MATTHEW HESTER & JAMIE ENGLEHART / HOLY GROUND EVERYWHERE

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In this engaging conversation, Jamie Englehart, Matthew Hester and Jason explore the themes of ministry, vulnerability, and the sacred-secular divide. They discuss the importance of recognizing God in all aspects of life, the call to full-time kingdom ministry, and the shift from traditional church structures to a more inclusive understanding of community and leadership. The conversation emphasizes the need for authenticity, healing, and sincerity in ministry, encouraging leaders to embrace their vulnerabilities and foster genuine connections with others.

The guys also explore the themes of vulnerability, authenticity, and love within ministry. They discuss the role of armor bearers, the importance of community support, and the need for grace in leadership. The conversation delves into the nature of God’s love and the journey towards maturity in one’s relationship with Him. They emphasize the significance of being real and honest in ministry, as well as the transformative power of love.

For more information on Matthew Hester
https://www.hesterministries.org/

For more information on Bishop Jamie Englehart
https://connectinternationalministries.com/leadership/

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GRAHAM COOKE & DIONNE VAN ZYL / RELATIONAL THEOLOGY

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In this engaging conversation, Graham Cooke shares his journey from being an introvert to an ambivert, emphasizing the importance of humor and kindness in understanding God’s character. He discusses the transformative power of personal encounters with God and discusses the concept of relational theology, highlighting how these experiences shape our spiritual growth.

Graham and Dionne Van Zyl explore the significance of breakthroughs in our lives, emphasizing that a true breakthrough is about who we are becoming, rather than just the resolution of our circumstances. The guys also discuss themes of leadership and the transformative journey of faith.

The dialogue emphasizes finding peace amidst chaos, the significance of hiddenness and manifestation in one’s relationship with God, and the essence of faith in navigating disappointments. Graham talks about how asking the right questions can lead to deeper understanding and relationship with God, and how a movement is being built to equip people in their spiritual journeys.

Which leads to BRILLIANT PLUS
A movement discovering a simple relational way of being with God.

Join Brilliant with Graham Cooke and become a member of the global movement experiencing God’s love every day. With an exclusive app, gatherings, and global small groups, you’ll unlock keys to a way with God that’s simple and relational.

JOIN HERE http://brilliantmovement.com/JasonClark1187

For more on Graham Cooke & Dionne Van Zyl
Website: http://brilliantmovement.com/JasonClark1187
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCOne4P6sJV9kbpjiJSElDQA
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/grahamcooke_official/

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IAN SIMKINS / THE TABLE

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Jason and Brooke connect with Ian Simkins and talk about community, the role of the table in ministry, and our identity being discovered in knowing ourselves as “the one Jesus loves.”

They dive into the challenges of tribalism and division and the need for curiosity and humility in engaging with others. Themes of self-worth, identity, and the concept of being loved are discussed as they explore the impact of workaholism, the need for validation, and the struggle to find value beyond accomplishments.

The conversation addresses the practical implications of being loved, the correlation between self-love and loving others, the importance of operating from a place of rest, the concept of mystery in faith, the beauty of curiosity, and the significance of valuing interruptions.

For more information on Ian Simkins:
www.instagram.com/iansimkins
www.iansimkins.com
www.x.com/iansimkins

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The Slave/Master Paradigm Within The Church

Excerpted from my book, Leaving and Finding Jesus

Maybe the most significant issues in the church today stem from Christian servants who don’t know friendship. I think much of the Deconstruction movement has been birthed in institutions led by Older Brothers who slave down the road of lack.

SCOTT CROWDER / LEARNING TO BE PRESENT

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Scott Crowder is a pastor, singer-songwriter, and one of Jason’s closest friends. The guys dive into their love for the church, about learning how to be present with God, ourselves, each other, and our community. Scott talks about creating church cultures that practice the fruits of the Spirit, learning to lead ourselves and others in seasons of joy and sorrow, that “success” isn’t about numbers, cool fads, or being ‘front runners,’ it’s discovered in community.

