#183 | Once You See: Seven Temptations of the Western Church, Pt. 1 | Jeff Christopherson

Because some people are like, wait, wait, wait, wait.

What?

You're telling me I'm a Bible believing person and that's hurting the kingdom of God? Why is that hurting the kingdom of God, Jeff?

Because we're not a Bible believing people.

And there's the mic drop everyone you can. I'm sure people are like, well, that show was good for today. Travis, what are the world are you doing? Explain that. You got to elaborate.

I'm talking about the word belief as it's supposed to be understood. It's not intellectual ascent into theologically orthodox positions, but it's actually obedience to those ideas.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

Are you a Bible believing person? Chances are, if you listen to this show, you probably are. And if so, then I have a question for you.

Have you ever wondered why the church in the New Testament looks so far different in the western part of the world than today? Have you ever wondered why the global church sees similar wonderful works of God that was seen in the New Testament?

But we're left scratching our heads saying, why don't we see that?

Many of us suffer from a holy discontent right now because what we see going on in the church today seems a far cry from what we see in the Bible or in the global church. And every time we leave, we're left with this desire for more. We want to go deeper. We want to know God more intimately.

We want to take greater risks and share him with those around us. When I look at the church today, I think that the church is suffering from a kind of spiritual amnesia.

Because when I look at the New Testament and I look at the global church, there's a sent nature to what they're doing. There's a willingness to serve, suffer, sacrifice, and sinned.

There is what I like to call a missionary identity that the church had that it no longer seems to have. And I'm not talking about sending missionaries. I'm not talking about that, although that's important.

But I'm talking about the church in your neighborhood seems to lack this missionary identity. What has caused this spiritual amnesia? Well, that's why I've invited our guest for today on the show.

His name is Jeff Christofferson, and he has some pretty good ideas.

Jeff is a pastor, a church planner, an author, and he's the executive director of the Canadian National Baptist Convention and Church Planting Canada. We have a lively. And I have to warn you, I got to put the the cones up because this is going to be a challenging discussion.

And I'm giving you a word of caution because his unique book, once you see Seven Temptations of the Western Church, is going to shake you. And I mean that in a good way. Because if you take this conversation to heart, you may not be able to go back to the way things were.

Because once you see what God is doing around the world and what he wants to do in you, you don't want to go back. And by the way, we want you to see what God is doing, what he is doing around the world, and what he's doing in you.

It's not by accident that you've come a part of our ministry because you long to make a difference, and you already are. You matter. You really do. What you are doing right now just by listening to this show shows that you are already making a difference.

You are submitting your perspective to the Holy Spirit that God might begin to shape you and show you what he's wanting to do. And I think you may want to do more. And we want to give you that opportunity, become one of our watering partners.

Simply click the link in your show notes and be a part of what God is doing to change the world. Now let's get to my conversation with Jeff Kristofferson. Happy listening. Jeff Kristofferson, welcome to Apollo's Water.

It is awesome to be here with you, Travis. It really is.

I am so excited to have you on the show. You really have no idea how excited I am to have you on the show, having read your stuff for years. But are you ready for the Fast 5?

I doubt it, but let's do this anyway.

Being Canadian, I have to ask a candida question here. The best dish in Canada, primarily is what?

Poutine.

I knew you were going to say poutine. Yeah, I knew it. Is there a certain. Okay, describe for our people that are not from Canada what poutine is.

Oh, it's hard to describe because it's three difficult ingredients. French fries, cheese, curds, and gravy.

Is there a certain kind of style to poutine? Do people do it differently? Is there just kind of one thing across the board?

Oh, no, no. In fact, there's poutine that have over a hundred different versions of it.

A hundred different versions of poutineries.

Yeah. So, I mean, you can have everything. Smoke. Montreal smoked meat's a popular one. It's. There's all kinds of things you can do.

I actually. Because I learned about poutine only, like, two years ago.

Our executive editor is married to a Canadian, and he went to grad school in Canada, and so he's like, yeah, you got to try it. It's really. And it is.

It's health food. Really?

How in the world is poutine health food? I mean, what, you're gonna need to get healthy after eating it? Is that it? You're gonna have to go to the hospital. I mean, what in the world?

