying to put a Pastor in a context to build a church and hopefully that gives the work that more stability uhm just borne out of experience and hopefully some wisdom from experience. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. So on the issue of sort of race in the church when you think about when you spend a lot of your days right now influencing, teaching, writing to, speaking to primarily to white Pastoral audience. What do we, what do we need to know here, understand uhm about the current racial situation and our role as Pastors that we that we don’t understand.THABITI ANYBWILE: That’s a good question. Uhm, I’m reading Thomas Kidd’s new book right now who is an Evangelical. And uh, part of what that book is illustrating is that our racial problems are not new problems.CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: That Evangelicalism as a movement uh, has always in some sense multi-Ethnic (?)CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: But it’s always also been complicated by uhm racial fault lines, racial sins, racial misunderstanding and so on. So you know, Whitfield can you know? Lead revivals…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …and convince State Legislators to uhm, enact slavery, and build plantations, build orphanages using slave labor. Well that crack you know in the foundations, right there from the beginning. CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: And so part of what I would say to those pastors is man, read some good books on the issue. Thomas Kidd’s books is a great book uhm, Mark Knowles and David Bevington editor series on Evangelicalism 4-5 volumes…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …History of Evangelicalism. They do a good job in treating some of these issues especially Mark Knowles 2nd volume as a walk through that history. Uhm be honest about the history let the history inform us, it’s meant to be a blessing to us…CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: …not a threat. That’s the first thing I would say. Second thing I would say is uhm, try to learn not to bristle at unpleasant news and messages that are made to you to try and help you understand how other people are feeling and and engaging things. So for example if someone talks to you about privilege or White privilege don’t get offended by the labelling…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …try to understand what the other person is saying… CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …Try to enter into the experience and to see without, without again bristling at the label to see okay are they articulating a truth here? CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: What specifically is true? What might be off? What might be accurate? How should I benefit from them? So just sort of acquire a humble posture…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …of receiving. You know, hard truth. CLINT CLIFTON: Sort of a fundamental Christian posture.THABITI ANYBWILE: That’s exactly right. Years ago I heard Joel McArthur said “Hard truth makes soft people.” CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: Now if that’s true, and I think it is. It’s true not just when were talking generally about the Gospel…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …its true when were saying hard things to each other about other topics too.CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm and so, to receive that as a wound of a friend…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: It creates softness were there hadn’t been. So I would say that humble posture of receiving hard things. But I mean you agree with everything… CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …but try to listen well. Uhm, and then last thing I would say is. There’s a sense in which where were well pass the sell by date… CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …on quote-unquote conversations or the race conversations. Uhm, commit yourself to be a person of action. CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: Right? So commit yourself to dealing some hard things perhaps. CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: And often times they’re only hard because of privilege. Because of being accustomed of being in control or being the majority or whatever the case maybe. But commit yourself to doing those things. CLINT CLIFTON: Could you give me an example of of...THABITI ANYBWILE: Yeah I’m thinking of a church right now where it’s revealing its entire collection of processes and culture and thinking about “Okay were were people are hearing from our church family about where ethnic minorities feel comfortable, where they feel alienated, where they feel like they have access or don’t have access and and what are we doing to address that…?” CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …beyond sort of platitudes or general messages. How does that inform our hiring process…CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm.THABITI ANYBWILE: …So say we want a diversified church, what are we doing to diversify the staff? I mean really what actions are we taking?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm, in this particular church has a school and other so they’re just working through all of the ministries that hard conversation that really is about asking the next question or what do we do? What do we, how do we actually put shoe leather to this? And that it’ll look different for different churches. And I’m just sort of pressing the point about let’s get beyond the conversation. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: and say if this is a 300-year-old problem dating back to Whitfield and others…CLINT CLIFTON: MhmTHABITI ANYBWILE: Uh, we should probably have more progress under our beltCLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uh, and let’s be the generation that actually makes somes progress that makes some action and some risk in that way. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. That’s really helpful thank you for saying that. So going back to the church planting itself. The church is rooted now, how long how long you’ve been doing this?THABITI ANYBWILE: So it’ll be 5 years in April. Rooted rooted feels generous but I’ll take it. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. I know it feels fragile but really but in church planting terms you’re rootedTHABITI ANYBWILE: Mhm.CLINT CLIFTON: And so uhm, you’ve made the decision to lead the church to multiply early. I think in your like 2 or 3 years…THABITI ANYBWILE: Mhm.CLINT CLIFTON: you guys sent out a church planter…THABITI ANYBWILE: Mhm.CLINT CLIFTON: …just just in the city here. Walk us through making a decision like that.THABITI ANYBWILE: Mhm. Well we wanted to make planting churches to be in our DNA CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: and so uh from the start we’ve had a missions budget that’s included International missions and uhm planting. So in that first year we actually contributed to another church plan uh financially in in Philadelphia CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Uhm, when we started church we had a Pastor an elder with us Jeremy McClain CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Who lived in Northeast DC just a couple of street. Very similar neighborhood as ours. