#300 | What Does Love Really Look Like in Church? | Michel Hendricks, Pt. 2

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You know, when people think of Christians, they should think, you know, I don't agree with any other theology, maybe, but, man, do those people know how to love each other.

And they know how to love me, too.

I just feel so loved when I'm with them now.

Love's not the only thing, too.

You know, there's other church.

You know, other churches were supposedly.

We can assume that other churches were loving well, because Jesus doesn't mention that.

And he says, but you're doing these things.

So correctness doctrine and correct this behavior and whatever, right?

But if you've stopped loving, essentially you've stopped being a church.

What is the business of the church?

We count bodies, butts, buildings and baptisms, the bees we measure, engagement programs, small groups, all kinds of stuff.

And there's nothing necessarily wrong with any of it.

I mean, we have a book called Numbers.

But what if the things that are.

The easiest to measure aren't necessarily the things that matter the most?

And I'll tell you this right now, that freaks me out, because I don't want to succeed in stuff that doesn't matter.

And I don't think you do either.

Welcome back to Ministry Deep Dive.

I'm your host, Travis Michael Fleming.

And today we're jumping into part two of my conversation with Michael Hendricks, co author with Jim Wilder, of the book the Other Half of Church.

Now, if you've listened to part one, and I hope you have, because your life would be so much more complete if you did, I encourage you to go back and start there, because Michael introduced us to something that I think has profound implications for the way that we think about discipleship and transformation.

And that's what I want to see.

We talk about Joy Chesed, that deep, loving attachment we develop with one another, and group identity, knowing who our people are and how our people live.

But that raises a totally different question.

What do we actually do with all this?

Because it's one thing to tell people to love one another, and you know this.

It's another thing to actually teach people how to love.

We know that we talk about this all the time as pastors.

We know how to tell people to love our enemies, but when we have that person at the church who drives us bonkers, it's really hard to love them, because it is easy to tell someone to love their enemies.

It's a totally different thing, though, to form the kind of person who could actually do it.

And it's one thing to put people into a small group and call it community.

It's another thing entirely to create the kind of relationships where people can be known, loved, challenged, and actually become more like Jesus.

Now Michael talks about what he calls a relational reformation.

That's what we need, a recovery of a church in which love isn't a program or value, but it's actually at the center of who we are in everything we do.

And this conversation gets practical.

We talk about why mature Christians need to model the Christian life rather than simply explain it.

We talk about what happens when someone walks into our church who doesn't look.

Or act like us.

And we talk about vulnerability, compassion, correction, and why our instinct to fix someone may actually make it harder for us to love them.

And underneath all of it is a deceptively simple question.

Are we actually forming people who know how to love like Jesus?

Before we get there, though, here's a.

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Now let's get back to the question at the heart of today's conversation.

What would happen if our churches became known not simply for what we believe, but for how well we love?

Here's part two of my conversation with Michael Hendricks.

Happy listening.

Well, there is measurables within Scripture.

They measured how many people came to Christ on Pentecost, how many widows.

We measured.

There's a whole book called Numbers, after all.

And we would always try to say, I would try to balance that out.

I said, you know, numbers are one indicator.

We would call them hard facts and hard checks.

Hard facts were one wing of the plane where we could measure the buildings, bodies, budgets, baptisms, that kind of thing.

And then on the other side, we would say well, then there's this idea of holiness, surrender, relational unity.

That stuff doesn't fit on the stat sheet.

And unfortunately, I think a lot of the performance aspect, churches have adopted the left wing and not the right wing.

And that's why people are falling away left and right is because there's not a relational glue to keep them there.

Am I wrong?

No, that's.

You got it.

Right.

And numbers aren't bad enough themselves because they can show us what's working and what's not working.

Right.

The key is numbers should never motivate us.

Oftentimes it's like you hear the numbers touted.

Last night, we had 2,000 people in the men's retreat.

We're starting to tread on some kind of dangerous ground there when we start doing that.

Because the thing that motivates us, and this is a group identity statement where we are largely motivated by our love for each other, our love for God, and our desire to live out his kingdom on earth.

Right.

Those are the things that motivate us, the desires God has placed into our heart for our true identity.

Those are the things that are almost impossible to measure.

Right, Right.

So we really need to be very, very intentional about separating numbers from motivation.

How do you do that?

