Resisting the Empire: A Kingdom-Oriented Approach to Politics & Government - N.T. Wright - 103

when we consider politics and government how can we best guide ourselves and our churches to live out a Christ centered political witness in this episode I'm joined by Dr n Wright Tom is the former Bishop of Durham professor ameritus at the University of St Andrews and a senior research fellow at Oxford he's written a number of books including his latest entitled Jesus and the powers together Tom and I explore the kingdom of God as it relates to the kingdoms of this world Tom then provides some insights into how the church can show up when it comes to politics embracing a kingdom oriented political posture as we resist the Empire are you ready let's go hello friends and welcome to another insightful episode of front stage backstage I'm your host Jason day and I am super excited about this week's conversation now each and every week I have the honor the privilege really to sit down with a trusted Ministry leader and we dive into a conversation all in an effort to help you and pastors and Ministry leaders just like you Embrace a healthy Rhythm for both your life and your ministry we are proud to be a part of the pastor serve Network and not only do we have a conversation every week but we also put together a a toolkit for you that you can access at Pastor serve.org Network and in this toolkit you'll find a lot of different resources to help you and the ministry leaders at your local church dig more deeply into the topic at hand you'll find lots of resources including a Ministry leaders growth guide so we encourage you to Avail yourself of that and use that with your local team now at Pastor serve we love coming alongside of pastors encouraging them and walking with them and you can find out more details about how you can receive a complimentary coaching session at Pastor serve.org frees session now if you're joining us on YouTube please give us a thumbs up we certainly appreciate that it helps us get our show out to a wider audience of pastors and Ministry leaders and if you'll take a moment to drop your name in the name of your church in the comments below we love getting to know our audience better and our team will be praying for you and for your ministry and whether you're joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform please be sure to uh follow and to subscribe so you do not miss out on any of these great conversations and as I told you super excited about today's conversation at this time I'd like to welcome Dr ente right to the show Tom hi good to see welcome to front stage backstage brother thank you good to be with you yes so good to be with you now now um I would love for you to just walk us into we're going to dive into a topic that's that's at the Forefront of um many of those of us who are in Ministry when it comes to this idea of um political power how do we as uh the church how do we as Christ followers um give witness in the midst of uh a lot of political tensions that that are being experienced in various countries around the world right now and so Tom to begin I would love for you just to share with us a little bit about a Biblical understanding um when it comes to the the kingdom of God and how it relates to really kind of the kingdoms of this world what are some foundational things we need to to consider oh my goodness that's just a nice little question which could generate an entire course of lectures or maybe a Shelf full of books yes but um I I mean I think one of the encouraging signs to me over the last generation over the course of my teaching career has been that more and more people in Fairly traditional churches starting to scratch their heads and saying what exactly is the kingdom of God all about and when I was growing up um it was just assumed that the kingdom of God meant the Kingdom of Heaven which meant Heaven as a place where God is King and where you'll go when you die and then people have started to notice if I can put it like that that Jesus taught us to pray thy kingdom come on Earth as in heaven and that actually all his teaching was about not how we can leave this place and go somewhere else but about how God is coming to dwell in the midst of this place and and to rescue and transform it and human beings are Central to that project and this is one of the things which is a very much a Biblical foundation for Christian political thought we have tended to oscillate between uh the the the political evils of tyranny on the one hand and Anarchy on the other and because in the modern Western World um those of us with certain educational backgrounds and so on are more likely to be rejecting tyranny because we want to be free to think our thoughts Etc we've tended to Lurch away from Authority away from Human Rule and um basically imply that we ought to be able to do our own thing and that somehow God would work all that out in fact the Bible is very clear again and again in many different ways that God created the world in such a way that it would work right when wise God-fearing humans are put in charge of it that's so with Adam and Eve in the garden and it's all the way on through with the monarchy in Israel which some people today are frightened of that because they say oh that's all about tyrants again but actually if you look at the Psalms like Psalm 72 it's all about God giving his way of doing Justice to the king who is going to look after the Widow and the orphan and the poor and the stranger and so on and that's what makes the glory of God fill the whole world that's Psalm 72 one of the great I think um biblical texts for a political theology but the trouble is that when human beings are given uh a role a task authority responsibility the Temptation following on the failure of Adam and Eve in the garden if you like the Temptation is to abuse that power that Authority that vocation that responsibility for their own aims and ends and that's when you get this strange phenomenon which I think the early Christians didn't have very good language for it and we didn't have very good language for it either which is what we call Loosely the powers the principalities and powers that the dark Forces which are forces of chaos which ultimately go back to uh the