Oh, my goodness. Okay, well, how about this one?

Okay.

The best thing about being Canadian is what or what most people don't get about being Canadian is what.

You've probably owned your sarcasm skills. You have a whole different level. It's our love language, and it's our mother tongue.

That's probably the most perfect answer I think I've ever heard. I mean, you don't even nuance it. It's sarcasm even in the answer. Okay, number three. How about this one?

If you could bring back something from 30 years ago that was popular but isn't now, what would you bring back and why?

Oh, man. 30 years ago, it was popular. Yeah.

Boy, I would think, like, for me, this is a terrible thing, but it's like being able to not have to check everything you say through the political correctness meter and just kind of. That gets a bit tiring sometimes. Being able to just say terms and.

Not have to nuance it and explain it to everybody.

Exactly. Yeah.

That's actually, I think one that many of us would. Would give a wholehearted amen to, because it gets. It gets exhausting after a while.

Yeah.

Especially talking to the younger generations. Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, we're sensitive these days.

Little too sensitive. Everything is a fight. I've done my best to staff Twitter. Just done my best. I recently just signed on because I think it's an argument over words.

That, to me, is what Twitter is 95% of the time. But I digress. Okay, all right, here we go. The next question. How about this one? Because you've been huge in church planting, been involved in it.

I mean, created organizations for it. But I think sometimes the names of churches are kind of fun. What is the best church plant name you've ever seen and why?

And you could be sarcastic here. This is where your sarcasm is fully allowed to be. Just let it go, brother. Let it go.

Well, there's A church that was started recently. I won't say where is it called the Big Up Church. And actually a Korean church, but that was the direct translation.

I mean, why do we choose the names of churches? What we do? Like, I'm, I'm in this. I'm in northern Florida and there's a lot of church plants going up.

And I'm like, I can't tell if it's a church plant or if it's a men's aftershave.

That's right.

I mean, longleaf pine. I'm like, okay, is that a church or what are we doing?

Or Greek words like let's, let's, let's have churches named after New Testament Koine. Greek.

I've seen Alethea Doxa. I'm just like, I'm waiting for. Or harmartia, which, for those who don't know, is the word sin.

We like that.

We can just say it's a Greek word. Welcome to a Harmartia church.

We're full on hamartia every Sunday.

Okay, how about this one? Last one. Number five. Number five out of the fast five. If you were a genre of music, what genre would you be and why?

I. I'm going with blues.

Really? Okay, Blues. Give us the reason why. Give us a reason why.

Yeah, it's like, I mean, we, we, we keep stumbling over the same thing and crying about it and, and we're, we're not really making much progress. We're. We're actually enjoying it. We like our pain and so, yeah, that'd be it. Blues.

That's a perfect description. That's a perfect description. We're going to take a quick break and hear a word from our sponsors, and we'll be right back.

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Get one today because understanding the Bible changes everything. And the NLT is the Bible you can understand. Let's get into who you are a bit.

So a bit of your biography, who you are when you came to faith, some of your family story and how you came to be a missiologist. I mean that's just one of the many hats that you wear. But let's focus on that one. How did you get to where you're at right now?

So I grew up in northern Saskatchewan and so basically go to North Dakota and keep going and going and going and going and going. And so my pastor was Henry Blackaby and Jack Connor, two of them. And so if you've done experiencing God, you've, you've read a little bit about that.

Probably most people have an exaggerated idea of what that was. And actually it was a couple churches that took their responsibility to get the gospel out to every village, every town, every city.

And so people respond to the gospel all the time. There was a little Bible school that was in the basement. People were trained, they were sent out.

And on its best Sunday, Faith Baptist Church in Saskatoon was probably never more than 175 people, less than that usually. But if you look at the leaders across Canada, many of them have come from that church. It was a very kingdom centric church.

It was always sort of not saving itself but giving itself away. And so that was a memory that was, you know, had a big impression on me. I sensed a call into ministry as a young man.

Went prepared, went to university in Bolivar, Missouri Southwest Baptist University, went to seminary, gone m divorced.

And then I kind of forgot about my lineage and I saw the sexy churches that were starting and real kind of saw what, what, what we were doing as, you know, old fashioned, old hat, whatever, what I'd grown up with. And so I was all over this new stuff and so I planted a church in Calgary, Alberta. In my mind I was, I had this script.