I mean, being in the church, we read the book and of course trellis and the vine, and we would talk about the vine can't go any more than the tre.

And other people would say, you'll never go beyond your systems.

But rarely did I ever hear people talk about.

I don't think I ever have talk about love, relationships at all.

It rarely ever existed.

I mean, we would talk about shepherding people and wanting to shepherd, but it came down to that wasn't enough.

Like you, you needed to measure it.

How do you change such an ingrained mentality when, especially after what I heard from vanderblum, they said 50% of their placements now in these larger churches are not seminary or Bible college trained, which means that they're coming from a business world.

They're CEOs or they have charismatic personalities because it's running the business.

And how do we go back to what the scripture says in this relational aspect?

I mean, how do we do that?

Well, you have to answer the question of what is the business of the church?

And that's where we've gotten the answer wrong.

You look at Jesus, the one time we see Jesus intentionally and kind of slowing down, analyzing the progress of seven churches is in revelation, right?

Yep.

Yep.

Most of those churches were screwing up in doctrine.

And behavior.

And he corrected them.

You know, don't commit idolatry.

Don't do this, don't do that.

One of the churches had lost its first love.

Interesting that there's no object for love.

So it didn't say love for me or love for each other, because we know from John's gospels that those two are so intrinsically intertwined, you can't separate them.

That's why I think Jesus just lays it at love.

You lost your first love.

And he didn't say, for me or for each other.

Right?

Now, the other churches maybe have doctrinal problems.

He tells them to repent, don't do this.

But it's interesting.

The Ephesian church who lost their love, he said, repent of that.

Otherwise, I'm taking your lampstand away.

It never says that to any of the other churches.

You know, one of the things Jesus said is let your light shine, right?

One of the purposes of the church is to let your light shine.

I believe if we tie that in to what Jesus says to the Ephesian church in revelation, that light is our love intrinsically.

It's the love of God shining into our culture.

You know, when people think of Christians, they should think, you know, I don't agree with any other theology, maybe, but man, do those people know how to love each other.

And they know how to love me too.

I just feel so loved when I with him.

Now.

Love's not the only thing too.

You know, there's other.

You know, other churches were supposedly.

We can assume that other churches were loving well, because Jesus doesn't mention that.

And he says, but you're doing these things, so correct this doctrine and correct this behavior and whatever, right?

But if you've stopped loving, you've.

You stop.

Essentially, you've stopped being a church.

And if you start.

And Jesus is basically saying, if you keep acting like you're not a church for a while, I'm pretty sure I'm gonna.

I'm gonna.

I'm gonna assure that you're not a church, because I'm gonna take my way.

And, you know, and essentially he's saying, I don't want you shining my light.

You know, the purpose of the church is to shine his light.

But he says to this church, I don't want.

If you don't repent, I don't want you shining my light anymore, because my light is love.

If you're not shining love, nothing else matters.

So it's a rediscovery of love.

We have to understand what it means to really love one another.

And I mean love God, love one another, all these things that are connected because it's all built.

It seems like these are all built on one another.

As you said, the relational soil.

You've got the soil, and that means a lot to me.

I come from farm country, so I know what it's like to exhaust something from the soil and things don't grow.

So you're saying that we need to do that now?

Like we also talked about, though, the performance aspect of many different churches, because they've really isolated it to.

The business of the church is to make disciples.

But what that means for them is get them to basically pray the prayer, become a Christian, get baptized.

But when we're looking at what discipleship really is, which is this idea of apprenticeship, you follow me, your behavior starts to change.

The church falls down.

Way.

It goes way down.

I mean, we're good at getting people in the door in the west, and that's even changing.

So how do we then create this relational soil to.

How do we recapture this in these larger churches?

Or is it we just have to create new places?

It's the whole new wineskin, old wineskin idea.

Well, you know, we're kind of at the head of the front edge of the wave on this thing of the, you know, this.

It's kind of a new.

We wouldn't.

Since.

And I can't.

I can't say God told me this, but since that there's almost a new Reformation coming to the church, but it's a real.

It's a really Reformation where the church again returns to its roots, where love is the center of everything we do and everything else.

We do a bunch of other things other than just love, but everything is saturated by love.

And love is always the center of everything we do.

We never do anything, our churches, that would decrease or separate or diffuse our love.

Love is always the center.