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: He’s had a long ministry on this side of the river. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Running after school program and so on. And he’s been bleeding for a church in that neighborhood. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: And uhm, and we so like yeah we want to be planting in neighborhoods like this around the city and the country. Uhm and so through partnership with McClain Bible and Jeremy sense of calling with let’s about year 2 let’s go ahead and plant a new work.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: And uhm, and so it felt it felt right to us. It felt like what the folks in Acts might have done.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: And say Hey the Gospel is needed over there. Hey come help us over here. Uhm and let’s send, let’s send a team. ‘Cause we had about 8-9 people who lived in that neighborhood…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: …and another 3-4 who were willing to move to do that work. And uhm so we thought that okay that might be enough of a team to get a new gospel word started there. And uh, through that partnership with McClain, Jeremy’s calling, that team’s calling. We were privileged to send them off uhm going on about 2 years ago now.CLINT CLIFTON: Mhm. Most Pastors would have had the impulse or church planters would have the impulse or the thought or maybe advice for others that would have said “Yeah, maybe you should plant churches but maybe not on the 1st year 2 to 3 years. Uh so certainly you thought that uh…THABITI ANYBWILE: …and they maybe right they maybe wise. But for us you know it was like. We want to see the Gospel multiply. Not just our main membership.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: Right. So if there’s a choice keeping 12 more people here. Right ‘cause were talking about 12-15 people here…CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: And seeing a regular gospel witness form in a neighborhood that needs another one. Okay that’s a no brainer for me.CLINT CLIFTON: Right. Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: We want to see that witness form because we want to see that gospel multiplyCLINT CLIFTON: You say, you say it like it’s a no brainer but You and I both know most Pastors don’t think like that.THABITI ANYBWILE: Welll well it is because we’re selfish and insecure. Right?CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah.THABITI ANYBWILE: You know, and I have it in my heart at times too. We’re like uh, again Jeremy’s a Pastor with us. We only had three.CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: Right? So we’re going to lose a pastor…CLINT CLIFTON: Right.THABITI ANYBWILE: We’re going to lose 12 other folks Uhm in a town where it’s hard to do ministry.CLINT CLIFTON: Yep. THABITI ANYBWILE: You feel like you need to have every hands on deck. On one level you do.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. THABITI ANYBWILE: And as a new plant You feel like okay every new member gets us that much closed to being rooted and being established. Why would you send them off, till certain metrics are ticked. Well because in God’s economy you know ,right? It’s giving, it’s investing, it’s dying it’s planting that seed that actually gets multiplied. And so it becomes a question of Faith. And whether were living by faith. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah. That’s very John 12. Sort of sit down. THABITI ANYBWILE: Yeah that’s right. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah yeah that’s encouraging to hear. I see more and more Pastors I’m encouraged by. See more and more church plants while buying early.CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah yeah that’s encouraging to hear. I see more and more Pastors I’m encouraged by. See more and more church plants while buying early. And statistically speaking, you don’t know how much weight we put into this sort of thing. But churches don’t multiply in their first 5 years are very unlikely. They’re never multiply and you know I think about our church we we tried to we attempted to plant early. And sometimes failed…THABITI ANYBWILE: Mhm. CLINT CLIFTON: and sometimes exceeded. THABITI ANYBWILE: Mhm. CLINT CLIFTON: And uhm but uhm every time we attempted to plant we learn something about doing it a little bit better. And certainly stretched and grew our faith congregations caused us to focus on kingdom issue rather than local issues.THABITI ANYBWILE: Amen.CLINT CLIFTON: …in a way that was really healthy for our church. I think it trained us in a good way. I hope that’s trueTHABITI ANYBWILE: I think that’s spot on. I think that’s been our experience too right?.uhm and that and that willingness to try and say a church succeed and sort of walk away with your tail between your legs discouraged. We go like Nope. Were going to keep trying and pleading with the Lord the blessings. CLINT CLIFTON: Yep. THABITI ANYBWILE: that’s been life giving to us and every time we’ve sent you know people away, the Lord has added. The Lord has brought more folks. Its almost as if His saying “If you’ll be faithful with a little I’ll make you faithful over much. CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: that’s been life giving to us and every time we’ve sent you know people away, the Lord has added. The Lord has brought more folks. Its almost as if His saying “If you’ll be faithful with a little I’ll make you faithful over much.” Right? Which is right out from the scripture. CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: So that’s been our experience too. We were joyous as a church to see them go off. But there was some of our dearest friends. So we also wept, uhm but between mad and supporting missionaries early on. We sent out first short term team to Mombasa Kenya, were about a year and a half old. Uhm and so, seeing missions teams go off and things of that sort. Uhm, its just gave us a heightened sense of the Lord’s at work here. CLINT CLIFTON: YeahTHABITI ANYBWILE: And good things are happening here even before we thought they would and you know isn’t that wonderful? Let’s ask for more. CLINT CLIFTON: Yeah thanks. Uh, Pastor T, would you mind closing today by praying for the church planters who are listening and would you send them and strengthen them?THABITI ANYBWILE: I would be happy to. Father we thank you so much for raising up men to herald your gospel. For sending us into the world to make Jesus known to the flourishes of preaching. We believe that the flourishes of teaching is Your power and that the Gospel is Your power to save all those who believe. Lord in, uhm, new and bustling suburban communities and hard scrapple, inner city, neighborhoods, rural areas yes