You're going to love this church. You're going to love this church. You're going to love it. You're going to love it. And I, and we planted a church that people loved.

But when I began to ask for sacrifice, we're going to actually go and plant another church from us over here in this other area. All of a sudden I changed the script. You're saying we're going to love this church and you're asking me to do something. I hate this is wrong.

And so I created a church with funky DNA. And so God used that to say, all right, remember your history, remember your lineage. And so I went actually from there to Toronto.

And we had no plans on how to get out of that because we had no financing behind us or anything. But the only thing we knew that we knew is we weren't going to let Christians in. And we started this church just through evangelism.

And, and, and I love to tell you that whole story, but that'll take a while. But, but we, we started this church that we began to reach people like crazy. And first, in the first 12 months, we baptized 52 new believers from a.

From a cold start, not knowing anybody, just relationships with our neighbors. And we began to plant other churches.

By the time we launched that first church, we called it the Sanctuary, we were actually launching two other churches simultaneously. And that became the blueprint for what became kind of a little movement and changed my heart on a lot of things.

And at the same time, the North American Mission Board was rethinking what it was doing for the Southern Baptist Convention North American Mission Board, they got a new president named Kevin Ezell, and the mandate was to focus on church planting. I was asked to be a part of that.

So I was leading Canada in the Northeast and then later became kind of the strategist for what we were doing and started the Send Network, which became the church planning idea, where we built the systems for church planting.

And I moved back to Canada with some personal reasons, with my mom's health, we just felt like there was. There's ten Commandments, and one of them was about that kind of thing. And so we moved back here and I became the.

I was asked, there was an organization in Canada already running for about 30 years called Church Planting Canada. And said 25 different denominations working together. And so they asked me to lead that.

And then later I'm also leading the Canadian National Baptist Convention which is kind of Southern Baptist in Canada. So I have those two, two roles that are working. So that's the, the mini Jeff, life.

Beyond your defenses. There is a life to. You're missing these moments and they won't come back, you know. So we have the book once you see.

And I've got it right here published by 100Movements dog eared and well, because, because I read it. I read it, Jeff. I can't believe how many people I talked to on the show that have written a book and people are like, they didn't read it.

I, I read your book. J. I read the book. Took a lot of notes too. Took a lot of notes in the back trying to make sure it was stuff I wanted to talk about.

Questions that I had. But first of all, let's just talk about once you see Seven Temptations of the Western Church. A novel. Okay, A novel. Really?

A missiologist writing a novel. You got some chutzpah, my friend, to write a little bit about a novel. Why a novel? And that's kind of like where angels fear to tread, Right?

On that you're opening yourself up to huge criticism there. Why a novel?

I, I just really sense that the ideas that we're, we're talking about blues, remember that my favorite genre. It's like the ideas that need to be dealt with and I got to see them from my seat.

That's not just from our network is denomination after generation stumbling over the same thing, hamstrung by the same ideas. And the answers are known. It's not like, oh man, we need a new revelation. No, the answers are known.

I don't know if like I got to experience Henry Blackaby and Jack Connor. I got to experience a kingdom centered church where most, I don't know, have had that. And so they haven't seen it.

So I, I just thought, man, writing another book on, on ideas probably isn't going to move the needle somehow I need to capture the hearts and minds of people so that like, I mean if you have to unlearn something and you're going to relearn something, there's some metanoia, some repentance that has to happen in between. And the only way that meta new mind happens is that our minds are blown with a better idea. We're not going to relearn.

We're not going to relearn something new and drop Something old, unless we really believe there's something better. And so I just wanted to give people a picture and an emotional reaction to the truth. That's why a novel, you can't really do that any other way.

You really find a backdoor in through the imagination is what you've done and what I've seen. Because now, as you said, you hang it on a story and emotional part of it. You haven't just hit the propositional truth, right?

You actually hit it through story and through examples and illustrations that are just people that you're interacting with.

What I found very fascinating, though, is you talk about these seven temptations, and I want to list this because I was expecting you to address them differently than you did. Actually, you never addressed them directly, which I was like, I kept waiting. I'm like, where are these seven things?