QUOTES

“’Success,’ in a word is, ‘presence.’ I don’t mean that in the school of ‘the glory cloud came.’ I mean, I can be present to you, as you are present to me, as we are present to this moment, as we can be present to where we live, and we are not stuck in a dream of an ideal community that we never can become.”

“When you’re present, you’re present to pain. When you’re present as a servant, as a leader, you’re present when you can do nothing for that person or they can do nothing for you.”

“How many faithful people did we (the church) overlook…faithful movements did we overlook because they didn’t bear the fruit that we thought kingdom-building looked like. They didn’t promote themselves (but) they’ve been here the whole time.”

“I am a witness or witnesses, I’m part of the church at large, whether I want to be or not. So, I’m learning to value those voices and people who have gone before me.​

For more on Scott Crowder
www.jesusloves757.com
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DANIEL GROTHE / THE POWER OF PLACE

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Daniel Grothe and the guys discuss his new book, The Power of Place, which speaks the sense of loneliness that many feel in today’s age of hypermobility and noncommittal wandering, reminding us of the ancient vow of stability and teaching us how we can lead a richer life of friendship, community, and purpose.

They also touched on the deconstruction movement within the church, how authoritarian leadership has wounded and undermined trust, and how healing and connection are available only where we practice the long game of family.

QUOTES

“We live in a world that is enamored with financial capital…What most people don’t think about is the thick layering of social capital.”

“If we have deep pockets but we don’t have social capital, we are poor.”

“As long as you’re protecting the machine, you’re missing the lonely who are out there…”

“The very worst wounds that happen to us are through the perverse laying on of hands.” I will go at your pace to earn your trust. If it takes ten years to lay hands and speak life, I got all the time in the world…”

“Can we make a conversational space; can we make the church of Jesus not (about) a platform to spout our certainties and tow the party line with our little tight theologies and recover the psalms of lament”

For More Information on Daniel Grothe:
www.danielgrothe.com
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Developing A Strong Team

by Doug Cowburn

On Leadership

To Develop a Strong Team, Work on This!

Any team that wants to grow stronger over time needs to do a few things right. Teams are full of people, personalities, strengths, weaknesses, and a myriad of other complications. To develop a healthy, strong team I have found a few principles that have created great team dynamics in the organizations I have worked in.

Have Fun

Start here. I am intentionally not putting this one last! The enjoyment factor on your team is a ‘make it or break it’ principle. As a leader, you have to enjoy what you are doing, you have to WANT to be there with the people you are leading. If these two things are not true, how will your team members ever be able to enjoy the work they are doing. This principle is even more true for a volunteer team!

Performance vs. Learning

Performance-based teams are run on success/failure metrics and accountability. They thrive on pressure from the leader or pressure from the other team members to be successful. The danger of performance-based teams is that often consequences end up being the motivating factor to do better. A learning team culture celebrates loss and wins with the same amount of passion. Wins are amplified and built on and losses are diagnosed and discussed in an open forum with no threat of consequences to the person who was leading the objective. Seth Godin says, “If failure is not an option, then neither is success.” On my teams, we welcome, covet, and learn from failures. This is what it means to have a “learning team.”

Develop Reliable Lanes of Communication

My staff team at EGC has experienced great successes when it comes to internal communication. We have been using an application called Slack. We don’t rely on email for conversation and decisions. Email was too slow. Having a chat-based communication system we can engage other members of the team quickly. Why did email fail us? Our team was slow to respond to email, but Slack worked great. How did we figure this out? Because we failed and were able to talk about how to get better at communication (see the point above).

Measure

Everything your team does needs to have a measurement attached to it, and your team needs to review that metric regularly. Does your kids’ team know the average attendance of pre-schoolers? Is that growing or shrinking? Do we disciple adults? How many have we discipled? Are we growing? If your team is meeting and not “doing” anything, I would ask, why are you meeting? Meetings need to produce activity and action. If you take an action, there should be a measure of success. Otherwise, how will you determine wins or losses and learn from them!

