#184 | Once You See: Seven Temptations of the Western Church, Pt. 2 | Jeff Christopherson

Our evangelistic passages that we use aren't really evangelistic passages. They're passages for disciple making. They should inform our thinking.

And these two wings on the plane, the good news that we declare and the good works that we live. I mean, the good news that we declare clarifies everything, but the good works that we do verify the thing we declared.

You got to have them both working. And we all know what it's like with a one wing just flying.

We have this hypocritical kind of church that we're messed up, or the other one where it's just the good works, but there's no gospel informing that, and it just becomes a social gospel.

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.

The last time we were together, I began a conversation with author, pastor, and church planner Jeff Christopherson about his new novel. Once you see.

Yeah, I know it's a novel.

It's not a simple how to book. It's a book that puts skin in.

The game and really fleshed the thoughts.

And the things that we've talked about often on this show. It's a novel about the seven temptations the modern Western church faces.

It's a unique book.

I've not seen anything like this before because it fleshes it out right in front of us and helps us to see in story form how these temptations are actually playing out in our world today.

It's an important book. It speaks to many of the issues.

That the modern church is facing. And the last time we were together, we talked about how the modern church doesn't look like the New Testament church in its being and activity.

In other words, it's lost its missionary identity. Now, this, of course, didn't happen overnight, but it has drifted away over time.

And by writing a novel, Jeff actually shows us how easily it has happened and is still happening today. This is where the global church comes in for us, because the global church can teach us and show us what a missionary identity looks like today.

Of course, we go to the scripture, we study history. But in looking at the global church, we can see how it's being fleshed out right now.

And if you've listened to any of our episodes before, you know that we believe we need to pay attention to the voice of the global church. Not just help them, though we should, but also to learn from them.

As we start today's episode, the conversation.

Turns to one of the characters in Jeff's novel who does just that. I know that you listen to our show because we know you love Jesus and want to help other people truly know and walk with him.

And we can do that together in an even greater way. Your financial gift will enable others to truly grow in their walk with the risen Christ.

Simply click the link in our show notes and be a part of what God is doing to help change the world and recover this missionary identity. Now let's get to my conversation with Jeff Kristofferson. Happy listening.

One of my mentors was the first white man to be trained to be an Indian medicine man. And he had been at Moody Bible Institute and he directed the practical Christian Ministries department.

moody were alive today, he'd want my job, not yours. And his point was, is that I'm actually doing it. You're in the administration, you're in all these other issues.

And I think having been a pastor myself, I see that all the time. Unless you have a small group, everything's really church centric in that everything comes there. And I've seen that in so many churches.

In some of the churches that I've interacted with over the last few years, you don't go into people's homes. There's not hospitality. Everything is dependent upon the building and the location and the programs.

And you're saying, no, no, no, no, that's not going to be effective in the long run. It might work in a community where people are moving in and you already have a high Christendom culture.

But as we become more of a low Christendom culture, those ministry methods are less effective. And you propose kind of this missional idea through these characters. And you introduce a fascinating character.

His name is Omar, but he becomes known as Yeshua, a Muslim in Yemen, which that to me already struck because of what's going on in Yemen, comes a believer in Jesus. Severely persecuted, family members killed, whisked away to from Yemen to the megachurch in Atlanta.

And they love him, they celebrate him, they put him on videos.

He goes to small groups, and then he says something in one of those small Group meetings that ends the relationship, pretty much severs it, because he brings something into question.

And I love how you brought him to bear to bring out to show how naked the emperor really is, proverbially so describe this character for us and what you wanted him to do.

Because he is confronting in many ways, not just this one church, but the ministry method that we have developed within the megachurch kind of movement to call attention to the fact that you think you're following Jesus, but you've actually created an entirely different alternative that you don't even realize that Jesus himself wouldn't even recognize.

Well, yeah, and it's not just the megachurch, it's any church where church itself, it becomes the goal instead of the kingdom being the goal and the church the vehicle to advance the goal. Because when the church is the goal, it's a powerless, idolatrous thing when the kingdom is the goal. Jesus mentions Kingdom 86 times, Church 2 times.

In the Gospel, we do it the opposite way. We say church 86 times, kingdom two times, and usually have a wrong idea in what we're using.

Then when Yeshua, he doesn't have the luxury to experience the trappings of Christianity in the persecuted church. And so he really just gets to experience the full on body of Christ.

And so when he comes to North America and sees one of our churches, at first it's aspirational. He sees it as, wow, so when we grow up, this is what we can become. And later it begins to serve as a warning of things to stay away.

But that example that you gave, most of the stories in there you could probably tell are stories that are true.

Yeah, I was wondering about that, by the way. I really did. I was like, I know this story is true. He didn't just make this up, he heard this.

I mean, that story is what I actually, I'm trying to develop a partnership for a church plant. I mean, I'm in a church and I was. Is a very, is. I'll just say it's a major, major church.

I was picked up by the airport in a Cadillac suv, leather, you know, nice everything. And I preached all the services and then I was invited back a second time and, and I did the same thing.