It keeps telling me about the seven things. And I get to the back and I see you've got biblically sampled. I'm like, but wait, he never actually. Oh, he did that kind of thing.

So we have the seven temptations. Do you want to go ahead and list them for us or do you want me to do them?

Yeah, go ahead, list them.

Tell us about. About what they are.

I'll just hit the hype, you know, real quick. Philosophicalism, that's kind of the temptation of a hypothetical faith. It's like we take biblical belief as a noun. It's something we, we own. And.

But in New Testament, in epistode is always a verb. It's something we do. We don't own a belief. We do a belief. And so we spend a lot of time on this hypothetical philosophicalism.

Second, professionalism, that's a temptation towards excellence. And in that, I'm speaking about the priesthood of every believer. And we're not limiting it to spiritual access.

You know, I can pray without going to a priest. But no, God has called every believer into the mission of Christ. And usually that's more than passing the offering plate.

And so getting beyond professionalism, there's a temptation third one, what I just call presentationalism, and that is the temptation of a crowd. And that we're speaking about. The body of Christ isn't a Sunday morning worship service.

And when you look at the first through third centuries, there was movement that happened because the understanding of the body of Christ wasn't our understanding of church number four. I just call this word pacifism, I think, but it's not pacifism, but pacifism. And that is a temptation of comfort.

And we have personal Preferences of what we want for church. And we list them. My idea of a church is this or this or this or this.

And very rarely are those preferences relating to Jesus courageous search and rescue mission that he calls his church to his mission. So we have this temptation towards our preference and comfort. Number five, pragmatism. And that is the temptation of competition.

And in that, you know, local brand advancement outranking a greater kingdom revelation, that happens. And so we. We don't see our. The church be Titus is our kingdom collaborator against darkness.

We actually see them as competition for the market share of the evangelically predisposed. And so we spend a lot of time measuring things pragmatically that have nothing to do with the assignment of Christ. And so that's a temptation.

Six, partisanism, that's a tough one.

That's the temptation of Caesar, and that is secondary earthly loyalties getting in the way over our dominant kingdom allegiance, and that is to the kingdom of God. And we do things that actually hurt the mission of Christ with our allegiance to temporary secondary issues.

And then finally, I just call it paternalism. That's this temptation of power that we think the Western version, what we have of church is superior to.

And I think we think that our idea of church is probably the most accurate expression of church. Meanwhile, we're losing ground here in the west every year and around the world.

The global church is in the face of persecution, is actually multiplying like crazy.

I got to be at a conference just before COVID in Thessaloniki, Greece, Greece, with 85 different church planning movements from 85 different countries. And to see what God is doing around the world. And then look back at us in North America and you go, what's wrong with us?

And so this paternalism is something that I think we have to get over. So those seven things are embedded in the story. And I think it gives us a hopeful.

The book gives us a hopeful picture and way out of the soup that we're in right now, where we're stuck.

You did a really nice job of it. I mean, first of all, I want to ask this question. Why seven? Is it just that you found seven? Was there more or there others that you.

I mean, give me some of the other ones that you wanted to put in there.

Oh, man. Yeah, I don't know if I could come up with them right now, but I know I had more.

You couldn't find peas, could you?

No, it had to be peas too. I had peas too. I just think like, seven is enough to chew on.

It's A lot in. In seeing the. I mean, I. I was looking at the seven that you had, and I've got them right in front of me right now.

Now, when you mentioned kind of the. I mean, there are terms that I would have been like, okay, where's the. You have the professionalism, and I've seen all of these.

And you even use kind of a phrase to describe it. When you said philosophicalism. We're a Bible believing people.

Each one of them. I give a phrase that we celebrate, a phrase that we proudly boldly declare. And in my opinion, they're actually hurting us.

They're actually hurting the mission of Christ.

Elaborate on that. Because some people are like, wait, wait, wait, wait.

What?

You're telling me I'm a Bible believing person and that's hurting me? The. The kingdom of God? Why is that hurting the kingdom of God, Jeff?

Because we're not a Bible believing people.

And there's the mic drop everyone you can. I'm sure people are like, well, that show was good for today. Travis, what are the world. Are you doing? Explain that you got elaborate.