Lord and everything in between, we praise You for the power of Your gospel to convert and to build a church. And we just pray that you would encourage those whom you have called. You would give them confidence for their calling. We pray that you would give them. Wisdom and in some cases perhaps beyond their years in their experience. You give them a subtleness oh Lord in the truth of your scripture. And that you would quicken older men and older women to go out on church planting teams and to uh add Lord the blessings of experience uhm, to your work. Do all these things for your glory and for the spread of the good news and uh The salvations of the nations we pray. Bless the work of name. Bless the work of Nham, bless the work of the News City Network, bless Clint in his work and encouraging in equipping planters raise up a legion of Gospel uhm driven sold-out men and women to take the good news to the nations we pray. In Jesus name Amen CLINT CLIFTON: Amen. Thanks PastorALBERT: Where do church planters come from? Well they don’t come from seminaries and they don’t come from a factory. Church Planters come from congregations. Their developed by Pastors who love and are prepared for Gospel ministry and sent out. But many churches don’t know where to begin and many Pastors are overwhelmed with the day to day duties of Pastoral ministry and don’t have time to put together a robust training program for the people in their congregation to be equipped. The North American Nation Board is helping with this. They have developed a thing called the Multiplication Pipeline. And it’s a three-level training course that takes place through multiple years for you to have the material and the guidance to get somebody in your congregation ready for church planting. The Multiplication Pipeline is available on Nhams’ website, you can find it at nham.net/pipeline.ALBERT: Thank you for listening to the church planting podcast. Don’t forget to subscribe and leave a review of your favorite podcast today.Today’s episode of the church planting podcast is sponsored by News City Network, The Church Planting Ministry of McClain Bible. A special thanks to todays guest Garrett Kell for taking time to join us. Josh Turansky produces todays show. Zukey Bastien was our show runner and her husband Nick was our editor. Thanks to Hudson Turansky and Marvin Moore who provided administrative and web support for the program and last but not least thanks to you for listening through to the end of the church planting podcast. Hey if you’d like to know more information about the show visit our brand-new website www.churchplantingpodcast.org. There you can see past episodes as well as notes as links for today’s show. And be sure to tune in next week our guest will be Svava who happens to be the master of the gift.

Dr. Kevin Smith leads the staff of the Baptist Convention of Maryland/Delaware. He has experience as a pastor, chaplain, church planter, conference speaker, and short-term missionary. He has studied at Hampton University, the Church of God Theological Seminary, and The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, subsequently serving on Southern’s faculty for over a decade. In 2015, while serving the Highview Baptist Church in Louisville (KY), he was elected president of the Kentucky Baptist Convention. Kevin and his wife, Patricia, have three adult children and two great-nephews. His hobbies include whatever sports his kids were playing and riding his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. His ministry is animated by Jesus’ prayer for the unity of His followers in John 17.Clint’s Church Planting Book: Church Planting ThresholdsTranscriptAlbert Miller: This is the church planning podcast. Thank you for tuning in every week We sit down with leaders who are shaping church planning efforts. Here's your host Josh Turansky and Clint Clifton.Josh Turansky: Hey, welcome to the church planting podcast. My name is Josh Turansky and I'm joined here by Clint Clifton back in the studio Clint Clifton: back in the old Studio. Hey, Josh, how you doing today? I'm doing well. Yeah, how are you doing? I am good really good. Yeah a little bit little bit sick of traffic and Washington and Baltimore where we live.They there's a lot of traffic in this Zone Josh Turansky: there is there's four million people between. DC and Baltimore, I think Clint Clifton: between the two cities? I think seven million in DC and two million in Baltimore. Josh Turansky: yeah two million in Baltimore. Clint Clifton: Yeah. There's a lot of people. We're talking 10 million in the region. Yeah, something like that. Josh Turansky: Wow. It's yeah, it's a lot. So you have written a book on church planting. This is something you've been deeply invested in for most of your life. Yeah, your vocation is church planting. Clint Clifton: So yeah the book really flowed out of the fact that in the church I planted had been planting churches and the guys that were being raised out of the congregation were receiving call the church planting inside my church, were looking to their Pastor to tell them how to do it. And so I would set up a meeting with them. I’d say hey man, let's meet up. I'll teach you how to plant a church. Of course, I didn't know how to tell them how to plant a church. But before that meeting I would have to prepare and so I would just write write stuff up. So I ended up, over the course of the few years with different Church Planters writing specific lessons for that individual person in mind, you know, and that ended up with a little bit more than 40 articles about various subjects the related to church planting. I remember one of the articles was called was called “Johnny the Church Planting Pirate” I just had like these funny for them and they were all on just lessons I learned in church planting - things that I wish I didn't know when I got started. And and they were more practical than they were biblical. I don't mean that to say that they weren't biblical but It was really “just in time” kind of practical training. So anyway, those articles developed into what now is Church Planting Thresholds.So we condensed those articles into ten stages of the church planning process. It starts with calling trying to figure out if you're really called to plant a church in it. Finishes up with multiplication. The the intended purpose. Is that a pastor who wanted to disciple someone in his congregation to plant a church would have a guide to do that with. Throughout the book there are these rectangular boxes in the book and it says, “do this thing now” I was just try to be as practical as possible. You need to overcome this barrier right now. Josh Turansky: Yeah. Now it's a good resource for guys that are out there and that's problem kind of with church planting resources they're not practical and so… Church Planting Thresholds. We’ll share a link to it in the show notes this week. Clint Clifton: There's an audio version of it. There is a Spanish version and a Russian and Amharic version on their way. We're trying to make it available as much