And then the pastor and brings me into his office and, and said, you know all those God stories you told? This Pastor's in his 60s. And he said, I don't have any of them. I go, well, surely you must. And I go, yeah, no. And I tried to. Then he asked me why.

Why is it I don't have any of these God stories. And I did not want to answer his question.

Well, hold on there, hold on because I want to, I want our people to make sure our audience keep up with it. What do you mean by these God stories?

I just told lots of stories of, of sensing the Holy Spirit, saying, you know, do this. And we responded in obedience, belief, and we got to see, you know, the result of what God did and, and miraculous kinds of things.

And I mean there weren't once in a while they were they fairly normative. It was like, all right, and so I'm, I'm sharing some illustrations while I preach of those kinds of things.

And he said, you know, I don't have any of those things. And he asked why? And I didn't want to answer the question. And, and I finally, he kept pressing and I said, all right, here, here's the answer.

And you notice this was a similar answer that Yeshua gave and that I said, suppose that you knew, that you knew, that you knew, that you knew for sure that you knew, you knew, you knew. They're in this brand new beautiful building, beautiful building.

I said that God said to you, sell this building and go move into the high school across the street. And if you knew that, you knew that at the end of that time you would take the money and you would invest it into a hundred different ministries.

And at the end of the time your church would be half the size as it is now, but the kingdom of God would have multiplied by over a hundred times by the fact of that investment going in there. Would you lead your church to do that? Because if the answer is no, I wouldn't expect to see any God stories in your future either.

What I was doing is I was sort of modeling, modernizing the rich young ruler story, in a sense, and the same result. His face fell, he went away sad. Someone else drove me to the airport and that was the last time I was invited here.

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A lot of these churches that you see out there, they start off with, we're different, we're mission minded, we're doing all this. And they are. They're meeting in gymnasiums, they're meeting in other places. And eventually, though, this institutionalization occurs.

How do you prevent that from happening? I mean, that's a huge thing to say to a church. Okay, by the way, you've got so many acres, thousands of people are coming to see you each week.

And by the way, we're going to have you sell it all, give it away, and then be half the size that you were and see God work whether. And stay the size you're at and not see God work. And they're going, wait a minute, how, look at all these people. How is this not God working?

How do you help them to see that difference? What you're talking about there? Because that's a huge ask.

Yeah, well, it wasn't my ask. I said, you knew that Jesus was making this ask. That's the difference.

So you see them though. He makes this ask, in the book, we'll say that. Actually, he says, really?

Because one guy raises his hand in the small group after hearing him talk, hearing these God stories, as you've already alluded to, and he says, why haven't we seen it? And he basically goes, because you don't need God. You have everything else that you need. And that went over well.

It's about orange juice after brushing your teeth. That's about as well as it could have gone there. That actually leads because this young man had found employment.

I mean, he was the beloved by the church. They'd employ him. They employed him as a janitor and they actually fire him under this pretense of budget cuts. And everybody knows it's not true.

I see this all the time with churches. Oh, he resigned. Well, he was fired. We're just trying to make it nicer. We all know this.

But he goes on and he encounters this church in Philadelphia and he now interacts with this Community that's really trying to meet the needs of the community. And I find that your work reminds me a little bit of the externally focused church where they said we exist for the people around.

And they cite in that book what happened at the Bolshevik revolution when they didn't necessarily outlaw Christianity, but they outlawed good works and the church became irrelevant overnight in Russia, the Orthodox Church. And so this idea of interacting with those and serving the people around us, that is so.

So many pastors and you, you use again, another pastor, teach us how to do this. We don't know how to do this. We only know how to create these services.

We only know how to interact with the guests and the visitors that are coming in. We don't know how to serve because they're so afraid of, I mean, one, they don't know how to do it. They don't know what to serve.

And number two, they're afraid of probably compromising. They're going to get critiqued. They're going to have these people that say, this isn't biblical.

How do you respond to that group of people to help them, too?

So how do you respond to critics, man? I mean, you just have to, yeah.

You can market that in a book.

You just have to put on your big boy pants and, and say, we're going to do this because it's right. It's what scripture asks us to do. And, and we're pushing ahead.

I mean, one of the things I think that we find is that the people who have hearts to do these kinds of things aren't in our churches.

I mean, they're attending our churches and maybe tithing, but, but they're actually in parachurches everywhere else because, you know, we've, we've not had room for this in our Sunday morning version of Christianity.

And so they've been rolling up their sleeves that, okay, if I can't do it through my local church, I'm just gonna have to do it outside the local church.

And so if we actually began to open up our arms a little bit and say the dreams, the visions of things that are in the heart of minds of people in our church, how do we tease those out? How do we fan that flame and how do we mobilize them? I think so much. I mean, I don't have to think. I've seen it so many times.

It just creates imagination that goes on. Holy Spirit just does incredible things through ordinary, ordinary people.

And all of a sudden, you know, that Sunday morning experience, it is not irrelevant and it is not, not necessary it is still necessary, it's still relevant, but it's absolutely a different thing than it used to be. I often talk about when culture tilted towards the church.