But we go and do all sorts of stuff that God calls us to do while always making sure we're centrally and fundamentally shining the light of Jesus love in whatever we do.

What that means, though, is we need to teach people how to do this.

The problem is most churches have been preaching regular sermons that we're supposed to love each other, we're supposed to love God, even that we're supposed to love our enemies.

But I have never been taught.

Until the last five years, I'd never met anyone who said we need to train ourselves to love our enemies.

So they never said how.

And it's.

It's almost cruel.

It's like if I take my 9 year old daughter out into the garage and say, hey, you know that car has a bad carburetor.

Here's all my tools.

Go fix that carburetor and don't come back in until it's done.

You know, that's kind of what we're doing to our people.

We're saying you need to love your enemies.

Okay, let's close in prayer and have another music, the song.

And then you go home and nobody was ever told nobody and not just trained how, but actually given a chance to practice.

Okay.

For the next 14 weeks I was in a training with 25 people in my basement where for 14 weeks we trained through hypothetical situations to love our enemies.

So is this then going back to another thing that you guys talk about in the book?

This mirror, this idea of mirror neurons, you have to have it displayed and modeled in front of you before you can actually grasp what it is.

Right?

Is that what I'm talking.

Is that what we're talking about here is in order to.

We can't just tell people what to do, we have to show them what to do.

Especially in behavior and character and maturity that we need to be shown doctrine.

We don't need to be necessarily shown, we need to be explained.

That's a left brain thing and that's very important.

But we don't need always the example on doctrine for character, how to love someone.

Well, in this complicated circumstance and this other complicated.

We actually need an example.

We need a more mature man or a more mature woman who shows us how to do it or can tell us stories of how they stayed connected to Jesus and kept loving even when their child did this crazy thing or whatever the situation happens to be.

So this is the Paul saying, follow me as I follow Christ.

Exactly.

Look at me, look at my life.

You know, look at my doctrine too.

And he said, he tells Timothy, pay close attention to your life and your doctrine.

You do both.

We're not saying jettison doctrine, but we've done the doctrine thing pretty well.

We haven't done the love thing.

We haven't taught our people how to love like Jesus.

Well, you know, it's interesting.

We're going to have as a guest on the show, hopefully in the fall, Kevin Vanhuser, who's a theologian from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.

And he talks about the gospel being a performance script.

That's what really the Bible is.

He says it's doctrine, but not just for knowledge sake.

It's an idea of.

It shows us how to Live out this in the middle of the world.

And so really it's kind of bridging that other part of it.

Because sometimes I think, as you mentioned, the doctrine we think of just as a knowledge aspect, but it's a knowledge in the aspect of living out, embodying.

I mean, and that's what we're seeing people come back to when you say this.

I love what you said with relational reformation, because we're now hearing more people talk about embodiment and purpose and interaction and church and this.

This idea of living and engaging and embodying what God has in front of us.

You guys are showing that the brain, science behind it, which is actually formulated and it gives kind of a boldness perhaps to it.

I keep thinking of a text on a screen, a Word document, and you're embolding it, saying, this is already there and we just need to pay attention to it.

And the scripture is already talking about it and here's why.

This is actually what occurs in your brain as we go about this.

Would that be a right assessment?

Yeah, exactly.

The author of our brain was also the author of Scripture.

And we should expect them to agree with each other, right?

We're surprised sometimes when it does.

But now I've seen it so many times with all of these things, with the importance of joy and the centrality of love for any kind of change, how the church is supposed to act like a family and function as a family.

All these things we see now is like, okay, now I see why.

Because if we're not functioning like a family, you know, a preacher can get up there and preach a really good sermon to me.

But if I have no attachment to that preacher because I'm one of 4,000 people in the audience, I've never actually had a meal with him.

I've never shared hard things and heard him share hard things, then my brain is going to not accept what he says.

Into the character area, I'm going to get lots of knowledge, but it's not going to change how I act when someone cuts me off in traffic.

Now, if, on the other hand, I know a person who's more mature than I am and I'm bonded to.

And he.

I actually see someone cut him off in traffic and I see him act or she act in a way that's very different maybe than what my default reaction would have been from my childhood, et cetera, my brain just starts rewiring itself and I start seeing spontaneous changes in my character.

Not with me trying to act better, but spontaneous changes into My character when someone cuts me off in traffic.

So, okay, this is fascinating to me.

