Interview with Dr. Matthew Stevenson III

[Music] hello everyone i'm brooke gurley welcome to ambo tv with me today is a very special guest none other than the apostle dr matthew stevenson iii who is here thank you so much for joining us apostle the honor is all mine it's ours it's all ours thank you so much so you all have a new album out come alive from all nations um and the music is great we can talk about that a little later but i want to know what kind of inspired you all to do the album now like what was the inspiration behind it why now yeah so first of all thank you for having me on second of all um the album i don't know if i want to call it irony or just divine timing because we started recording music about two years ago and um we didn't know that the timing or the moment that we would release it would be what it is now and everything that's going on now and so um i went to the team and i told them quote i want to release hymns from the future so what does it look like you know if if our grandchildren are alive what are they referred to as a hymn what do they know let's create some songs that have some nostalgia but also some anchoring and who we are and what we believe is so they went to work and they went to work immediately and in our movement we have a phrase called collective influence so what that means is that we tried to pull all of the talent the writing the resources that we have together in one room i literally paid for an airbnb we're going to get together and just like just go away and write and they did it and they came up with a project that's called come alive oh that's awesome and i love how you said that it's hymns for the future yeah because one of the songs so i know bless your name is the leading single but yahweh when i was just listening to it i was like oh i almost like had a praise break in the middle of doing what i was doing and i just love it because i also believe there's power in naming us specifically yahweh as his name oh yeah for two that song to continue just to sing it yahweh we pray you know so who wrote that one i guess and then i you know i've seen that tie into it a couple of real stories about yahweh is that we've been singing it for about almost three years now i brought it back from i was in a service in canada and there was a a gentleman that began to sing it he then introduced me and to preach i got up and re-sang it and started singing it all over again and i brought it back to chicago and we have not let it go since um i've been and believe it or not our idea was that yahweh was going to be the track that did the lease and it's doing the most yahweh is everywhere right now and i'm on there like maybe two minutes but you know yahweh is and i think if i'm honest i think the lord is breathing on it because it's his name and i think that right now you know when people's hearts are everywhere their mind is everywhere emotions everywhere i think the lord is blowing on anything that glorifies him and so uh it's become an all nation's anthem what i enjoy is if i go to any 20 of our campuses if i start singing yahweh everybody's going to know it everybody's going to find the part so that song has has done the unimaginable on this project wow so you said that yahweh is the one you thought that was going to be least successful which one did you actually think would be the leading track uh i assumed it would be carry us through um so you know there is a thing that we do at several temples he will carry us through and but we do it slower as well and i assume because that's the one we see most frequently that would be the one that did the best but yahweh is everywhere i mean several languages several nations and and without exag exaggeration every day i'm getting feedback on what yahweh is doing and so i i didn't expect it it's weird for me um they are like a candid moment they're like yahweh is doing so good you need to do another music video on it i'm like no i don't want to i want to do that i'm not an artist but you know i am almost willing to bend because i see the effectiveness of what yahweh is doing across several barriers awesome and so is there kind of i know you all said you went to the airbnb and like the creative process is there um a theme i know you operate in the prophetic is there something that you feel like god wanted you to get through through this album um uh you know i again i'm unbeknownst to me nobody knew 2020 would be what it was we themed it for the movement everywhere so it was our notion that you know whatever the lord was going to do it was going to be bigger and broader than what it had been before and we needed to be prepared on several fronts for that level of bigness musically speaking when i charged them to do this project um i don't know that we were reaching for one audience which is different from how we've done other things um i think we were reaching for whoever had ears to hear and so we got some country on there we got some ccm ish stuff on there we got some classical uh him type stuff on there so uh i felt like a part of what i charged him to do was to reach for the depth that would create the kind of diversity um that would hit the ear of people who knew us and who did not you know my um burden has been even through like what we're facing right now as a nation and beyond this it has taught me that we've been reaching for who's in front of us and not necessarily who we need to be reaching for and there is a huge difference between that and so musically we reached for everybody not just for who was in front of us but who we wanted to reach as well can you keep that interesting who's in front of us versus what we should be reaching for i think that one of the benefits um there's a couple and it's a very controversial opinion but one of the benefits of the whole quarantine and the whole uh pandemic is that it has shown a lot of the urban church