as possible and nobody's making any money off the book. We're using all the proceeds to help start churches. And so I just use it liberally will give it away liberally. So just any way we can be helpful to you. Let us know. Josh Turansky: great. Okay, let's talk a little bit about this episode. In this episode you interview Kevin Smith. What's his title? He's like the president of the BCM/D.Clint Clifton: He's the executive director of the BCM/D which is the Baptist Convention of Maryland and Delaware and I feel like this is the time where all the podcast listeners tune out like, “oh a denominational guy” we don't want to hear this. Josh Turansky: Hmm. I hope not. I'm about to this guy Kevin Smith is awesome. Clint Clifton: He is awesome.Josh Turansky: Yeah, and he marches to the beat of his own drum. Clint Clifton: Yes. It does. Josh Turansky: If you follow him on Instagram, you see he drives his Harley around. Clint Clifton: He's a middle-aged African-American man who preaches like nobody's business and he's a fantastic preacher and he drives a Harley. Josh Turansky: But there is there is that push back out there about denominations. I have people that come to my church and then and they say well I was looking for a church that was non-denominational. Denominations have kind of have been seen in a bad light more recently. So so make a pitch for it.Clint Clifton: Yeah. Well, I mean forget the word denomination, just go back to Christianity. Is their biblical precedent for Christians working together you to plant churches and to spread the gospel? President for having compassion on the poor and the vulnerable and the orphan and the Widow? Should Christians do that only in their local church, or should they do that with other Christians? Who share their convictions? Well, obviously almost all of us would say, yes! for sure. You should do that with other Christians. Well, that is what our denomination is. I mean and yeah, granted, denominations have, at times gone off the rails they've done crazy things but the age of denominations is not dead.It's manifesting itself in a new ways with networks and other things but it's definitely not dead. I would argue that it's thriving. Josh Turansky: The denomination that Kevin Smith is a part of. And where he's got a leadership role is not so much about control as much as it's about collaboration.Clint Clifton: It's about collaboration specifically for a mission. A collaboration around the Great Commission. In fact, to be accurate, the Southern Baptist convention as an organization only exists for that one purpose, to collaborate around the Great Commission.Josh Turansky: Yeah, well good.Hopefully the listener gets a lot out of this episode this conversation and I would recommend follow Kevin Smith on Instagram. Clint Clifton: He's a great Twitter follow too. I don’t know if Twitter still thing people use today. He’s super funny and he goes off on rant sometimes about various things. He's real socially aware, but he's also gospel minded.Josh Turansky: He’s definitely got some good input. Especially on races race issues that's not what he's harping on but he's a good voice and if you're a white guy living in the suburbs, planting in the suburbs, pastoring in the suburbs, and maybe your friends are all white you need to follow Kevin's on Twitter.Commercial: Hey Church Planters. Your calling is to plant a church, but churches are also a business auxiliary partners with you to provide one time and ongoing Business Services. Enabling you to stay focused on Mission visit auxilio Partners to learn more about the finances HR and legal compliance services offered and schedule a free consultation. That's auxilio.partners. Mention the church planting podcast to receive a 20% discount.Clint Clifton: Dr. Kevin Smith. Thank you for being with me on the podcast. Dr. Kevin Smith: My pleasure brother. Appreciate you very much. Clint Clifton: Yes, so you have an interesting background and you're just an interesting character in The SBC altogether. There's so many interesting things about you. So I just want to talk about some of those things.So can you can you tell us a little bit about how you got to this situation and that you're in right now? Dr. Kevin Smith: Yes, probably. Almost 28 years ago. Now I desired to plant a church in a public housing development area in Chattanooga, Tennessee and other local pastors that I knew a particular Southern Baptist pastor was the main one who kind of responded with some interest in church planting.Clint Clifton: So we're you telling baps before that. Dr. Kevin Smith: I'll Church a church. I was ordained in was duly aligned with the Southern Baptist convention and the National Baptist convention. Kind of more culturally National Baptist. But in that particular moment now remember talk about 28 years ago church planting is like a buzzword now, it wasn't 28 years ago.And so this Southern Baptist pastor was the only person I knew was talking about church planting and the Tennessee baps convention in North American Mission board had a wonderful partnership. And we planted there in Chattanooga Tennessee Okay, Morris Hill Baptist Church was I'll send the horses sponsor church at that time was the terminology and we were in partnership with the Tennessee baps convention and just went back recently celebrated the 20th anniversary of that church plant.Yes, sir. Clint Clifton: And what was the church plant called Dr. Kevin Smith: love? Baptist church, and we were over in the southeast part of Chattanooga Tennessee, which is my wife's home went from there and doctoral studies at Southern Seminary and then teaching at Southern for well over a decade Clint Clifton: you planted before you went and did your doctor.Dr. Kevin Smith: Yes. Okay. Yes. I was doing my m.div at the Church of God Theological Seminary. So I've got a little Pentecostal spicing me. I have better pneumatology than most Baptist. Then we went to pasture while I was in Louisville past it Watson Memorial Baptist Church about a then probably about a 60 year old historically black congregation brought them in the southern Baptists life out of.Conviction theological conviction and also belief that kind of miss the illogical methodology to reach the nation's with the gospel. Then with the High View Baptist Church as teaching Pastor large mostly white church and African-American in the pulpit and we just had a good time there then had the opportunity to come to Maryland Delaware believe it or not as a pastor.I've always appreciated and always participated at committees and things and state commission life. Life Wayne am everything, but I said, you know, I would never be one of those denominational Geeks and three years ago. I became one of those denominational Geeks the executive director of the Baptist Convention of Maryland, Delaware.We're about 500 plus churches different languages every Sunday probably little bit under 40 different languages are spoken in the Baptist convention, Maryland, Delaware. We had we are a Sin City is within our midst which is Baltimore. If you're