So I'm hearing in a service we have, the sermon is going on, but you said now we have to have opportunity to practice this.

How do we do that when we just show up, listen, go home and shut the doors?

I mean, we don't.

I remember taking a course years ago where we had to learn how to exegete our community, where we had to understand the belief systems of our community.

And I know just in where I'm living right now, let's say we're in a suburb.

You see the garage, very small front porch.

You pull in, shut the garage door, and people are in their own little cab, little oasis, separated from everyone else.

How do we get our people outside to engage with people and practice this stuff?

Well, that's kind of like I said before, it's almost like a basic rewiring of how we do church.

Like what we're doing now is not even designed to do that.

Right, right.

It's not.

That's why it's failing.

And so the typical answer is the template answers.

Oh, we have small groups and we get people in small groups.

But small groups don't necessarily become high joy and high hesed love and then build our group identity unless we're intentionally doing that.

And most people who are writing the curriculums for small groups do they actually, have they been doing this for a year or two.

And understand it is the whole substructure there where we all are agreement that we're doing things as a family now, not as an organization.

Again, I don't have good answers.

What I'm saying is let's start trying stuff out and see what works and what doesn't work.

But let's not keep doing what we're doing because we know this is not working.

This is awesome.

You've got my brain, my brain, my motor neurons are firing right now, Michael, as we're walking through this, because I see this, I see this family atmosphere.

I see this relational dynamic.

I see this growing desire for people that want that connection.

I see it, and I'm hearing of different people trying different things, whether it's house, church, whether it's small groups, as you said, D groups, whatever the term you want to use for it.

But it's clear to people that what we're doing isn't really working and trying to cross that bridge and to see that formulation begin to occur.

So we see these group identities, this happening.

But I have questions.

First of all, when someone comes in.

To this group, they have this hesed relationship.

We don't operate from a hesed perspective, at least initially.

I mean, we all are wired for joy.

But I find it, if you don't fit into my group, I have to let you, I have to shame you so that your behavior then fits mine.

We always judge the outward behavior first.

So if it's a person coming into the service, let's say they're nearing a suburb like you are of Denver, and someone comes in who's goth, let's say, I mean, I'm just throwing out stuff.

How do we help?

We have to show them love before we can ever talk about the behavioral choice.

I mean, we have to introduce them to Jesus before anything else.

But.

But the obvious reaction that people have is they socially don't fit what we're doing.

My first reaction, and probably intuitively, unless I've corrected it through a lot of practices, is going to give a negative look to that person to let them know that that's perhaps not how we do things here.

Is that.

Is that an accurate thought that people do or practice that we have to correct?

That's often what, you know, the first thing, if the first thing you feel when you go into a Christian group, and maybe you're not a Christian, is that you need to shape up and behave, then we probably have the cart in front of the horse.

The first thing they should feel is people's faces lighting up on them and a desire to know who they are and sit with them and enjoy them and be curious about maybe what is God doing in this person.

The fact that he even showed up is a big deal.

And even when we feel the sense of needing to fix another person or change their behavior, then we've.

And we've gone back kind of to the example that Jesus uses of the Pharisees.

You know, he uses the example of a plate and a dish.

He said, you all wash the outside of the dish or the cup, but you leave the inside all alone, right?

And that's kind of what we're doing.

Let's wash the outside of this cup in this dish.

And he said, you know, you hypocrites, he says, you know, you're doing that with other people.

You haven't done it yourself.

He says, if you focus on washing the inside of the cup, that's where all the grime is, right?

If you focus on the inside of the cup, the outside, just naturally, most of the grime is not the outside of my coffee mug.

It's on the inside.

And If I put it under water in soap and I start scrubbing the inside just from the splashing water and overflow, the outside usually is so clean, I don't even need to clean the outside.

It just kind of takes care of itself.

But I'm not really focusing on the outside.

I'm going inside and doing the gunk.

And if this goth person comes into your group and he or she sees that you are actually going into the gunk of your own life, you're sharing it with the group.

You're sharing how you're interacting with Jesus and your other people around this gunky thing in your life and trying to clean it up.

One of the things that does to this goth person as well is all of a sudden they start trusting you.

Because you're being honest about who you are.

You're not trying to fix the struggles that you have.

You're not trying to fix them.

You're trying to fix yourself.

And you're sharing your crap with them, and you're delighted to be with them.

