Month: September 2019

2_02: Jen Wilkin – A Gut Check on Biblical Literacy & Sound Preaching

2_02: Jen Wilkin – A Gut Check on Biblical Literacy & Sound Preaching

Breakthrough Ideas with Jen:

  • When you’re a single woman in the church, you usually kind of keep moving around because you don’t always fit very well.
  • We treated the Bible like it was magical, like if I open it up the Holy Spirit was just going to drop out insight on me just because I had been faithful to sit down and give it a little bit of my focus.
  • We treat the Bible, often with less respect than we would treat a common textbook or the works of Shakespeare.
  • We should recognize– obviously the Bible is much more than a book but it is at least a book. And that it would abide by some rules that all books abide by.
  • But the only way that person will be able to develop the sermon around what is sound teaching and what is not sound teaching is if they have firsthand knowledge of most of the text.
  • Those who had a platform became comfortable with holding the position of expert and those who sat in the pews became comfortable with holding the position of amateur.
  • The people in the seats took on this idea that they required someone to just download the interpretation and application of the text.
  • Most of us come to church to sit under teaching over passages that we had spent little-to-no time in ourselves prior to listening to that teaching.
  • The first guard against false teaching is knowing what the text says.
  • And the reality is the discipline is not dead. It just follows the most compelling message.
  • If people are giving their discretionary time a lot of other places and yet they’re not willing to give it to the church, well then that’s on us. That means that we’ve not communicated a compelling vision for why this matters.
  • You have to believe down to the soles of your feet that if people don’t have basic bible literacy if there are actually very negative consequences associated with that.
  • I have found almost without exception that people don’t know the bible.
  • Your people will never rise to an expectation that you have not set.
  • People actually gravitate toward committing to things that raise the bar, not things that lower the bar. That’s why people run marathons.
  • Our MO with Christian education for the last 30 years has been, “I don’t think they’ll do that.”
  • The first question that many of us in church leadership have asked has been, What do our people want?” And a better question, to begin with, is, “How are disciples formed?”
  • If we’re supposed to make disciples and teach them to obey all that Jesus has commanded, then what mechanism is going to allow us to do that?
  • The more organic a ministry model is, the harder it is for women, in particular, to opt in.
  • Because women are typically primary caregivers for at least one other human being, in order for us to opt into any commitment, we require a high level of structure, predictability, accountability, accessibility, excellence.
  • We need to have at least some spaces where we’re raising the bar and we’re asking more from our people, then those environments will require structure and accountability and predictability and accessibility, and that they’re done with excellence.
  • While I talk a lot about building Bible literacy, the little secret is that it’s not actually just Bible literacy that people are developing. It’s just literacy.
  • Is it any wonder that many teenagers leave home and don’t take the Bible seriously or don’t take Christianity seriously, when it has asked so little of them during their formative years?
  • In many churches, the needs of women are not heard with regularity just because of a leadership structure that is perhaps predominantly are all male.
  • Within the church, we have widows’ and orphans’ needs that can sometimes be missed by men in leadership if they don’t have access to regular input from the women in the congregation.
  • Anytime you start talking about women in leadership in the church, I’m either perceived to be a feminist by those who are more conservative or a patriarchalist by those who are more liberal
  • We’re committed to making sure that our church is a place where you could say, “That’s a church mother. That’s a spiritual mother for the women in our church. She’s visible. She’s obviously serving, contributing in good ways.”
  • The first common misstep that well-meaning men in leadership can make when they realize that they’re missing the voices of women is to say, “Oh, let’s  let’s ping our wives on this.”
  • Putting women into rooms where key decisions are being made means that you’re inviting someone into the room not just because they’re female but because they’re the right person to be in the room.

Breakthrough Resources in this Episode:

The Village Church Core Classes

The Knowledge of the Holy by AW Tozer

Jen Wilkin is an author and Bible teacher from Dallas, Texas. She has organized and led studies for women in home, church, and parachurch contexts. Her passion is to see others become articulate and committed followers of Christ, with a clear understanding of why they believe what they believe, grounded in the Word of God. She currently serves on the staff of The Village Church Institute. You can find her at JenWilkin.net.

2_01: Leonard Sweet – How Almonds Keep Us Focused on Jesus

2_01: Leonard Sweet – How Almonds Keep Us Focused on Jesus

Breakthrough Ideas with Len:

  • Show me a weakness inventory and I will show you where God can bless others through your life.
  • Our translation of the word “Word” for LOGOS is inadequate; we must embrace the tension.
  • In a “well curve world” we should live out of the overlap of opposites coming together.
  • Our world is both getting more global and more tribal – don’t resolve the tension and celebrate them.
  • We were made for this in between place… paradoxy is orthodoxy.
  • All middles are going, and churches who want to play safe in the middle will be going too.
  • The sanctuary should not be a safe place from risk, but instead be a safe place to take risk and bring the extremes together.
  • What does it mean for us to bring the extremes together and not resolve the tension?
  • Churches will be getting bigger and getting smaller, we cannot be afraid of the opposites.
  • The Early church had to be properly oriented – facing East toward the future of Christ’s return.
  • The double orienting of every church is toward the future and toward Christ.
  • Are we keeping our eyes on the future, or are we getting lost in programmatic distractions?
  • If we can keep our focus on Christ, we can have a future.

Breakthrough Resources in this Episode:

LeonardSweet.com 

Rings of Fire: Walking in Faith through a Volcanic Future

Napkin Scribbles Podcast

Author of more than two hundred articles, 1500+ published sermons and sixty books, Leonard Sweet’s recent publications include the groundbreaking textbook on preaching, Giving Blood: A Fresh Paradigm for Preaching, the best-seller From Tablet to TableThe Bad Habits of Jesus, and the fall 2019 release of the twenty-year successor to SoulTsunamiRings of Fire: Walking in Faith Through a Volcanic Future.

Len often appears on the “50 Most Influential Christians in America” listings, and in 2010 was selected by the top non-English Christian website as one of the “Top 10 Influential World Christians of 2010”. His “Napkin Scribbles” podcasts can be accessed on leonardsweet.com or spotify. His Twitter and Facebook microblogs are ranked as some of the highest in the religious world.

Len works with graduate students at four institutions: Drew University, where he has occupied the E. Stanley Jones Chair, George Fox University, Tabor College, and Evangelical Seminary, where he currently holds the Charles Wesley Senior Professorship of Doctoral Studies. In 2015 he launched his own homiletics resource preachthestory.com. One of the most sought-after speakers in the religious world today, he resides on Orcas Island in the San Juan Islands.