not familiar or send cities are our church planting emphasis as Southern Baptist in the 32 largest metro areas in the US population wise we need to add Orlando in.And then I was also we're also bumping up right next door to another Sin City, which is Washington DC our nation's capital. We love the work. I became a denominational nerd because I really. Thrive in like every Kendrick tribe tongue and nation and so how can you take 500 churches different languages different ethnic makeup within the congregation Merlin has some of the wealthiest counties in the country and Maryland has some areas of sharp Parvati.So how do you take all that in Maryland Delaware to States and have a unified Cooperative effort of sharing the gospel in Maryland, Delaware and Beyond to the nation. And so that's why we're here and that's what we're seeking to do. Yeah. Clint Clifton: Why did you why did you start your career out in church planting are your ministry out in church planting?What was it about church planting than originally attracted Dr. Kevin Smith: you.Some of the churches I've been in and then church today. I served briefly had a very insular kind of mindset that fact. I served the church where people use of criticized the congregation for having the attitude of us for no more. And then also there's kind of a sometimes as a success kind of element within American Christianity, which means I want more people but also, A larger budget more money and so it's the gospel is good news to everyone including the poor.I was just real burden for like a congregational life this not just driven by giving units and economic models, but believing that the gospel is for anyone those kind of Errors work are characterized by welfare. Unwed mothers irresponsible guys kind of hanging around the perimeter. And before then I had before I was a pastor.I was a chaplain in the jail. So I've always had a heart for like individuals that I think. Wanting to be successful congregations don't necessarily see how them and so I think the gospel is for everyone. And so we can't have a class element to American Christianity and that was my burden regarding church planting Clint Clifton: but thinking about your context the African-American church context the idea of a young aspiring Pastor going out and planting a church.That Dr. Kevin Smith: was that was foreign Clint Clifton: it well in my mind. You probably received a lot of pushback. Dr. Kevin Smith: Yes. Oh, yeah, I think sometimes churches that have not engaged. I mean there were other churches on the in the areas of this public housing development, but that development wasn't necessarily on their mind all the time or giving priority in their Outreach and then sometimes like.Charges just weren't willing to do whatever it took to reach those people that were in that area particularly people that don't have a church background. Yeah, and so we can't be as traditional as we are used to being and we just had a tremendous burden in a core group of people who desire to reach that area with the gospel some who have grown up in that area and moved out and moved on and some who were from that area and just desired to see a gospel witness in that area.Yeah. Clint Clifton: Well you are. Known for being a pretty clear and outspoken voice on all sorts of matters racial matters. Basically, you just speak your mind on a variety of matters yet. You keep getting elevated and denominational. I for two positions will why is that? What is it? What is it? You know, why can so many other guys that would speak as candidly as you do get.Kind of criticized sharply and shut down and Dr. Kevin Smith: I think one thing is I try as best. I can when we're engaging tough issues. If we're going to convict the consciences of fellow Christians. I think we need biblical language and use biblical categories. And so I tried to address heart issues. In biblical category.So the culture our culture talks about race outer culture talks about racial wreck. I'll culture has a lot of ways of addressing tensions between people of different colors. Where as I've come into those conversations and Ephesians 4. Verse 3 when Paul says Endeavor to keep the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace.And so I want to challenge God's people to do whatever it takes to push forward towards Christian Unity that thing that Jesus prayed for in John chapter 17, so I want to be overly an extremely and rudely biblical and making hard arguments to God's people because I think the word of God and the spirit of God Christ are the only things that will convict our conscience for example.In the areas of class. I want to talk about the way people work together in Acts chapter 2 whether they had a lot or whether they had a little like right now people are barking about what categories you use to understand. Justice in a society or some people. What do you mean by social justice, so I don't like the term social justice of screw all that.Jesus said in the great command love your neighbor. So in your particular Ministry contacts, how are you following that and obeying that one as a follower of Jesus Christ? And if your pastor to how are you leading your congregation to corporately do that. I mean, I don't want to like spend all day whining about categories and languages.Let's use the scripture. And use biblical categories. So however, you term it Jesus said love your neighbor. However, you term it God said in the Old Testament sometimes Israel was acting righteously, sometimes they were acting unrighteously, sometimes they were acting justly sometimes they were acting unjustly.Tickly as regards how they were dealing with the poor. And so I think the best way to have hard conversations as root yourself. In biblical language biblical categories. I'm thankful for the insights of what we would call a common Grace sources scholarship sociology research all those kind of things but we're trying to convict the conscience of a brother or sister.We need to use Clear biblical categories and biblical language Clint Clifton: that's helpful using biblical categories. But when I think about you, I mean I can think of other examples of people who use biblical language biblical categories when they talk yet somehow they're there. Incredibly offencive showing its there's something about you that you can you found that place where you can say the river very hard thing and you can say a very directly usable categories and somehow your received with warmth.Dr. Kevin Smith: I think that's from just being a pastor. Yeah as a pastor of a congregation you're trying to build up God's disciples. You are not trying to win an argument. I think sadly too many brothers. When I say Brothers, I'm still gonna like pastel leaders and just influence by like cable news and the broken dysfunctional bipartisan mess in Washington DC rather than Shepherd like Tendencies of the Lord Jesus Christ or even the way Paul or John or Peter or James with a dress and exhort the.We come into these describe pray we come in these discussions as pastors as Christian leaders seeking