Well, maybe in the south, some people have a memory of that at some time in their, in their ministry lifetimes.

They've been ministering a long time, but that's not been a reality in most places in the North America for a long time where, where people got up in the morning and said, janice, you know, go to church. You know, it's just not, not something most of us have lived our, our life where the culture was level with the church.

It's not really an advantage to go to church, not really a disadvantage to go to church. It's kind of a neutral thing. And so we as churches have understood that that space.

And so we have done all kinds of things to help people see the relevance of it, the help or whatever. And so we've done things and in many ways we've cheapened church, the idea of what church is.

As a result of it, we, you know, we've become so seeker friendly that, you know, it's like 45 sermons on changing diapers. But we're. Some places, probably some places in North America that's still a reality.

But in most of North America, the culture is tilted away from the church. Nobody's getting up and saying, you know, unless they've got a religious memory in the background that that's just drying up.

And so we're playing at a different time now.

And so that worsh service that is the thing becomes, I think, all the more important to inspire people to the faith, the obedience, what God has asked them to do.

It's, it's bandaging, it's repairing, it's, it's blessing, it's, it's inspiring people for the works that God has asked them to do the rest of the week instead of. It's, you know, our, our primary evangelistic outreach that we're doing. No, everything else we do the rest of the week is our evangelistic outreach.

This is actually the body of Christ rehabilit because there's been a tough week. I think that's where we're, where we need to be going to. Hopefully we'll get there to the river.

To the river we go Leave our worries on the shore and drift away on the river on the river we know Sometimes the perfect words are never said I spilled my coffee I don't feel like talking My worries just keep growing by the day it seems that.

It'S become this the highlight product. It's become a product. And you're saying, no, no, no. It shouldn't be the product. It should be the means for people to go about their mission.

This isn't bringing everybody here, isn't just for the presentation aspect is what we've done. Instead, it's the idea of repair. I love how you said it. Repairing. It's like a spiritual triage. I'm helping you out. I'm inspiring you.

I'm instructing you on how you are to obey and what you are to do. I'm not just trying to attract people in with a big personality.

I'm trying to give you these lessons or these truths from Scripture so that you can go forward to do the mission. God has you to be outside of these walls, which we, I think, have lost.

And now some people are listening and I'm sure they're so confused right now because for many of them, it's a very individualistic salvation. It's just me and Jesus. I don't understand this mission that you've called us to be.

I'm not understanding this aspect of the kingdom of God that you said is mentioned 86 times in the New Testament and the church is only mentioned two. This is so foreign to me.

In the Gospels.

In the Gospels. Excuse me, in the Gospels, how do we help them to see that it's not just you and Jesus?

There's so much more that's here as a collective, as a body, and we are doing more. Yes, we are offering salvation, but we're also trying to show God's kingdom at work in the world.

I find that so many evangelicals are schooled in just one aspect of salvation, and that's the you come to Jesus, receive Jesus, and that's it. No, that's just one aspect of it.

How do you help them to see the fullness of this kingdom, what it means to be a follower of Jesus, to offer salvation, and to be on mission at the same time in the midst of their world. And it doesn't involve bringing everybody to church. That's a huge question. I know.

Yeah, it's just. I mean, it's called read your Bible.

There's that sarcasm that you were so clear.

If we take. I mean, in fact, you read the Gospels and then you read Acts, and it starts out, you know, we.

We Acts 1, 3, which I, my first time read that and understood it. You know, I. It's like Jesus, the undead. Jesus is now with his disciples for 40 days. And the. And the scripture says, and for 40 days.

He spoke to them about the kingdom of God. That's. That's all you know. He didn't talk about church planning. He didn't talk about church growth. He didn't talk about.

He talked about the kingdom of God because that's what he spoke about for his three and a half years of ministry that he had with him. This is what everything looks like when I get my way, guys. It affects more than the religious part of who you are.

It affects everything that surrounds you. And so we see that in Acts, chapter one, verse three. And then we see this preaching.

They preach the gospel of the kingdom all the way through and into the very last two verses of the book of Acts, where Paul in his own rented quarters, boldly, without hindrance, declared the kingdom of God. It's like, it's like this is. It's a holistic idea. God on his throne, on every part of who I am. He gets his way on it all. And so I can't.

Forgot your question.

No, whatever you. Whatever question you were answering, it was good. Okay, but let's stick with this, because I think you're bringing this out.

You're talking about the kingdom of God. He's teaching about the kingdom of God. And here's where I noticed there's this rub.

I see so many Christians schooled in this, and I hate to say this in a pejorative fashion, but because he's such a legend, Billy Graham way, where it's get people to Jesus, this decision, we want you. And in some circles, I know we're in the area I'm at, it's the three circles. It's God's story, your story, and you know, that kind of thing.

Bringing him to Jesus. You're saying kingdom. And some people are going, I don't understand how these fit together.

How do we have people understand the salvation that God has for them? And being a participant within this kingdom? Because they seem almost like contradictory ideas. And you're saying, no, they're not. They go together.

But how do these two ideas or concepts, truths, go together? Because they seem, I think some are like, if you look at Jesus, parables.