that a lot of our efforts our resources our personnel has been targeted at who we see weekly now that everybody is is on the the digital landscape and everybody is online we're having to plan for prepare for and deliberately target for people we don't know or see we don't know who's watching us right now you know right now instead of congregational attendance we're relying on analytics which means which means that we've got to look at reports after the fact of who watched how long they stayed what they did when they were on and so it's just a different ball game right now and and i think i think it needful and i think it need for because sometimes the monotony of just coming to church and having your members is a subconscious satisfier but then also a distraction from the fact that we were instructed very vividly go ye into all the world and sometimes i think the church if i'm frank makes the mistake of just reaching for who they can see and not necessarily who needs to be reached that's a great point and that actually brings me to another question is and i know you are a global influencer a visionary how do you see the church the model for the church changing after this pandemic because it has it's changing and it's going to definitely change how do you see what does that look like that's a huge question um i think that yeah i want to phrase this right i think that one of the things the pandemic has done first of all it's been rough for everybody i'm not excluded it's been extremely hard for anybody under any uh leadership responsibility and pressure and all of that so i imagine whether you're current or not is still hard secondarily it's confronted several crises that we've been in for years that nobody wanted to talk about for example you know in the urban church context we are very heavily reliant on production and i'm using that word lightly and what i mean by production is did this service pull off right not if it was excellent not if it was prepared for a plan for did it pull off if it pulled off we're good we also rely very heavily as a culture as an urban culture on oratory so how well the relationship between speaker and audience works well for the majority of 2020 audience has been non-responsive camera right so we have had to honestly accept the fact one of them i could probably think about 20. one of the crises we've been in is our abandonment of technology and our disrespect of what it could afford the broader story and the broader narrative of the kingdom all nations was on a technology bent for years but even we were not prepared for how aggressively we would have to invest in what technology would mean um to the harvest the other thing is i think that the church is going to have to become very heavily prophetic and very heavily evangelistic and the reason i say that is because if we don't have some type of inclination or predisposer to what the coming days look like we're going to make the same types of moves that we've been making in different outfits so it's not just about you know i and it's really sad you know when you look on sundays you go to church you know nobody looks at tv anymore we're all on social media platforms youtube etc and we're looking at some of our giants that just have no clue on how to put on a service on a way that grasped the attention of people that watch they're about fireplaces they're using cell phones they're using ipads and all of that humbly speaking is the consequence of not taking technology seriously a decade ago um so i think that's a part of that problem there evangelistic because of this i think there is this notion that if people aren't watching or coming that they don't need what we have and they don't want what we have and i vehemently believe that that is not true i think that they are just unaware of what the cross does what the gospel does who jesus is and i think that even unbelievers are having to cocoon themselves out of generations of bad doctrine and bad teaching that people like me and others have inherited that we're up against we're not just up against the devil and sin and demon we're up against generations of erroneous teaching that intelligent millennials are not going for so we're having to recreate our evangelism beyond food because the average you know church when we think evangelism outreach we think food closing waters but there is an evangelistic opportunity and mandate that goes beyond food and socks and water and right now we're having to put our cerebral power on that right wow that's good and when you said before about how their the churches weren't prepared for the technology of the moment um and you said there's a lack of prophetic voice do you think that having that lack of prophetic voice kind of caused them to not be prepared for the moment and had they because i know for you you're saying you said that you believe all leaders all ministers should be connected to a seer or a prophet and so do you believe that what we're seeing now as far as pastors not being ready is sort of fruits of not being connected to a seer or a prophet certainly um you know anybody that follows me or knows me knows that i think it's a joke that the average church gives more authority voice influence to the deacons than they do prophetic people i think it's uh anti-biblical it's laughable but it's also sad it's it's you know and and my my point with that is always that you know it is our biblical heritage that even if a king was wicked you got first and second chronicles first even if they were wicked they knew to consult a prophet and uh unfortunately in 2020 that is still not our paradigm our paradigm is you put business before revelation and i think the best business is born from revelation frankly so if you don't know what's coming and if you don't know where things are headed and if you don't know where things are going you don't know how to plan prepare save or even