to exhort brothers and sisters. And then if we engage in an unbeliever, we come as Witnesses of Christ hoping to gain the hearing of an unbeliever not just to win an argument or offend them. I mean, I'm in Ubers a lot.I'm on airplanes a lot. I mean coffee shops. I go to Harley rallies. I've never seen anyone like bow their knee. And repent to Christ because I won an argument, right? Oh, I show them how their argument was stupid or wrong. People are one to Christ when we highlight Christ Lift Up Christ and extend that offer to them.So I think I hope the pastel sensibilities really leave me in that way, I think about you know, Older sisters that I've passed it. Yeah. Older men that I've pastored young ladies young men. I think both those relationship dynamics of Paul with Timothy treat the older men as father's older women as mothers and younger women with younger women as sisters with all Purity.And so I just try to be mindful of those things. Clint Clifton: Yeah, so there are 42 if I remember right State conventions. Yes in the Southern Baptist convention are. The only African-American leader, I am of those Dr. Kevin Smith: I am a while back the. State exec and California was from Central America and he has resigned but I'm probably I think I'm the first you know.United States of America black afro negro type leader in that setting so, you know, I love of a fully and truly. Southern Baptist convention there was the African-American leader of the District of Columbia Baptist convention, but that's more of a conglomerate of a lot of soup rather than like a Southern Baptist convention.Clint Clifton: Well what has kept you engaged in southern Baptists life as an African American whose convictional clear on racial issues. Certainly, you see some of the problems in the SBC what has kept you engaged Dr. Kevin Smith: just that burden for Jesus prayer in John 17 that his disciples would be one so that the world may know that you have sent me if American Christianity is always from colonial era till now characterized by racial divisions ethnic divisions.Sometimes class divisions. I think that just undercuts our witness to the Gospel of Jesus Christ. That little purpose statement. They are really weighs heavy on me Father. May they be one as you and I are one so that the world may know that you have sent me. I mean we'll have thousands Southern Baptist over here.The annual meeting will be talking about missions and America we talk about missions to the ends of the Earth and a lack of Christian Unity that Grieves the spirit undercuts that mission. Yeah, and so that's why I'm here. I mean, I understand I'm thankful for the seven. Historic black denominations the United States methodists Baptists and Church of God in Christ Pentecostal and I understand how they exist because they came about in the 19th century and the end of the 18th century just because of the racial Strife in our country and I understand why they still exist because they're still racial strife and our country, but me as an individual follower of Jesus Christ.I'm really burdened by John 17 and Ephesians 4. And those are kind of the motivating passages for how I think about engaging the larger body of Christ. Clint Clifton: So talk to the young African-American church planter Pastor that is on The Fringe of association with the SBC and really doesn't think he wants to be involved.Dr. Kevin Smith: What I would say is number one in many scenarios you able to plan. That church because of the Cooperative efforts of Southern Baptist with guava program and I landed strong Antioch strong Easter offering number two.It is so she national level or stay conventional level. There are relationships that you could lean into that would be very edifying and encouraging to you. You know one thing I try to tell people think about the math is 46 thousand plus southern baptist churches. So I mean, it's got to be like crazy uncles and weird cousins, but there's so many other people that would be such an encouragement and.Encouragement to in building up for you. For example, I mean there are over 4,000 congregations in Southern Baptist convention there like mostly African-American or mostly Mexican or mostly Korean or agents. I mean, there's a lot of congregations lot of passes a lot of leaders where you can find great and wonderful fellowship and that's a last of all we all want to encourage each other to the ends of the Earth.I mean, I'm black and people use the terminology African American so I'm concerned about. The gospel on the continent of Africa, especially when corrupt things like the Prosperity Gospel from the pits of hell. I'll try to have influence in Africa. So through the international Mission board my baby, even I have a three-year partnership with the Baptist Convention of Kenya we're able to be in all kinds of countries on the African continent.So if you're concerned about the gospel, if you're concerned about church planting if you want partnership you want other people to be able to push you in those Endeavors. I'm very thankful for. I'll missions methodology and I've seen it bear fruit. Also, I have friends in every denomination.Yeah, and I will say this Paul said we've not yet apprehended. No denomination is heaven and I have friends that every denomination and they can tell you what irritates them in their particular denomination. That's just part of us working working out outside relation with fear and trembling and also.One of those one another's in the scripture says for bear with one another some of that is US putting up with one another. So I'm thankful for black brothers and sisters and the historic. African-American denominations of black church, I'm thankful for African-American brothers and sisters in the Southern Baptist convention.I'm thankful for African-American brothers and sisters and other denomination. I'm thankful for any person who is seeking to lift up the name of Jesus Christ and declare the gospel. And I think if you're about a certain type of missions methodology, the Southern Baptist convention is a wonderful group of brothers and sisters to partner with it's a large family.But it's I think the wonderful group of partner with Clint Clifton: well, we work together. We have had the chance to work together for the last couple years and Baltimore and then in Washington area. So let's just for a minute. Let's make a pitch for our for our cities. Dr. Kevin Smith: Yes, Clint Clifton: and tell people why they should come work with us Dr. Kevin Smith: a few years back.There was the Freddie gray incident in Baltimore that for a lot of people put Baltimore on the map. Since the 1830s Baptist's in Maryland and Delaware have been thinking about big population centers like Baltimore, Maryland Baltimore is a diverse City Baltimore as a transitional. And there's a lot of Brokenness at a lot of different levels of society.And so I would encourage you to pray for cities like Baltimore where we can share the Gospel of Jesus Christ where we can show people that there's dignity and being created in the image and the likeness