If we're a Bible, I'm talking about the word belief as. As it's supposed to be understood. It's not intellectual ascent into theologically orthodox positions, but it's actually obedience to those ideas.

And I think that first one is actually, actually the mother of all. And the six fall under it. And if we were Bible believing, we wouldn't be having struggles with the other six below us.

This life of time that's given to.

Us all, it gathers round each night, each morn.

We watch it pass and grow. As you said, you wrote the book during the pandemic, but you also situated it post pandemic, which I thought was very interesting.

And you have one of your characters who's actually. His name is Jimmy, and he's a pastor of a megachurch in Atlanta.

But even he notices something in the church and he writes, this is what you wrote there. I said, he writes as if he's doing it and you didn't do it. But people want to get their hands dirty. This is what he noticed post pandemic.

They used to want to hire staff to do ministry, but now they want to experience some stuff themselves, but not at church. They want to serve the community, and we don't know how to do that. You said this during the pandemic, not post pandemic. Right.

And you knew this was coming then. I mean, this is what I'm actually hearing. People say they don't want to just Sit there, they're tired, they're frustrated.

I can't tell you how many people that I said, is this all there is?

Is this it?

I just go on Sunday and hear great music and they have a worship and it's great programs and all that. Is that it? Is that all that I have? And you captured it. It in the middle of the pandemic, Jeff. That's pretty prophetic there.

Well, so, so, so what did you bring that out of that? So, so, like, I've been working with pastors, you know, most my adult life, and the conversation is. Is frequent where.

Where I'm having an intimate, honest moment with somebody. They're saying, jeff, you know, if you look at my calendar, everything that I do, I. There's not much of it that I need God for. And the.

The thing that God used to call me into ministry, the thing that really captured my heart that I surrendered and said yes to. I don't even get to do those things. Find myself busy with all this other stuff.

And so when Covid came, I sensed the Holy Spirit just saying to me, because I was doing a number of webinars, kind of preparing people.

We had one time where we had over 10,000 people on this webinar when we were interviewing people from Spain and Italy about what they were experiencing before it hit us in North America. And what I just sense, the Holy Spirit saying is, this is your moment. When else in human history have we.

In not human history, but in recent history, have we had a time to hit the pause button and say, okay, let's rethink what we're doing here? You know, that thing that you were called to do, maybe let's make this as an opportunity to make that as a priority.

We had some coaching cohorts, we're working with Christ together on that. And.

And we found that at the beginning of that process, only 25%, these are churches, if they're leaning into this conversation, listening to us, they're probably on the missional edge of things to begin with. And. But only 25% of those pastors were actually willing to make a substantial change in the midst of this.

And when it was all said and done, we went through that process. Only 9% did. Only 9% made any kind of change, everything. It was homeostasis as quickly as possible.

Let's get back to business as usual, putting on the service and getting the people back. So that's where I began to realize, yeah, we need a different way to see this. And so that's one of the motivations why I wrote.

Well, and you gave it the title. Once you see, I mean, once you see all of this, you not only talk about how the church has shifted and you use this pastor kind of.

It is an archetype or archetype for many different pastors. But you bring out other characters that I thought were very interesting and each one of them made a very recent observation, if you will.

I mean, even going back to Jimmy for a moment where he noticed that the church has lost the moral high ground in our community and people don't see us as neutral. And I found this very interesting that you said this because there was an article that came out. It was in First Things.

It was about, I don't know, maybe four or five months ago. I could be.

My timeline's a little messy, but they were actually talking about Keller and they mentioned that Keller talks about the third wave talking about politics. And this guy was. Had become a political theologian, which I didn't even know was a thing. But he said, you know, pre.

I mean, not necessarily everything in the article because you haven't read it. I know, but just as an overarching kind of flyover. Do you agree with that concept?

So if, you know, I'm going to be real bold here because it's just you and me and no one else is listening. But the bleed over of American evangelicalism to Canada and actually the rest of the world is having.

Is having a corrosive effect and it's measurable.

If you look at Canadian evangelicals themselves, if you ask all religious groups which, and I, I'm, I'm using Canada as the example. I think probably you can, you know, the translations are pretty easy to make. If you ask all religious groups who does. Who is the. Has the.