Teachings on the kingdom, I think, and I admit for a long time, I think even as a pastor, I taught on those and believed those to be how you get into the kingdom. But they're really not. If you're in the kingdom, this is how you live.

And so our evangelistic passages that we use aren't really evangelistic passages. They're passages for disciple making. They should inform our thinking. And in our. Every part of every part of us.

And so it's like these two ideas of these two wings on the plane. Good. The good news that we declare and the good works that we live. I mean, the good news that we declare clarifies everything.

But the good works that we do verify the thing we declared. You got to have. You got to have them both working. And we all know what it's like with a one winged is flying.

We have this hypocritical kind of church that we're messed up or the other one where it's just the good works, but there's no gospel in informing that. And it just becomes a social gospel. And. But when they're both.

When they're both out there working, we really are, I think, living messengers of what Christ asked us to be. And so it's not complicated. It's not woke. It's not a social gospel. It's actually what Christ has asked us to be in his church.

And so many examples that we see that we're talking to speak of issues of justice and we can't be afraid of the. And when we just sort of.

We don't want to talk about that, it gets in the way with our declaring the gospel, then I don't think we really understand what the gospel is.

Draw that out. That's my next question. How do we then understand the gospel with the kingdom of God in our gospel and what we articulate?

Because some people would say, I'm going to use the Philip Yancey version. We're all bastards and God loves us anyway. I mean, that's the plane that he used to. He mentioned that in the book.

Forgive my language there, but that's exactly what he said. But how do we help people to see the kingdom of God in the gospel itself?

I define. This is just Jeff Kristofferson making it easy. I define the kingdom of God as what everything looks like when Jesus gets his way.

And so that would include my repentance, that would include my belief. But it goes way further than that. Doesn't stop there. It goes on with Metanoia, repentance on almost every area of my life. And. And so I'm.

I'm actually, I'm repenting and realigning with the way Christ has intended my life to be. And my life only works and the church only works and things only work when we actually cooperate with. With Christ's intention in the first place.

And so if we just have a gospel that only includes how we get to heaven, we don't really have a church that works because the idea of the church was supposed to be something far more redemptive than, you know, helping people have assurance of salvation.

No, I think that is quite excellent because as you've already noted, and I think of the early church, people love to talk about Acts, but yet I'm not sure how many of us always grasp everything that Acts is talking about, where it has so many people being served by the disciples, widows and orphans being taken care of. They're existing to help other people in this new household of God, this community. And today, though, it's this just very individual.

And I think that's one of the reasons we saw so many people during COVID have not come back because they didn't see how essential it was to their life. We've just isolated it to this one aspect of spiritual truth and removed it from the further understanding of the kingdom of God and what it entails.

And again, when Covid was coming, I wrote an article and I preached a message that was called we were made for this as it was coming. Because I really, really. This is terrible to say because the early signs of COVID how awful it was going to be.

And I lost everyone, lost friends in this because of this. But I knew we were made for this. And I went back to the second and third century, and there were two pandemics.

One lasted 12 years, one lasted 15 years. And the early church, what was their response? The Roman citizens kicked the people out of their homes because they had the sniffles.

The Christians brought those Roman people into their house and fed them with simple foods and nutrition. And many of them regained their health. And what happened? What do they want? They wanted to be a part of that religion. They want to be a part of those.

Those people. And those two pandemics thrusted the church forward in an incredible way. And so in. In a weird way, I was kind of excited about the opportunity.

So I had our people go and make Facebook groups in their neighborhood and said, all right, go. Go up and down, make sure. And then. And then take care of your neighborhoods. Find out who's.

Who needs something, who needs medicine, who needs groceries, and just sort of pastor your neighborhood. We were made for this. And I was so excited about, you know, the deploying of people.

I didn't realize that the talking points of COVID were going to be our rights to worship, our rights to gather, our rights to. And I thought I was very disappointed because we talk about the church being in two different ways. The church gathered and the church scattered.

Really, that's not really a great picture. I think the church gathered and the church deployed is a better picture of where we should be.

We understood the church gathered, but we had no idea what to do when the church was scattered or deployed. We weren't deploying anybody and we had no assignment for them. There was no equipping that had happened to prepare them for it. And so all of it was.

We were just losing 45% of our church because of what was going on. Because our church was a worship service. We took care of their needs. They came, they did their part, we did our part. It was a contract.

If we were ready for it, we had a better opportunity. The picture that I give in the book of the ice storm shows here's a group of disciples who. There was something going on. It was life or death.

And they took full advantage of it and brought the gospel into the situation. And they saw incredible things happen. Covid was something that. It could have been that for many churches.

There was an article that was in the news MSN just a few weeks ago where they were noting a church outside in Michigan, a church of about 300, 300,000 people. I mean, not church, excuse me, a community, 300,000 people.

And during COVID there was the shutdown and you get into the individual rights and with the church rights. And this church was forbidden from meeting. They met. So they, the authorities chained the doors.

Therefore they responded in the election and voted in all of their people into the city council. They abolished their town motto, which was everyone has a place to belong. They they cite that under equity, inequality and woke agenda.