assign personnel because another crisis that the pandemic has shown the church we had been the personnel crisis which means that we have hired some people unnecessarily and we have not created some positions because of our lack of belief or confidence that they were needful or necessary now the average church don't need janitors they don't need parking lot attendance they don't need you know what they need is videographers editors media people uh publicists even and these are just different mindsets about how to approach church and what it's to be so to answer your question absolutely i think the average church is suffering uh consequences that they've been suffering for a long time and just didn't they weren't aware of it absolutely now i know another passion of yours is leadership and training future leaders you actually had a free three-day um for your leadership school i i watched some of that i signed up for it so i was like oh this is you know some good information um why where did that passion come from to train leaders i know you are a leader and just a very creative one so it's a great question um i have my entire ministerial career trained leaders um sometimes it was deliberate sometimes it was accidental but i had a huge conviction about reproduction which means that if i cannot make multiple me's i've not been effective that's just been a huge conviction of mine however when the pandemic hit it became an immediate um issue because what i noticed was even navigating through my own personal leadership intricacies i noticed that the way i was spending the dominant portion of my time was on the phone with leaders figuring out how to manage navigate preach through teach through plan for the unknown that threw me into such a mental space because i'm like you know you can have all the degrees you want you can have been in all the conferences you want nobody knows how to prepare for the unknown it's just not there's not a class available you know on how to prepare for what we've been dealing with you know at one point in the pandemic the the numbers and the stats and the rules and the laws were changing daily and you had to almost be glued to the tv to find out what your instruction path was going to be so i decided that i was going to my personal philosophy is everything from the family to the government rises and falls on leadership if something is not happening if something's not being done if a need is not being met we probably have a leadership fracture somewhere i chose to take this pandemic as an opportunity to grab a hold of anyone who thought they were a leader and but but to also redefine what they look like you know because i am not of the persuasion that if you are a housewife for example that you're not a leader i think it's a lie because you have influence over children and their decisions and their education and their nurturing and what they feel like that is an influential position uh and if we're frank we're dealing with a lot of the crises that we're dealing with in our culture emotionally speaking psychologically speaking relationally speaking because people thought housewives their job was to cook and clean no they lead and they influence and they form and they exhibit and they display so i feel like one of my assignments during the pandemic was to redefine what leadership meant and that we have heard leadership and position synonymous where if i think i've been appointed to something that makes me a good leader and that is absolutely not the truth i think we're seeing that in our political landscape right now 45 whether you agree with him and or not and that's an entirely different seminar has taught us so much uh i often say and i'm going to say this without saying too much i often say that a part of what he's taught the nation is you don't have to be qualified and that it matters where you come from but it does not matter where you come from if you're diligent about pursuing whatever seat or space or opportunity you want it can be afforded to you absolutely now you said you were teaching them leadership in a pandemic how do you minister to people during a pandemic because i have different friends who are ministers and my father's a pastor and all that but how do you deal with that because you have your one church in several locations so now you have other leaders under you how do you deal with that it has been extremely complicated and uh the way i am all nations worship assembly as a whole organization 16 years old but the multi-site phenomenon which is you know us becoming 20 churches and one in uh in several locations but you know one church is only four years old and so it has been a huge learning curve in that in the african-american space we've not had a lot of people recently at least that have ventured to do that and then the second thing is leading leaders is harder than leading bench warmers and parishioners so um not only have i had to commit myself to answering um the questions the concerns the fears of people that are in the pew i have to deal with and regulate and manage the people that lead the entire thing and that's a bit different because they have families they have plans they have careers they have per they have uh employees that's really different leading leaders is not as easy as what people think and so if i'm honest with you prior to the pandemic i am not a take it one day at a time person by any stretch of the imagination you know i started planning for retirement probably year three that i was doing it um but what the pandemic has taught me is at this juncture it is healthiest it is best for every leader to tackle the cares of the day and when you wake up look at the concerns of the day leave those concerns where you found them by the time you've gone to sleep deal with the nest concerns every day so take it one day at a time has been my life insurance through the entire pandemic