That's a whole nother dynamic.

It is a whole nother dynamic.

But if I'm looking at people and I've shared when I'm struggling with something or I'm dealing with an issue.

But I also know, having been in ministry for a long period of time, there's the social acceptable sharing, and then there's the real issues.

You know, there's the stuff that people could talk about that I would hear a lot.

And not to denigrate this, but there's.

There's some that are, yes, they're incipient and they're evil.

Like pride.

Pride is incipient and evil.

We're all gonna admit that.

But that is a whole lot more acceptable to people than someone saying, who's coming in and maybe have, have same sex attraction goes, you know, I had some type of intimate relationship with this guy last night, you know?

You know what I'm saying?

This is where the real rubber meets the road here.

So they'll say, oh, I'm proud, or I struggle.

And it's like, well, wait a minute.

Where do we have that type of real admission and safety?

Like, I am really showing you what I'm dealing with right now.

And then this idea of most churches aren't going to respond that way.

Some will because they've had these muscles built up.

But more often than not, it's bad center, bad discipline.

And again, I'm not denying discipline.

That's in scripture.

But how do you bridge that gap.

With people to Help people understand the safety of this hessed and love relationship.

What has to be built up over time, it has to be modeled, it sounds like, from the leadership for the people to be able to get it.

But I'm looking at a leader going, a leader's only going to be able to give as much as the people will allow him to admit if he admits complete moral failure.

I mean, hopefully that's not the case.

Being an extreme example here, just seeing how this plays out, how do you then help people work with that and then have accountability and understand consequences at the same time while still maintaining that relational chesed that's there?

You know, there's a lot, lot to unpack from what you just said.

And you know, one of the things we say first is we, the brain has a very fairly organized definition of maturity.

And the people that we want leading our groups, we want them to have earned maturity.

Earned maturity means I have a pretty good suite of emotional and relational skills, meaning I can handle big emotions, big problems, and I stay loving.

So wait, hold on.

Maturity, that is defined by how one acts within a relational construct rather than understanding greater doctrine.

Oh yeah.

Doctrine has very little to do with relational maturity.

Just want to make sure, just laying that out there.

So, for example, in the infant, the first four years, it's a maturity stage that we learned largely to receive the glowing face of our mothers and secondly, our fathers.

And then secondly, during that period, we start to learn how to handle the big emotions of life, right?

Sadness.

And we learned that again by mirror neurons, by seeing my mother and seeing my father, attuned to my anger, attuned to my fear, return to my sadness and still be delighted to be with me, be in that sadness and show me what it looks like to be relational in that emotion, right?

Those are the kinds of things we learn to give, to receive love.

And then our brain actually kind of rewires itself after the infant stage.

Around age four, we go into the child stage.

And one of the main skills we learn in the child stage is how to do hard things.

This is where the father's influence often is more prominent than in the infant stage.

The mother's influence is prominent in the infant stage.

And in the child stage, we learn to do hard things, hard relational things as well as hard physical things.

It starts out with little things like learning to brush my teeth and make my bed or whatever.

And it gets progressively harder throughout life.

But we learn that, right?

And we learn how to start to take care of ourselves.

And then when we go and start into the like around age 12, 13, our brain rewires itself again for the adult stage.

So adult stage starts at age 13.

And the big thing we're meant to learn relationally, mature wise is not, is to take care of both myself and others.

Like a child cannot do that.

So we should never ask them to that sort of like when, you know, a 10 year old kid has to take care of his drunk parent or something like that.

We're actually doing some damage to their brain because they don't even have the circuitry to do that yet.

That circuitry we get after age 12 or 13 or start to learn.

But adults can take care of others and ourselves simultaneously without destroying myself and destroying the other person.

Right.

So when we see a workaholic who just absolutely works crazy hours because they want to get ahead and they start ignoring their family, that's an example of someone who didn't learn this early.

They're still stuck in child level maturity.

They haven't got into adult level maturity where they know how to balance two really important things like a job and a family and making both function simultaneously.

That's an adult level skill.

A lot of people, workaholics, never, never learned how to do that.

So some of the focus in this whole brain Christianity, we talk about the other half of church in our book.

The other half of church takes maturity very seriously and makes sure that part of our discipleship is going back into the infant and child and adult stages and filling in the skills we didn't get right.