Have Productive and Designed Meetings

Lastly, as I alluded to above, meetings are important, and they need to be productive. To accomplish this, your team meetings need to have an agenda. An agenda says that you have prepared for the meeting and are being a good steward of the time each person is investing in the team. No agenda? No meeting! Here are a few recommendations that every meeting agenda should include:

• A record of past action items with a due date and an owner.
• A meeting agenda that lists who is running the topic, how long the discussion should take, and what the purpose of the discussion is (update, troubleshoot, etc).
• A facilitator. Every meeting needs someone to push the agenda, to get off rabbit trails, and keep the meeting efficient.

Rest Well

Any team needs to appreciate the need for rest. For many teams who work together every day, rest can end up being ignored due to other urgent needs. Here are some ideas to add good boundaries for rest.

• Do we check to make sure that we honor our team members’ family time in the evenings and on weekends?
• Do we make sure people are using their vacation time? (For Paid Staff)
• Do we offer sabbatical rest? (Do elders get a break, do pastors and ministry team members get another day off to honor their sabbath rest)?
• Do my team members have permission to ask for additional time off if needed?

  Follow up questions: What do you need to focus on to make your team stronger? Are you having fun? How can you run meetings with your team that honors their time investment?

Doug Cowburn is the Executive Pastor at Elim Gospel Church in Rochester, NY, and works with Intentional Churches to help churches pursue the Great Commission. Doug is passionate about helping leaders and churches take bold steps toward health and growth. 

MARK AND JULIE APPLEYARD / RETHINKING CHURCH

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Risk, trust, pioneering and a church built upon encounters with the transformative love of God, this podcast is an invitation to rethinking church.

From the traditional to a micro church model, Mark and Julie share their journey of pastoring.

Today, through Anothen Micro Church, they empower believers around the world to become influential spiritual leaders in their homes and communities.

Quotes:

“I don’t have great faith without great belief, and I don’t have great belief without deeper encounter.” Mark Appleyard

“For love to be agile the church has to be mobile.” Julie Appleyard

“Every believer is a leader simply by he who is in them.” Mark Appleyard

“What if we didn’t become policers of rules but releasers of people.” Mark Appleyard

“God is much more passionate about creating cultures for freedom than the sin issue because He has already dealt with that.” Julie Appleyard

For more on Mark or Julie Appleyard or Anothen go to www.anothen.co
Anothen YouChurch App

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DANNY SILK / UNPUNISHABLE

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Parenting, leadership, freedom through self-control, spiritual maturity, emotional health, the nature of our Father, and heaven and hell, Danny’s thoughts and gracious communication are empowering and transformative. It was an honor to discuss the unpunishing nature of God with Danny!

Quotes:
“The role of authority and how it behaves has to change if you are to be successful in loving your kids on purpose.”

“We have got to fight to exalt love over the issue so that love is the ruler of the culture of our home instead of obedience and compliance…”

“We are empowering people with our authority, not dominating people with our authority.”

“Earth is freedom practice.”

Jason noted that “The person with the most self-control is the person with the greatest freedom. Danny responded, “It’s kind of an allusion that obeying rules is some sign of character… That would suggest that the place with the most rules would produce the people with the most character. If that were true, then prisons would have people with the most character. And the only place that has more rules, second to prison, is religious structures.”

“There are lots of rules in religion because leaders are afraid of the people’s freedom…”

“The true demonstration of your character is freedom. If you could do whatever you want, what would you do? There’s your character.”

Danny Silk is an author, speaker, and president of Loving on Purpose  

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There is No “Us” and “Them”

The early church, led by Peter and a handful of others, was beautiful—and that’s an understatement.