Now it's a place where freedom rings and they have the Bible at the center of it. There was another two churches outside of Michigan. Just to further illustrate in, in Covid, one said, okay, I'll shut down.

I want to respect the authorities that are above me. Romans, chapter 13. The other one said, no, you're inhibiting my. My right to worship. One church was about 100.

The guy that said threatened the church was being threatened by this. The other church was 300.

How does a kingdom centric view keep us afloat when we see the temptation to go after something that is not of God, even when we're going to suffer greatly because of it?

It's one thing to suffer in unbelief, it's another thing to suffer when someone claims to be Christian and it seems that kingdom, it's much more painful because it seems like they have truth and we don't. How do we go about that? How do we help people? What's a kingdom centric view to help us there?

Well, ultimately, as leaders, we know that in a few breaths we are going to be face to face with Christ and we will give an accounting on our lives.

And so that to me is the sobering moment that kind of helps me kind of reconstruct a lot of other things in my life is he's not going to ask me, did my church grow? He's going to ask me, did you obey? When I, when I think about, you know, that battle that, that we're, we have been in, there's a history behind it.

There's this. If you walk, the pendulum swings. There's a pendulum swing of hierarchy. And so we have, you know, more mainline churches that have a lot of hierarchy.

And then the pendulum swing moved away to autonomy, independence, freedom. And so every, every congregation is, you know, its own fif system and its own thing.

And neither one of these to me seem like a, you know, a holy biblical idea. The, the middle ground seems to be interdependence.

And when you look at John, you know, John, chapter 17, Jesus Prayer for his people, there's a sense where there, this oneness is, is something that's significant. And so if you want to look at, there's always going to be winners and losers.

Has a church population grown? Has it maintained, has it declined? In, in every city in North America, it has not Grown it is most cities.

In Buffalo, there was. There was a pastor. I won't give any of them. There was a pastor who went.

He became a new pastor of a church that was one of the larger churches, and he went on an apology tour, and he went to all the other pastors and says, it takes an ecosystem of small churches to grow a large church. We did this activity. We did this activity. We did this activity.

And we didn't do it intentionally to hurt you, but we knew it hurt you and we didn't care.

And I want to, on behalf of our church, apologize, repent of that, and promise you, as long as I'm leading, you won't see us ever do this, this, this, or this again. And it created a sense of trust amongst the churches in Buffalo. And they started to say, what could we do? What could we do together?

And when they all began to lean in and think and said, well, the most important thing is gospel access.

How do we get the gospel to every man, woman, boy and girl so they could see and hear and taste and smell the good news of Jesus Christ on multiple occasions, so they could receive or reject Christ with knowledge. And so they said, all right, we're going to do two things. We're going to start new churches, and we're going to strengthen existing churches.

So they brought out their map of Buffalo and they said, well, here's a area of town that's in really, you know, trouble. Let's start a church there. And someone said, well, Pastor Bob is pastoring there.

He's been there for years and years and years, and his church isn't doing very well, but he's been faithful and slugging it out there. And so they went and visited Pastor Bob and said, what do you need? And he needed resources. He needed people. And they said, well, we can help you.

And so other churches began to give people and money to Pastor Bob. And they said, well, let's go plant a church here. And another pastor said, well, that's beside my church. I'd be glad to be a part of it.

Even though the city of Buffalo contracted by a half a percent, smaller than it was 10 years before. Church population, people, the amount of people who went to church every Sunday went up 28%.

And that's almost evenly distributed between new churches that were started and existing churches that were leaning. In the churches that were started. You ask their sending church, you know who you say, who's your sending church? You know what they say?

The Church of Western New York. And there's a sense where they're actually living out this John17 idea as close as anything I've ever seen in North America.

And the fruit is there to see. And so as long as we see church as our fiefdom, as autonomous, as winners and losers, and we're going to compete, we'll never see that.

But when we begin to sort of take our hands off of it and say with open hands, God, you have called me to this city and not to get a church out of this city if I'm a church planter, but what are you doing in this city? How do I cooperate with what you're doing in this city to bring the gospel, to bring healing, bring the good news here?

All of a sudden I behave way differently. And I don't see my brothers in the church next door as competition, but as kingdom collaborators. We're working together and joining hands.

You know, the results are there. So it's a whole different vision. It isn't this hierarchy and it isn't this autonomy. It is this interdependence where we're working together.

We're not going to agree theologically, we look through a glass dimly.

And even though those of us who think we have everything exactly right in our doctrine are going to go to heaven in a few years and find out we had a lot of it wrong. Wrong.

The things that aren't, you know, the most important things, prime order things, we put them as secondary things, and we concentrate on the gospel together and, and let the world outside see that we love Jesus most. That's the thing that holds us all together. Until we're there, I don't think we stand a chance at, of turning the tide.

Where we are in North America, I think as long as we're. We were measuring ourselves against others, you know, that's. That's not a winning, winning idea.

Not. Well, not at all.