The most positive influence on our country. The the group that thinks the highest of themselves in terms of the of kind of what they think others think of them.

Evangelicals like far and out what everybody else. So we think we do, you know, the most. The best. If you ask Canada Wide who is the most dangerous to society.

Canada Wide says evangelicals more than Muslims, more than any other group. Evangelicals. And so, so yeah, so the moral high ground.

We don't have it and there's lots of reasons for it and I spend too long in this conversation doing that, but we don't have it. And so I think at this moment we're going to have to sort of adopt a posture if we're going to be effective.

Adopt a posture of where the global church is where they don't have it either. They're considered the scum of the earth, dogs everything else and yet they're winning people to Christ like crazy.

It's no longer demand our rights that's going to get us to where we need to go. It isn't going to be any kind of political movement that is going to change the hearts and minds of the mission field.

It's actually becoming what Christ has asked us to become in the very first place. And that's a slow burn. That's a slow cook. We can't do that overnight.

But it's amazing what 12 unschooled uneducated people did 3 cent by 3 centuries later. That's where we are.

I am in full agreement and we've talked a great deal on this show about the moral rot that's been within the church, whether it's the, you know, the variety of different scandals that have just been brushed under the carpet, if you will Even I know I had Todd Johnson on for the center of the study of Global Christianity and we were talking about corruption, even just financially giving with missions and then the preoccupation with the celebrity culture and the professionalism in church where we we're not kingdom centric. We're about image. We're about brand, we're about showing off who we are in our very media hyped world.

And yet I see so many different Christians saying, okay, there's a problem, there's a problem, there's a problem. And some agree with the diagnosis of the problem. What they disagree with is the solution. And there are very, very different solutions going forward.

I think, as you, you've already alluded to that the early church, they were outsiders and the global church feels that way too. I know we've talked to British evangelicals like David Bevington and he said, have cultural power. We do not. And we haven't had it for some time.

We don't very, we don't do well when we have power. And yet we're in a democratic, a democratic republic or a democratic society. Very secularist.

And I'm noticing this, a split that's starting to occur where some Christians are saying, okay, the civilization that we are beneficiaries of in large measure traces its history, at least its found moral foundation, to what the word of God brought to the surface. Equality, justice, freedom, all of these things are a product of that. And then combined with enlightenment ideas, this is where we're at.

So I've seen very different solutions. Some say, let's withdraw from society for a time, a concentrated time. Let society just do its own thing and collapse on itself.

And then the church comes into rescue. Others are saying, no, we do want to withdraw, maybe from the educational system and we want to be able to educate our children again.

We need to disciple, disciple our families. And you actually allude to that a little bit in the book. Everyone agrees there's a problem.

Although in some of these larger churches that you allude to, they go, what problem are you talking about? We've got full seats, full program, everything's going great.

However, as a good friend of mine, Charlie Davis, who used to run team, says the church is like a 747 in the sky, the North American church, and it's run out of gas, but it doesn't know it yet. How do you, how would you, I mean, what do you have to say to that? Is that a yes or is that a no?

What else do we have to think about with these issues because there's so many of them.

Where I, I find, I think most troubling is, is where a lot of us go for the answer.

We, we, we go back a century or two or three or four or five, and we go back to Christendom, we'll go back to the Reformation and say, all right, there's our high water mark. There's where we need to sort of get back to that kind of thinking. And I would very much disagree with that sentiment.

I don't see the Reformation as the high point of Christian history. I see it as the beginning fixes of the low point of Christian history.

History and what, what was going on then and this is, is Christendom as you said.

They didn't really, you don't find the reformers talking about mission much because there was a common, there was a common mission and they were sort of arguments on sort of versions of it.

But we go back to that which was really still just, you know, the third the by 3:13 Constantine began to say, you know, if I can't whip them, I'm going to join them kind of thing. You know, we, we sort of turned the movement into, into sort of a sterile machine that we continue to sort of work today.

And so if you, you, you see that the average person, when they think of church we think we're over it.