From the moment Holy Spirit burst onto the scene in the upper room, as depicted in Acts 2, there was an evangelistic explosion. With “many wonders and signs,” folks were added to the church daily, weekly, and monthly. (1)

Unity marked this early church. The phrases “all together” or “of one accord” can be found five times in the first five chapters of Acts. The power of God displayed by leadership was remarkable. Even Peter’s shadow healed people. (2)

Young leaders—most notably, Paul and Timothy, both championed by Barnabas, and later James, championed by Peter—were raised up and commissioned to spread the Good News from village to village and city to city. (3)

Miracles occurred at a rate the world had never seen. Yes, there was persecution, and yet the church grew, and “throughout all Judaea and Galilee and Samaria [they] had peace and richly increased in numbers.” (4)

The presence of Holy Spirit manifested in every aspect of the church. From Pentecost on, Holy Spirit was present and known to fall “on all who heard the word.” (5)

In this beautiful church, sons and daughters grew confident in the love of a good Father! This was a church passionately releasing heaven on earth, the Kingdom within us; a church where righteousness, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit were deeply rooted in the soul and every aspect of life. (6)

This was also a generous church where the lost were being found, the sick healed, the sinner forgiven and transformed, the lonely placed in family, all who were thirsty could come and drink, and “where they sold property and possessions to give to anyone who had need.” (7)

All could be saved.

Except anyone who wasn’t Jewish. 

So, not literally all, I guess. Just, well, the Jewish all.

In those first nine years or so of the early church, when I write, all could be saved, what I mean is that a small exclusive group of people could be saved; all of the included us, but none of the excluded them could be saved.

Just like today, the understanding of the Good News of Jesus within the church and her leadership was limited but ever-expanding. In those beautifully formative early church days, the limitation was that only Jews were in.

Imagine a church stunning in fellowship—a church Jesus referenced as “the light of the world, a city set on a hill.” Imagine the revelation of eternal life flowing through their veins. Imagine the power of their evangelism.

Now imagine, because of their tradition, culture, and limited understanding, they only shared this life-transforming Good News with a select few. Imagine meetings like the one I had with those two elders, except it was not just women who weren’t at the table. Most of humanity was excluded, as well.

I know, it’s nearly impossible, but imagine a church interpreting Scripture to reveal Jesus as the Savior of a select group, a people who looked, believed, and acted like them—as though atonement was somehow limited… Imagine they interpreted Scripture in ways that separated Gentiles from Jews, in from out, and women from ministry.

I know it’s difficult, but try to imagine a church experiencing profound revelation, favor, life, joy, and unity while simultaneously living with a heart-breaking limited perspective regarding the all-inclusive nature of our heavenly Father.

You may be picking up some playful sarcasm.

Why? Because it’s actually quite easy to imagine this church. You likely have participated in it. I certainly have.

I don’t mean that as a condemning statement. Rather, it is an invitation to daily repent—to mature in reconciling Love.

The early church and her leadership were authentic, sincere, and growing in revelation. At the same time, the early church had a serious flaw on its God lens, the same dualistic hierarchal flaw the church and her leadership continue to discover and repent of today.

Us and Them

For and Against

In and Out

And I could go on.

The early church knew the transformational revelation of Jesus’ great affection. And this church was led by a man who had experienced mercy, grace, and the all-inclusive love of His friend, Jesus, in a way that few ever have.

And in every day that passed, Peter and the early church grew in the revelation of our Father’s always good, no distance, no separation love. And yet, even in the daily profound manifestation of God’s presence, for the first nine years or so, the early church seemed oblivious to their devastating (especially if you were a Gentile) ‘us and them’ flaw on their God lens.

God didn’t ignore their delusions, nor did He condemn them for their exclusivity. He just kept revealing Himself. He continued to meet them where they were, His presence profoundly known.

Throughout history, God always seems to believe that His love is more powerful than our flawed understanding. God seems to think our hearts will win out in the end.

And it is, and they do…

Along the way, the early church’s fallen ‘us and them’ thinking and their closed hearts began to change. Peter first. Then one day, when the soil was ready to bear good fruit; Peter is given a vision by God that is offensively good. A gospel so expansive as to include the whole world in the finished work of the cross. It even included bacon! (See Acts 10)

Offensively good!

And Peter was willing to be offended by the goodness of God. And that’s a big deal. The willingness to be offended by God’s goodness is the birthplace of revelation and transformation and an absolute requirement for leaders.