And I was one of those churches that we had a megachurch move into the community and not necessarily welcome just because they sent out an ad campaign that said because there's no gospel presence in this city and that just ticked us all off. I mean, we still tried to welcome them, but it's like they made unnecessary enemies. We're trying to do the same thing right here.

And you just basically said, we don't do anything thing. And now that pastor has had scandal and left ministry. But you see this concept.

One of the questions, though, that I know people ask me is how do you differentiate between what's primary and what's secondary? Because some say, I don't want to work with that church. They're doing A plus, B plus C. That's terrible. That's heresy.

And sometimes they use the word right, sometimes they over exaggerate. How do we help people find unity and not unanimity, but unity. And, and when do we say we can't go with you right now. Where do we draw that line?

Well, I mean, it depends what we're doing, but if it's, you know, like, I, I can help start a church that has, you know, similar teaching as I do now. If they baptize babies, I can't. It's just not who I am.

I'm, I, I believe something differently, but I can still with that church, if they understand the gospel is by faith in Jesus Christ, I can do all kinds of things with them together.

And so I think Billy Graham did a great job in trying to tease that out in that Lassan covenant, saying, if we can agree on these things, we can do all kinds of salvation, kinds of gospel things together. But once it gets down to ecclesiological matters, I might not be able to join in, But I'm still cheering for you. You, I still love you.

I still want to pray with you. I still want to. I don't mind even my people go and join you if, you know, it's. It's just. That's not where I am.

It's not where we are as a, as a church and. But as long as we set it up as enemies, as long we set up as we're right, they're wrong. And it's difficult, I think, to do that.

Oh, it is. And you actually bring this out in the book where you have this pastor who finally decides to join this. He's a mega church pastor.

He decides to join it.

But actually his father is a very large name in the denomination, really involved in political circles, which I thought was quite fascinating how you juxtapose these two together.

He ends up leaving the church before they fire him, starts another thing that ends up becoming the exact thing that he just left before and caught in this Vicious cycle. He ends up paying a huge price for his desire to do this mission.

I think many of us say, like you've already noted in the beginning of our conversation, where there are some. You said 25% wanted to do it, but only 9% ended up doing this type of paradigm shift.

It wasn't even a paradigm shift. It was just even modest shift. Any shift, 9%, any shift.

It's going to become to the point in time where they're not going to have a choice whether or not it might be. And it could be my generation, it could be the generation behind.

I know talking with pastors even five to ten years ago, we thought we might make it to retirement as pastors, but the generation coming behind us probably won't. It will be bi, vocational or co vocational, as you mentioned. How do we help our people know?

Because some were saying, hey, sounds great, never going to happen. I got family to feed, I got stresses. I lose my respect, I lose my pension, I lose all of this. This is going to cost you.

Let's just say that right up this type of shift that you're. This kingdom centric idea. Not that you're not doing something biblical. You are in fact.

But it's coming up against not even, I don't even want to say old wine skins. I would say it is a truncated gospel, if you will. It's going to cost you. How do we help people see the cost is worth.

Yeah. And, and so the, and the two story, like there's three main stories in that book and they all end up weaving together. Right.

But, but the one story, the Jimmy character, I patterned him after, you know, people that I've met, that, that we, we have these sort of spasmatic. Oh yes, that's right. And we start to make a, a step or two in the right direction.

But the overwhelming influence of the cultural Christianity that we're swimming in, just soothing knocks us back to, to where we were. I think there's probably, there's sort of two cases.

There's one where for some of us we're going to have to, we might not ever get to experience this. My job, I'm pastoring a church right now and it probably can't take it there. I probably can't take this church to where, where this idea is.

But I can celebrate it when I see it. I can fan it and bless it and not, not stand in the way, not be the naysayer, not be the one that, you know, preaches against.

But I'm actually the one who's When I, when I see it, see that person in my pew, I'm behind them and blowing and trying to, you know, encourage everything in there. And I think there's a generation of leaders that, that's going to be their role.

Their ministry is, is that almost like a midwife in a cartilage situation.

But then there, there's what I'm seeing is, I'm seeing it everywhere where younger, younger leaders have no desire to do the thing that, you know, people of your, my generation thought was the only option. And they, they don't have any desire at all to do that. And so they're, they're thinking differently, you know, from the get go.

And so for those people, the, the, the change is, is easy in a sense. It's like, okay, let's make sure we're biblical here. Make sure not.

I, I see it this way, if don't want to get in the weeds so much here, but we often start with ecclesial praxis. Here's our, here's our idea of church. Here's how it works. Here's the best, most biblical, best, most wonderful thing.

And we go from that to missional engagement or no, if we go from that to Christology and we go okay, and then. But we start with our ecclesial practice, we go to Christology, which is kingdom thinking, and from there we go to missional engagement.

So we start with our preferred this is what I think is best for church. And we narrow it down how the Jesus fits into that church. And then we get an even narrower scope about engagement.

And I think we get everything backwards.

And so we're not effective in missional engagement because the Jesus that we're selling is the one that anybody wants because he's the one that so fits so nicely into our machine. I think the way we start is with Christology. We start with the big picture of who Jesus is, His priorities, kingdom thinking all the way through.