We think of, you know, the church is a building but you know, most people are there in that one way what times Ch know it's a place you're going to meet or where's your church or you know, it's, it's, it's that I, all the time that I read Romans 16 and I see Paul saying greet so and so, greet so and so, greet so and so Greece and he's never been to Rome and yet he knows the players in Rome. What, what's going on there is like, it's like the church through persecution was mobile. It was a movement, it was, it was a training people.

It was, it was.

And, and it wasn't seen as a worsh a and so I don't know of too many people that are just in their, in their, in their instinctive thinking that do not equate church as worship service. And until we can get over that, I don't know how we, we move.

And so you have to, you know, I use this thing once you see something here, you can't ever comfortably live here anymore.

And, and if you've experienced this, for those of you who are listening to audio, I'm sorry I just did some hand gest until you've experienced that, you know, all of a sudden going back under here just seems like such a cheap sham.

And so we can do all kinds of glitz and bright lights and whatever to somehow keep the machinery moving a little bit longer, pour the last little bit of Gas in the thing. But you just look at all the measurements of where things are going here.

You know, sure we have some more larger churches, but we have way less people in church.

You actually mentioned this. Let me introduce one of the characters. You have character named Luca who is really pained by. He's got church hurt. Really.

I mean if people want to put a contemporary label on it. He's a pastor's son who literally watched his dad die to the stress inflicted from his church.

Even though his dad had presented a kingdom centric vision to a church that had a. What kind of vision would you call that? Philosophicalism. I mean just. I don't know what it is.

The whole list almost.

They have this. They're kind of this backwards church in Philadelphia. Representative of so many churches that I've seen.

You did a really good job of just capturing that.

And I had a conversation yesterday with a pastor friend who pretty much described the church he came from as the church that this Lucas father, I think his name was Josiah. Dr. Josiah Lewis is memory. Josiah Lewis had pastored an African American man in the inner city of Philadelphia.

And he presents this kind of kingdom center centric idea of church. The church rejects it. It pretty much.

He keeps serving these people because he loves them but just causes so much stress and he dies a heart attack if I gather right in his Oldsmobile. His son is bitter and his son though still, though still believes in God. Which I, I thought was also a good thing to capture. He didn't deconstruct.

He's hurt. But rather than using that as an opportunity to deconstruct, it uses that opportunity to create something different.

Different because he didn't like the ministry message and really the church narcissism if you will, at the core of everything. And proposes a different kind of church leadership. And you use him to write this.

He says we must shift from professional leaders designed to produce a worship service to co vocational leaders deployed to equip disciple making disciples. Something that's infinitely reproducible. Elaborate on.

I mean you've already done that a bit, but bring it out a little bit further so we can get a taste of it.

What you see going on around the world right now, you don't see people making a living from church. Often there are some outliers, but where you see the movements, that's not what's going on here.

Like when we're thinking about planting a church, we're usually thinking about a solo planter or a small team each at some point making a living from it.

And, and I think where we have to go is like even when the first and second great awakenings came, there was movement happened and farmers and shopkeepers didn't stop becoming farmers and shopkeepers. But this professionalism has sort of taken over and now our only imagination is a vocational pastor.

I have two callings. God has called me to the workforce and God has called me to his church in leadership.

And these are two holy callings that God wants to use both of them in my life.

And when we begin to think of church not as worship service, but church as in mission of Christ and you begin to think like who was Jesus and how did he sort of shape his functions and priorities and think about okay, how could we as a co vocational team work full time in the marketplace, not leave our places of credibility and influence and actually bring the gospel there and then you know, and just actually do the thing we're really good at and invest our, our energies in those things. It really just opens our imagination to possibilities.

And then when we think about less resources and actually I led the send network which you know, is the biggest church planting idea that there is and maybe has ever. And resources weren't the limiting factor. We had resources. The limiting factor has always been the manpower.

And less and less people I think are have an imagination or a desire to do what their imagination says a pastor is or a church planter is which is this, this separate thing. And, and so I think we just need to normalize back to what the rest of the world understands. And what we used to understand is a co vocational ide.

The normal. We still need, if I want to use these terms, we need, we need an army of priests. We still need some bishops.

We still, we still need some people that have a, you know, oh, a theological broad understanding and they know Greek and Hebrew and they can smell something that you know, okay, that's antinomianism. We don't want to talk about that. But that doesn't need to be everybody.