of God regardless of their status or any of these American measurements of the value of your life, but you are valuable because you are created in God's image and God loved you so much that he sent his son.As the payment for sins that you might be forgiven and have eternal life in him and then down the road. We have Washington DC which is the nation's capital. So obviously there's a lot of trust and worldly power and political power and I would encourage you to pray for church Planters and existing congregations in the DC area because many times as people.Pursue Earthly power pursue political power even sometimes in a corporate world, they can achieve some of their goals and then get to a certain place in life where they where the reality becomes. What does it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul between Washington and Baltimore.I mean, we have important and wealthy and quote successful people commit suicide have serious drug habits. Struggle with alcoholism are some will just functional alcoholics. And so that it's clear that the Gospel of Jesus Christ. The love of God. The Light of Christ is needed in our area and I would ask you to seriously pray about pray for our churches pray for our efforts.If you're not in that in the area of the country and you have people write raised up in your church, they want to be part of a core group. If you have people raised up in your church, perhaps would like to do an intern or residency and one of our colleagues. Relations and be a church planter. We would love to help you call out the called in the Washington DC Maryland Delaware area.We would love to partner with you and I ask you to consider that yeah, it all field is the field is wide open. Yeah Clint Clifton: all these Stars. Have to align sometimes to make church planting really take off in an area and sometimes those those stars are Financial leadership and all kinds of things but I don't know about you but I feel like in our region right now.There's more alignment than there's ever been. Yes, and I'm excited about the progress that we're seeing the churches that are being planted are being planted by faithful Godly humble joy-filled, you know, tenacious hard-working guys that. Just dedicating themselves and the churches are being a lot more successful in terms of we've seen in the past to so Dr. Kevin Smith: and I'm excited because of many of our Planters have a.Biblical attitude towards loving their neighbor and so they want to do well and they want to bring good. To the public school down the street. They want to bring good to the boys club on the YMCA up the street. They want to bring good to some challenging areas. And as we do that we're able to let our light so shine that people see our good works and glorify our father.So I'm very thankful that we are obeying the Jesus command love our neighbor and we're not fussing about terminology. We're trying to figure out the best way to obey Jesus command in my particular neighborhood. For example, we have churches that can. Go through their name, if you know more of a poor or undeveloped area, we can't we have abilities for congregations to go through neighborhoods and give out smoke detectors.Yeah, okay, we bringing good to the neighborhood because you certainly don't want someone in the unprotected home and we're also providing an Avenue to develop relationships and meet men and women boys and girls in that neighborhood. So I'm very thankful for where we're able to serve. Clint Clifton: So you have been in so many different Arenas you're an academic.You've been a proper Professor. You've done lots of pastoral work. You've started a church. You've let it denominational entity all those things, you know make you a really unique individual and Southern Baptist life and you're an African-American leader all the all those things make you unique, but talk to the church planter for just a minute, you know with the scope of all that you've seen and all those different things and just a couple, you know nuggets of advice if I come off top of your head to the guy who's just.And often church planting and pastoral Ministry. Dr. Kevin Smith: Nothing is more important than the relational emotional spiritual Fellowship that you have with your core team. I know many times. We are excited to launch and we're excited about those kind of things but for the emotional and the spiritual undergirding of a church plant, I think the core team development is so important.So I would encourage any planter as a pastor of a new Gathering of Believers lean into those relationships. Secondly, I would tell you don't despise the day of Small Beginnings because however 22 flush years later my wife and I are still. Of our most substantial relationships with Brothers and Sisters in Christ are people we set up with every Sunday and then broke down with every Sunday.So don't despise the season of setting up and breaking down because you are just like really digging into relationships and then thirdly you just have to find areas. To be engaging people who are not followers of Jesus Christ. I know some of our brothers have spent a lot of time studying at Seminary and they admire their professors and sometimes they really think well, you know how maybe ministry will be a life of study it's a life of study but it's also a life on the street.Yeah. Well you engaging men and women about the Gospel of Jesus Christ. I think those three things are just tremendously valued the core group and. Chip and spiritual under pending matter the relationships you develop in those small days while y'all are setting up and breaking down and then just being a man on the street.I mean no the fire chief know the police chief know the local principal of the middle school elementary school and high school. If you have neighborhood associations know the neighborhood association president those kind of things are vital because the church is geographically somewhere for a reason I believe in the.Warranty of geography God has placed you there for a reason and so know that. Clint Clifton: Dr. Smith. Thank you so much. You're its variation. Dr. Kevin Smith: Thank you. My brother. Josh Turansky: Thank you for listening to the church planting podcast. Don't forget to subscribe and leave a review of your favorite podcast. Today's episode of the church planting podcast is sponsored by new city Network the church planting Ministry of MacLean Bible a special thanks to today's guest Dr. Smith for taking the time to join us. Josh Turansky produce Today Show Zukey Bastien was our showrunner and her husband, Nick, was our editor thanks to Hudson Turansky and Marvin Moore who provided administrative and web support for the program and last but not least thanks to you for listening through to the very end of the church planting podcast.If you'd like more information about the show, feel free to visit our brand new website at www.churchplantingpodcast.org there. You can find all of our past episodes as well as notes from today's show. Be sure to tune in next week. We will have on the famous Johnny Hunt.