Those are the people that need to be leading our small groups or the people that have done the hard work so that when someone comes in who's goth or someone drops a big bomb of somebody, some behavior issues or something, a mature leader, a man and a woman know how to handle these, maintain the relational integrity of the group, stay loving, not try to fix the person, but also be with them and get them true help.

I'm having a flashback to being in a small group one time and there was a man in the group, he was an older man, gentleman, and he had just come to the realization, and I don't know if he just admitted it publicly, that he had his sons being watched by a babysitter who ended up molesting those children.

And he lived with this unbearable guilt.

And he never shared this until the group and he goes, I just can't forgive him.

And I thought, well, first of all, it's huge that you've even admitted this, but another person in the group, well intentioned, they said Wait a minute.

You have to forgive?

The Bible says that we have to forgive.

And it's like, well, hold on.

Yes, that's true.

We are to forgive.

But he is just acknowledging this.

He's opening up about this right now.

And we need to be able to be there with our brother to walk through this, him dealing with this stage.

So while the truth is that we are to forgive, there's a process involved in this whole thing and we need to help make sure that we're walking people through the process as we hopefully lead them to that fact down the line as we learn how to process that pain.

Is that a good example of something along that line or am I off?

It's a good example of the importance of group identity as well.

For example, we were in a group doing this kind of training to love our enemies and people would share weakness and there were a few people that would very regularly then offer a fix.

So what your example is telling a person who's just bared their soul and you say you have to forgive that person.

Scripture says you have to forgive them.

When I say that to you, that means I'm trying to fix you.

And when I'm fixing you, my relational brain is turned off.

Your wife would say your rcs are off because that's a non relational solution.

But what if my wife is the one trying to fix me?

Here's what we did in our group.

After I saw that two or three times the next time we met, I said, we're going to have a family meeting today.

And I said, I've noticed sometimes when someone shares a problem or a weakness that we almost feel a compulsion to give them an answer or some advice.

And so here's a ground rule we have is that we do not offer anyone advice in this group unless they ask for it.

Or in very rare cases, when we sense maybe God saying that he's given us something to say to them, we ask them first for permission and say, are you looking for some advice on this or some help or do you just want us to sit with you in this hard situation and you respect their answer when they say, no, I just want you to sit with me.

If they don't want advice.

I wish Job's friends would have asked Job that question.

That would have taken.

We wouldn't have a book, but it would have taken some time.

How then do you share that?

I mean, do you always ask permission before you share that type of advice?

Always.

I don't ever give anybody advice without asking permission.

Okay, here's the Thing though, usually when people are sharing weakness, the thing they need and the thing their brain was designed to need first and foremost was compassion.

Compassion is full of joy.

And hesed because you're in my face is telling you not only that I'm glad to be with you even when you shared this really painful thing that's going on between you and your child, for example, but I'm feeling, I can feel that pain.

I'm with you in the pain.

When I can see that you're with me in the pain, you've just put my brain into a really healthy place.

Even though I'm in pain, even though this is a hard situation, you've actually just helped me and made me stronger in this very difficult thing.

On the other hand, if you kind of level advice at me, all of a sudden you've just put a backpack on my shoulders that has like 20 pounds worth of bricks in them.

So you've just made my life harder when I'm already carrying a big load.

You've added some bricks to that load.

And that's some relational intelligence that we haven't been teaching in the church.

People actually need to be trained in this.

How do you help a person when they're exposed, you know, they're sharing some weakness in their life?

How do we actually help them and not make it worse?

These are all things we need to train our people.

Which I've never seen a class on relational development.

I've seen.

I've seen some recently on spiritual friendship, which, which is along that line.

But I have never seen a class or even a membership class that talks about relational development and group identity statements.

Never.

Yep.

So, okay, because we're unfortunately running out of time here.

I wish we weren't because I know that we're just scratching the surface of this in the book.

And you can see my copy.

I've got a lot of writing all over it and I've got a new copy too, so I'm gonna give this away.

But how do we get engaged with this idea of.

Not just idea, the truth of what full brain Christianity is?

Because the resistance that I hear from people most often is I love the concept, but I struggle in that it does take an entirely new language to understand.

How do we help people walk through that and process that?

Well, one of the things is Jim and I wrote the other half of church for to answer that very question, like, what's the on ramp to this, this whole new kind of area of love centered, joy centered Christian discipleship.