Peter rises from that vision and within hours, welcomes me and several billion more into the family. Within hours, the gospel included the whole world. Within hours, every tribe and tongue was a welcomed son or daughter. Within hours, the good news was even better than Peter or the church could think or imagine.

Many of us today long to go back to the early church days, viewing those first few years as the high-water mark of what a church is meant to be. They weren’t. Not even close! As beautifully transformative as She was, the early church was even more beautifully transformative the day She repented, and Cornelius and his family, and my family, and every family was included! And She continues to grow more beautiful each day because Her foundation is firmly laid upon the rock of an all-included finished work of the cross.

One of the reasons I love Peter’s leadership is because the man’s heart was ever-expanding, his mind ever open to rethinking. He was a man who knew how to repent.

Jesus said, “upon this rock,” I will build the expansiveness of my church. Then Jesus gave the reins to a narrow-minded hothead. But a narrow-minded hothead who was continually open to being offended by the all-inclusive goodness of God. And as Peter matured in his faith and leadership, he became way less narrow in his thinking…

I believe a good leader is continually discovering a gospel that is more inclusive than the last time he or she checked. A good leader is one who is daily repenting from ‘us and them,’ ‘for and against,’ ‘in and out’ thinking.

The love of God is all-inclusive, and a good leader is a person who is ever learning not to divorce their heart from their head.

In my 46 years, I have often been surprised by how many leaders divorce their hearts for the sake of their understanding. I know it’s not just leaders, but I expect more humility from them.

I have sat in many rooms and watched love undermine every argument of separation, every case made for ‘us and them,’ only to witness leaders close their hearts and deny love for the sake of their dualistic understanding.

Peter, as a leader, was the gateway for changing the way the church thought regarding the inclusion of Cornelius and his family into the Family. If Peter had been too proud to repent when the goodness of God was revealed to him, he’d have actually stood against God and made a mess of things for those who followed him. So it’s a big deal!

Leadership, the kind Peter revealed, is evidenced by repenting from the exclusivity of ‘us and them’ thinking. Leadership, the kind Peter revealed, is evidenced in the willingness to rethink theologies, systems, methods, traditions, and institutions that undermine the all-inclusive other-centered love of our Father.

But I am encouraged! Lately, and more regularly, I speak with leaders, sons, and daughters, in all walks of life and leadership, who are willing to be offended by His love, then willing to repent, rethink, and re-imagine.

I believe the church is on the cusp of another “Cornelius breakthrough”—a deeper understanding and agreement with the same revelation that Peter was stewarding in the early church; there is no ‘us and them’ in how our Father thinks, no ‘us and them’ in His Kingdom, no ‘us and them’ in our Family.

There is no Jew nor Gentile, slave nor free, male or female, no black or white, lost or found, sinner or saint, gay or straight, republican or democrat, capitalist or socialist, Christian or Muslim or Atheist… there is nothing that separates us from His all-inclusive love. “…For you are all one in Christ Jesus.” (See Gal 3:28)

There is no death He hasn’t defeated, no hell He hasn’t invaded, no delusion He hasn’t infiltrated, no darkness He hasn’t illuminated; there is nothing that separates us from the love revealed through His death and resurrection.

As Bono sings, “One love, one life…”

We are one, and we are growing in this ever-expanding revelation; one family discovering our Father’s great desire revealed through the prayer of His Son, Jesus.

“I pray that they will all be one, just as you and I are one—as you are in me, Father, and I am in you. And may they be in us so that the world will believe you sent me.” (John 17:21)

These are not early church days, these are 2020 church days! Isn’t that amazing!? You are the church! And you’re beautiful!

So go find your Cornelius today and reveal the desires of his or her heart: that they are loved and included!
Be the leader Peter was to your spouse, kids, family, neighborhood, shopping mall, and even your local church gathering.

“No other except the impulsive Simon could have been at once the embodiment of the Adversary (get behind me Satan) and the incarnation of the Rock on which the church should rest (Matt 16:16-23).” – Frank Grant Lewis, Peter’s Place in the Early Church, 1909