Interview with Marvin Moore aka my uncle. Worked for Nasa and Coast Guard. Great interview!

Marvin Moore has been the editor of Signs of the Times since 1995. He is the author of more than 35 books and particularly enjoys writing about Bible prophecy and righteousness by faith. Marvin’s messages this week cover the plan of redemption, starting with the origin of evil and how it came to our little planet and extending to the final crisis and Armageddon. All along, God has had a plan to eliminate evil from the universe and from our hearts, and His plan is nearing its completion.

Marvin Moore has been the editor of Signs of the Times since 1995. He is the author of more than 35 books and particularly enjoys writing about Bible prophecy and righteousness by faith. Marvin’s messages this week cover the plan of redemption, starting with the origin of evil and how it came to our little planet and extending to the final crisis and Armageddon. All along, God has had a plan to eliminate evil from the universe and from our hearts, and His plan is nearing its completion.

Marvin Moore has been the editor of Signs of the Times since 1995. He is the author of more than 35 books and particularly enjoys writing about Bible prophecy and righteousness by faith. Marvin’s messages this week cover the plan of redemption, starting with the origin of evil and how it came to our little planet and extending to the final crisis and Armageddon. All along, God has had a plan to eliminate evil from the universe and from our hearts, and His plan is nearing its completion.

Marvin Moore has been the editor of Signs of the Times since 1995. He is the author of more than 35 books and particularly enjoys writing about Bible prophecy and righteousness by faith. Marvin’s messages this week cover the plan of redemption, starting with the origin of evil and how it came to our little planet and extending to the final crisis and Armageddon. All along, God has had a plan to eliminate evil from the universe and from our hearts, and His plan is nearing its completion.

Marvin Moore has been the editor of Signs of the Times since 1995. He is the author of more than 35 books and particularly enjoys writing about Bible prophecy and righteousness by faith. Marvin’s messages this week cover the plan of redemption, starting with the origin of evil and how it came to our little planet and extending to the final crisis and Armageddon. All along, God has had a plan to eliminate evil from the universe and from our hearts, and His plan is nearing its completion.

Debut Their New Single " On The Block featuring Maino Ghetto & Blues, formerly known as The Product G&B, is an American R&B Duo made up of Sincere Gubano and Marvin Moore. The melodic Duo was once Protégés of Wyclef Jean and affiliated with the Refugee Camp, as well as a part of Clive Davis’s Jay Records roster. Since their debut in 1998, Sincere and Marvin Moore have lent their vocals to numerous tracks and have aided the success of several singles and albums. Since their debut in 1998, the duo lent their vocals to several tracks on Pras' Ghetto Superstar album, including the single "Blue Angels". Wyclef Jean convinced Arista Records chief Clive Davis to release "Maria Maria", the duo's collaboration with Carlos Santana, which contributed to Santana's Supernatural album eventually selling over 30 million copies worldwide. The song became a worldwide number one hit. "Maria Maria" was named the 14th most successful song on the Billboard-History Hot 100 "last decades" and the second most successful song of all-time in the Hot Latin Songs. In 2000 the song won a Grammy.

This sermon is from Saturday, May 4, 2013.

Wow a whole year of UkeyLove's ukulele open mic night. There has been some special moments some captured on these podcasts most will only ever be appreciated live.As its a birthday edition podcast there are more songs than usual and it is slightly longer as well.Enjoy this great line up.The Fleas: Plastic Jesus / Chocolate Jesus medley (Ed Rush and George Cromarty / Tom Waits)Ally McFlea: Donald Where's Yer Troosers (Scottish Traditional)Colin Chambers: Ain't She Sweet (jazz standard written by Milton Ager & Jack Yellen 1927)Fred Stead: The Green Door (Bob Davie & Marvin Moore)Alan Chan: Jambalya (Hank Williams)Philip, Meena & Morwenna: Daydream Believer (The Monkees)Caroline Grannell: Black Cab (Jens Lekman)Uke Gnome: The Man Who Sold the World (David Bowie)David Stevens: Wild in the Country (Elvis Presley)Fang: Same Old Blues Again (John Lee Hooker)Ricky and Kitty: Such Great heights (Postal service)Gavin and Paul: I Want You Back (Jackson 5)Mark: Common People (Pulp)Pitt: Small Axe (Bob Marley)Quincy, Brian & Ally McFlea: A Message to You, Rudy (The Specials)UkeyLove Last Thursday of the monthCurrent release: UkephoricReleases Coming soon: Planetzim and Grainne O'KillThanks and much UkeyLove