And so I would even Encourage you not only just to read the book, but actually do read it in a group, a chapter a week or every other week and actually do the exercises at the end of each chapter.

So there's a chapter on joy and then there's some good exercises on joy and on gratitude.

There's a chapter on hesed and love and then there's some good exercises on typical things that can build our bonding to one another.

We do the same for the chapter on group identity and the chapter on healthy correction.

Do those together and get a taste of it.

And then the organization I work for, Life Model works.

You can go to lifemodelworks.org we even offer online study groups.

It's a six week group that kind of gives you a good introduction to more skills even than you see in the other half of church.

And sign up with your small group or you can sign up as an individual and they're putting you in an online group for six meetings and then from there on there's a whole bunch.

And from that group they will show you a bunch of other trainings that we and our partner organizations offer to help you start working on your maturity and on your character and learning to love your enemies and building joy and building group identity, all this stuff.

There's a lot of resources out there, but the good place to start, I think is with the other half of church and do it with a, a group of people, you know, and then, you know, go check our website out and we'd love to help you.

Send me, send me an email.

I can give you my email.

You can post it on the notes for the podcast if you want and I'll refer you if you need a hand for anything.

Well, that is awesome.

And I am, I think people should get the book.

I think this is something that is.

God is doing this.

Like you said, it's a. I love how you said it.

It's a relational reformation that is starting to occur where we're starting to see the power of relationship.

And I'm tremendously exc.

Excited about this.

But Michael, I wanted to thank you for coming on the show and sharing and drawing our attention to the other half of church and Life Model Works.

And I hope to have you back because I really do feel like we've just touched the surface of this because I think people really do want to grow and they want to mature and they all recognize something is wrong.

But this relational reformation is going to be huge, I think for the success of our faith as we go forward, at least in our Culture.

We have to go onto a different model than what we've had.

But, Michael, thank you for coming on.

Apollo's watered.

Yeah, thank you, Travis.

It's fun talking about the relational reformation with you and look forward to doing some more of the same.

What would happen if the church really did become known for the way that we love?

It would be crazy.

Now, I know some of the churches.

Out there, your church, might be doing.

This, but I venture to say that.

Many of our churches aren't.

I mean, we do preach about love,.

But we really want them to be known by their love.

Not just because it's written somewhere in our statement or values, but because we've actually become the kind of people who.

Know how to love one another and.

Even our enemies the way that Jesus calls us to.

That's what keeps sticking with me from this conversation with Michael.

We spend a lot of time in the church telling people what Christians believe and how Christians are supposed to behave, and all those things matter.

But Michael is pushing us to ask another question.

Are we actually forming people who know how to live this way?

Do we know how to stay relational when someone disappoints us?

Do we know how to sit with someone in their pain without immediately trying to fix them?

Do we know how to welcome someone who doesn't look, think, or act like us and allow them to experience our delight before they experience our correction?

And are our churches becoming communities where people could actually learn those things by watching mature followers of Jesus live them out?

That's a much bigger vision.

That's a much bigger vision of discipleship.

And maybe Michael's right.

Maybe what we need is a kind of relational reformation.

Not something new, but a recovery of something so deeply biblical that we've often neglected a church where truth and love aren't competing with one another, where doctrine isn't merely something we know, but something we embody, and where people don't simply learn about Jesus, but become more like Jesus because they're surrounded by a people who are learning to live like him together.

And that's also why we're building Apollos Academy.

Because ministry leaders like you don't need another person telling them the latest technique that's going to fix their church.

What you need is people who can help you step back, understand what's happening, examine some of the assumptions shaping the way we do ministry, and think faithfully and be equipped for what comes next.

That's what we want Apollos Academy to help you do, to see more clearly, think more deeply and lead more faithfully.

And pre sales for our first courses begin in early November.

We're putting the classes together now.

It's so exciting.

And if you want to be among the first to know when they open, head over to ApolloSweater.org and join our email list.

And if this conversation with Michael Hendricks challenged you, don't just move on to the next podcast.

Talk about it with someone.

Maybe ask a few people in your.

Church a simple question.

Are we teaching people to love like Jesus, or are we actually training them to do it?

That might lead to a pretty important conversation.

Well, that's it for today's episode.

I'm Travis Michael Fleming, and this is Ministry Deep Dive.

Stay watered, everybody.