How does that inform everything? We go from that to missional engagement second and say how do we make disciples of Jesus in the context that we're in?

And then we go finally from there into biblical community. How do we form community, the community of Christ that is reproducible.

And so we're actually approaching this from the entirely different way that's a lot easier to do from scratch than it.

Is to oh yeah, which is why I think you, when I saw you did the church multiplication institute rather than just renewal, because it's a lot easier to give birth than it is to raise the dead. You mentioned belonging before believing and that rubs some people think, okay, wait, wait, wait, wait. No, no, no, no, no, that's not right.

That's not right. And you go, no it is. And I actually think neuroscience is behind you by the way. We have, we look to see if we belong before we believe.

Why is it so important to get that right? And where have we, how have we perverted that and what results have come because of it?

Yeah.

So if, if, when, if our understanding of believing is not just a, you know, a few facts about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ that will give some intellectual assent to, but it's actually a whole new order of life. It affects everything. This is what believing means.

It doesn't mean I've, you know, believe something and now I've prayed a prayer to, to confirm it, but it actually means my whole life is invested in this new thing. I can't do that immediately or emotionally. I have to count cost. Jesus talks about this. I have to weigh all that kind of a thing.

And especially we're in a day with no religious memory when people don't know anything about scripture. It takes some time to cook. And so for instance, you referenced the book Kingdom Matrix that I wrote. The ideas in that actually came from.

We're watching disasters happen in the south in New Orleans and Mississippi and here we are up in Toronto. So we would take mini van convoys from Toronto two day drive down to the south and do the work that needed to be done and come back two days.

But we would make it that our minivans were loaded half with lost people and half with, with our, our church people. And these people would, would take their own holidays, take their vacation and, and pay their own way and go with us on this thing.

And we would pray before meals, we'd have a little devotion and, and our lives would just be, you know, really close together for this period of time. Most of the time by the time we got back to Toronto, those people had decided to follow Jesus Christ. They felt like they belong.

That yeah, this becomes an important thing to, it's belong first, believe second, behave third. We go behave first and then you can come to our church and believe and then you'll feel like you belong. And you know that doesn't work that way.

It doesn't work that way, not at all. And I love the fact that you brought that out. Another key element that you brought out that I thought, wow, he's going there.

You allude back to the Middle east.

You start off the book in the Middle east with this character, Omar, who becomes known as Yeshua, as he goes from being a refugee in Atlanta and then goes to Philadelphia.

And then he ends up being a part of this kingdom movement and ends up returning back, actually returning not back home, but to Iran, where his family has relocated. And he didn't know it. He didn't know it until he gets there, there. But he's encountering these Christian leaders and these Iranian Christian leaders.

And there is a collective frustration with the Iranian leaders as they're interacting with these American Christians because of what they call the livestock auction. I thought, wow, this terminology is going to throw people off.

But I think it's extremely important that we talk about this, because their little notice of livestock auction, it's really about helping missionaries on the ground or helping those. Not missionaries on the ground. Helping those on the ground that are serving Americans have a tendency to pick one.

And then that actually results in the spirit of competition, and it divides the church because then people are competing for the resources that are there. Now most Americans are going, we're doing missions, we're helping people.

And the Iranians are sitting on the ground going, you're really messing us up by doing it. Why did you feel that you needed to bring that out? What are you trying to address there? And how can we help people see a better alternative?

Well, this is answering that sort of. That question or that temptation of paternalism. Right. So we have a picture of what needs to be happening.

Even though we've never been to Iran before, we're coming from our churches with an idea of what needs to happen. We're ready to. Ready to do that.

So we have an image of the kind of person that we need to find because we already know what they look like, because they look like us, you know, and. And so this just happens. I mean, if you've been around the world and seen, you know, the what.

What we've done, in many cases, there's a book written called When Helping Hurts. And. And it's not really designed for this. This context. It's designed more for meeting needs. But.

But it actually, the principles, I think, overlay perfectly because we think we're helping our. And our motives are pure.

It's not like we have bad motives, but our actions actually divide what's going on there, and it creates a win or loser, and it fosters a culture of people trying to perform for us to get our dollars. And so they change their strategy, they change their ideas, change all kinds of stuff in order for us to like them.

And so the Wise old Iranian leader who spent most of his life, again, true stories in jail is the one that's kind of speaking truth here saying, this isn't helping us. Us. You're actually. You're actually dividing us, and the ones that you're helping no longer feel like they're part of us.

I think we do far better spending. You know, if we only have a little bit of time, we've only got two weeks that we can invest on a mission trip there.

Not making a lot of decisions about how they should be doing ministry and telling them, but actually going in a. In a. In a learning posture, saying, what do you want to teach us here in North America by what they're doing?

And then figuring out ways if we're going to help financially. Figuring out ways to help the things that God has already asked them to do, not sort of on our page.

I was so grateful and glad that you drew that out.