And we, and if we're going to see some kind of a broad movement then, then this de professionalizing and the raising up of normal everyday disciples and g them significant places within the body of Christ and then it becomes a reproducible idea. And I'm excited about that idea.

Seven Temptations of the Western Church Here they are. Number one philosophicalism. That's the temptation to a hypothetical faith. One that makes faith a noun, not a verb. 2. Professionalism.

The temptation towards excellence in all things. Make sure you write these down if you haven't already. Number three Presentationalism. The temptation of the crowd.

Everything for the Sunday morning experience or event and then nothing else besides that. Passivism. The temptation to comfort. Number five Pragmatism. The temptation of competition.

Building a brand for our church as opposed to the other churches around. Partisanism. The temptation of Caesar. Secondary earthly loyalties before kingdom. 7. Paternalism. The temptation of power.

Ours is the best, most accurate vision of church and kingdom. Even though we are dying and the rest of the world does not seem to be wow, that really does hit home, doesn't it?

And I love the way that Jeff addressed these issues. Not straight on, but through a story. And that's not always easy to do. Both as Malcolm Guide and Karen Swallow Pryor have shown us.

Sometimes we need to use our imagination to catch the truth of a thing. Or think of JRR Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings or CS Lewis with the Chronicles of Narnia.

They open up our mind to see who God is in a different way. Someone I can't remember who said tell it slant.

The idea is is that when things catch you at an unexpected angle, you have to stop and consider in ways that you don't. When things come at you head on. It's why Jesus told parables like the Good Samaritan. Samaritan. Samaritans were the enemy impure.

They were half breeds. The priests and the Levites were the pure ones in the story.

They were upholding the ceremonial law but missing the point because that's what stories do. Obviously we barely scratched the surface of the seven temptations in this first part of our conversation. Honestly, we only got to the first couple.

But I was really struck by a couple of things from this part. Things that I think have a significant, far reaching implication for the future of the western church.

First of all, sensing that there is a problem we need to do things differently is not just enough. Jeff talked about lots of interest post Covid, but only 9% follow through. And that's of the people who were interested in change.

That really speaks to temptation number one. Next, I was also struck by his statement about the Reformation.

How people really well meaning people speak of getting getting back there, but that can actually be a trap because the Reformation is not the high point of Christian history. It's the simple beginning of the fixes of the low point of Christian history.

I'll be honest, I probably wouldn't have thought of the Reformation in those terms. And I know that jars a few of you out there. But I do think he's right.

And I would encourage you to consider that people hear things like that and get nervous. And I totally get it. We are committed to orthodoxy at Apollos watered completely, completely. And that is a problem for many in today's culture.

However, it's our structure as an organization. What we do is largely tied to those ideas.

And as our conversation with Karen Swallow Prior said, to Victorian era ideas, maybe, just maybe we need a reformation of orthopraxy or relationship. How we go about this, how we actually love people. Or as Michael Hendricks said when we talked to him, a relational reformation.

Which leads to the final thing that really struck out to me in this part of the conversation. It's the part about professionalism, about co vocational work for pastors. Yes, we need people to teach and organize.

Jeff heads up two significant Christian ministries and I know of a pastor of a large church who is what we have often called bivocational on purpose. And I've actually encouraged other churches to do the same. But they're scared. And I understand because I've been there.

But I know that watching bivocational pastors, it actually makes them better because he knows what his people go through and the church around the world knows this too. Most places require bivocational or co vocational work. Perhaps that will have to become the norm and perhaps that will be better for the church.

It's something that we really need to think, think about. This was an unsettling conversation in the best sense of the word.

It stirred things up and I do believe that his book is one of the most dangerous books that I've read in some time. The book really did jar my thinking and my imagination and as you can tell, there's a whole lot more to talk about.

In fact, it's about to get really good and challenging. Very, very challenging. And I'm warning you now, but that's for next time.

Please don't hesitate to drop us a line about this conversation or any of our other conversations. We want to hear from you.

Connect with us on Facebook, Instagram or our YouTube channel where you can see this conversation and any of our other conversations. I want to thank our Apollos Watered team for helping us water the world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollos Watered.

Stay watered, everybody roll.