i mean honestly that's all we can do right now i mean if you you can't really plan in the future because you don't know what it will hold right correct especially now it used to be more predictable but right now you know there's a lot of factors that go into what we're planning and preparing for if you are not a a hope-filled person or faith-filled person or an optimistic person and i think there's some good people that are pessimistic for whatever the reason is you know they've lived through things they've seen things people have taught themselves but if you're not the type of person that can re-envision reimagine reorganize anything in life you've been triggered and you've been triggered at the traumatic level so part of what every leader irrespective of their sector has had to do is help people to focus on the fact that there will be and after this one thing that we like to do ample we like to ask people and you are a pastor so this may be a funny question but we always like to ask our guests who are some of their favorite pastors or some of their favorite sermons that really impacted them their ministry and what they do i feel guilty about answering this because one of my favorite preachers is one of my closest friends and so i feel like i'm like i don't feel like it's a fair answer if i'm going to listen to anybody uh it's probably going to be dr darius daniels right now and it's because i am uh the honest truth is when it comes to preaching presentation content i'm a huge critic and it's you know it's because i have i'm a fourth generation baptist pastor and um so i have a huge appreciation for theological integrity because of that it is my humble opinion dr darius daniels is one of the greatest that we have right now and so i feel bad about saying that and admitting that because he's one of my closest friends we're born days apart um you know we celebrate stuff together and congratulate each other uh every sunday we're encouraging each other about how to preach but objectively speaking uh if i'm gonna turn on the tv and be blessed and encouraged and invigorated it's gonna be dr daniels hey there's nothing wrong with naming your friend that's why he's your friend right that's part of it that way um so again your album it for your all nations has come alive what is your hope that people will walk away from from this album uh that it was a barrier breaking cd um i was on an interview earlier and somebody asked me a similar question and i had to think about it i enjoy questions because they helped me realize i know more than what i realized i know um and one of the things that came up was this you know in the 90s israel houghton gave us a series of anthems and songs that if you go anywhere in the world and you strike out on one of them people will know it if i go somewhere and say you are alpha everybody joins in the next one or if i strike out and say uh lord you are good and you're everybody will know it it is my hope that come alive uh becomes a genesis of that which is in the next 10 years we could strike out on yahweh and people know exactly what we're talking about and find it and grab a hold of it and be anchored by it we don't have a lot of music that is barrier breaking a lot of music is very targeted which is not bad i wanted to make some barrier breaking when i say barrier breaking i mean gender race if need be ethnicity if need be um um background you know barrier breaking worship that became the universal language of the anthems that bring us peace and stabilize us through moments like this i am certainly confident that this is not going to be a permanent thing in america but because of that we still need a song um if you look at you know i'm a huge historian huge sociology fan what has helped us and when i say us i'm talking about urban people people that came up with nothing what has helped us make it through every difficult period in our history is a song and we can assign a song to every period and the powerful thing about that is it's not just christian i could name any song whether it's by teddy pendergrass tupac shakur mahelia jackson and people will connect it to an era in history i want come alive to be that for people where they remember when they were fighting and struggling to believe god and found the hope the strength the power to do so because they heard something don't come alive wow it's powerful thank you so much dr stevenson for joining us when we come back in the studio in new york you know if you're there i know you have your fire conference that you did i did and you know it was a one conference governor cuomo let us gather several thousands of people we had a representative there and it was phenomenal if you don't know i am in love with new york city and it came out of nowhere that is my home um i want property there i'm going to go back and forth there when the world opens up right place i love new york city i'm coming back make no mistake about it okay great great well thank you so much for joining us on april tv and we're excited about the music you all go get yahweh like go listen to this album and listen to yahweh and try not to have a praise break in your living room like i did all right thank you so much this is ambrose hey the pleasure is all man thank you so much thank you so much okay you

Channel: Ambo TV

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Keywords: Christian, christian media, christian television, christian tv, sermons, christian sermons, live stream church services, live sermons online, inspiring sermons, church media videos, powerful, ambo, ambo tv, faith, daily, morning, Dr. Matthew Stevenson III, All Nations Music, Come Alive, Yahweh, All Naitons Worshp Assembly, ANWA, Matthew Stevenson interviews, interviews, ANWA interviews, gospel muisc, new music

Id: imBZ_wcnDyo

Length: 25min 43sec (1543 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 03 2020