I was interacting with a mission organization in India, and they were telling me about two churches that had caused actually a lot of problems because one was actually financing a project and they were giving $150,000 to this ministry project and then disagreed with something on the ground and pulled out, leaving this great deal of shame for the church that was there. And I can't tell you how many times I've heard of ministry saying, hey, we're going to go in and do this. This is how you follow Jesus.

I went into Liberia and I got there and they said, what do you want to do? And I said, well, that's the wrong question. My question is, how would you like to utilize us, you know, your culture? What would you like us to do?

Do?

How can we serve you? And what can. We knew that we. And I told my team this. We're going to learn more from you than you're going to are from, you know, they are from us.

And it's often true. And I think they appreciated that. And they told me what they wanted me to do and I did it. Which I thought was weird, but I did it.

And revival broke out. It was awesome. I was, like, blown away. But I think having that servant posture. Most evangelicals that I know just think, oh, missions.

But they don't think of the means that have been employed in order to accomplish that mission. And you alluded to again, when helping hurts. Excellent, Excellent book. Highly recommend.

Now, as we're coming to the end here, and I know you've been so generous with your time. We've gone over our time. What's a concluding word? That you have for our audience. We like to tell people because we are Apollo's water.

We want to give people a water bottle for the week. Something for them to sip on through the week. A truth that they can hold on to and just draw refreshment and renewal from.

From what's the truth that they can hold on to? This week, as a result of our.

Conversation, I think I would go back to our earlier thoughts on the kingdom of God and, and help us to understand that, you know, that is the ultimate reality. And a lot of times people call it upside down kingdom. It's not an upside down kingdom.

It's a right side up kingdom in an upside down world, it's God's. I mean it's counterintuitive and it certainly count counterintuitive to religion and the way we construct religions. But I would just say if I'm.

If I'm a pastor of a church, I would be, I would be spending a lot of time thinking what is my goal here? Is my goal this church? Because if it is, that's way too small of a thing.

And if, if your goal is that your church you are not going to do the things the kingdom requires like giving yourself away way you're going to save yourself. But if your goal is the kingdom of God, then you're going to ask different questions. I don't own a person, I don't own a dollar.

What is it you want to do here?

And with open hands we hear the spirit speak in those moments and then we give courageous leadership in the direction that God has asked and then we experience God's stories. I guess that would be my concluding thought is what is my goal goal?

If my goal is the church that I'm serving, I maybe I've got an idol and that's something I need to metanoia on and move towards a different idea.

Those are a good concluding word and a good concluding challenge. One that is very difficult. I think for every one of us who has been involved in ministry of some sort.

I do want to thank you for your, your what you've been writing. Kingdom Matrix was excellent. It shaped my understanding of kingdom and made me make some huge changes and how I went about ministry.

I can already tell you that because I know when people read this, they're going to look at their church and they're going to come to their leader. And their leaders aren't probably going to want to make the changes that are necessary. But I do. Jeff, I want to thank you for coming on the show.

Thank you for all you've done. May God bless you as you go. But thank you for coming on Apollo's Water.

Thank you, Travis. It was a real pleasure. Thanks for your great questions too. It was fun.

Believe it is a dangerous book. It acts as a mirror to many.

Of our modern churches and that can be an uncomfortable rebuke to some. To others, it's very welcome because now they can actually see what needs to be changed. It's a little bit like C.S.

lewis wrote of Aslan in the Chronicles of Narnia. He's not a tame lion, but he is good.

This is a book that is not.

Tame nor safe, but it's good. It could help us end or change everything.

We are thinking a lot about this book as a team and the implications it has for us as individuals and as an organization, as part of the church. Omar, also known as Yeshua, offers a real challenge to the church in the West. Can we hear it? And as I'd like to say, it's not just this in a novel.

This is what I saw every day in my church. I saw this worked out all the time. But can we hear their words, the global church, as they're speaking to us?

Do we recognize that the truth of God's word requires that we live differently, that both wings of the plane, as Jeff put it, are necessary for us to fly?

And do we recognize that Jesus's parables were about living the kingdom in every area of life and that the kingdom is what everything looks like when Jesus gets his way? If we stop and think about it, that's a huge, huge deal for all of us. It has implications that we don't often think about.

And as a church leader, I or we will have to give an account. Not did we grow the church, but did we obey? What are our God stories? Where we saw God work or did we get in the way?

Did we set up our own kingdoms that just look like they are his? Those are hard questions. The kingdom of God is ultimate reality, Jeff said.

It's not an upside down kingdom, but a right side up kingdom in an upside down world. And that actually helps us to recover a proper missionary identity. That's true.

So true.

But too often we think that the upside down part is only on the outside, only out there in the culture and not in us too. But as we saw last time, the Reformation was necessary because it was affixed to the problems inside the church.

We have to be faithful to the message of Jesus in the scriptures, build on the faith of the church through tongues. We have to listen to the voice of the church around the world. Then we can better engage our culture here and now in everyday life.

Tell us how you are living out Christ's mission where you are. And please don't hesitate to drop us a line about this conversation or any other of our convers. We want to be able to hear from you.

Be sure to 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 to water the world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollos Watered.

Stay watered, everybody.

Sa.