the dark lord himself whether you call it the Satan or the devil or whatever Jesus says this is your hour and the power of Darkness as the corrupt leaders are closing in on him in Gethsemane to arrest him um there's that sense of dark Powers which are about chaos whereas humans are supposed to be about wise fruitful order not order in the sense of a stultifying regime where everyone is squashed into shape but but a wise fruitful order like a garden full of of fruit and and flowers and so on doing what it does best under human authority so that structure is something which I have never heard a sermon about that I've been going to church for the last 70 plus years I've never heard anyone preach about the human responsibility maybe I wasn't listening but I think you'd have to go a long way to get that and the trouble is that as soon as people do want to talk about political responsibility um from a Christian point of view it's very easy for that to tip over into saying by the way I know which candidate you ought to vote for at the next election and Mike Bird and I were very keen this by the way is the UK edition of our book you may have seen the US One um we're very keen not to say this is who you should vote for there's an election coming up in Britain just like there's an election coming up in America there are other key elections at other parts of the world one of the fun things of writing this book with Mike is that he's Australian and I'm British so we're kind of crossbench when it comes to looking at the American scene at the same time we all know that American power has been one of the great fulcrums that uh around which World politics have moved over the last few Generations um and so it really matters this is one of the jokes of course that um whoever gets to be in power in America will affect all the rest of the world but curiously only Americans vote in this election I've always thought that that was a a bizarre wrinkle you know no taxation without representation excuse me so obviously obviously there's there's but we need to think globally as well and uh so it's really all about the Creator God wanting humans to look after his world Psalm 8 that you've made so that they can speak truth to power and can hold up a mirror to power we have wanted to separate that out and say no church is over there state is over there you religion is upstairs politics is downstairs that's completely wrong from a kingdom point of view from a Jesus point of view it's all one show we believe in one God and he's The God Who is claiming the sovereignty over the world but it's not a bullying sovereignty Jesus says precisely bullying is what the the rulers of this world to do that's how the principalities and Powers get their way we're going to do it the other way so being able to say to the rulers and actually you're getting it wrong because of this because of that that's a core part of the church's task and to do that requires humility and wisdom and it requires the church itself to be working and and organizing its life in such a way that it can say that with integrity and not invite the kind of well you're just as bad as the rest of us thing which sadly would all too often be the case now that that's that's the very very short version of the lecture the first lecture in the course of lectures that I would give if I we're doing a course on this right now yes yes I appreciate that Tom um so as we look at this as as pastors as Ministry leaders one of the challenges Tom and and you you and Mike both you know bring this up in in Jesus and the powers your your book um is that the way that we as pastors and Ministry leaders the way that we we live out our calling the way that the church lives out her calling um we have to be very conscious of that um you you talk about the idea of of the Cross and the kingdom and how it takes both the cross and the kingdom together so the cross you know the the um Evangelical expression the atonement those pieces you know looking to to Paul's writings primarily and then you have kind of the Kingdom where you're looking at the gospels you're looking at um the justice as you said uh praying that God's kingdom would be here on Earth right and and sometimes as as Ministry leaders or as churches we will tend to vacillate or lean more strongly to one or the other and yet you've shared that they can't be understood without each other absolutely can you can you help us process through that because I think this is one of the challenges we face when it comes to how do we how do we resist the Empire or how do we confront the Empire is we get kind of mixed up on this right yeah I think we do and and even calling it The Empire whatever that is whether it's American Empire or World Empire or whatever is is both important and risky it's important because if we imagine that there isn't Imperial power out there in the world we're fooling ourselves because there really really is um although it tends to work not by people officially invading and taking over territory and running it but through economic and strategic moves which um then create a world in which what somebody is saying on the other side of the world is what's going to happen in this part even if they're not technically running that country that's how it plays out but when we say the Empire it's easy then for Christians today to slide back into a kind of comfortable well we've got rid of Christendom um mode you know the the narrative which I've heard often enough goes like this that to begin with the church was kind of edgy and Flaky and doing exciting things and then the emperor got involved and then it all went horribly wrong and the church colluded with Empire and became part of the P structures and now thank the Lord we've had um John Lock and Thomas Jefferson and people and they've showed us that actually we're giving up all that stuff and now the church can be free and do its own thing so now you've got church versus Empire and I want to say that's that's just as much a delusion you know the the the when the emperor came to the church and said look there are so many of my subjects becoming Christians that I actually think we need to work together and find a way of doing that what was the church to say no no no please go on persecuting us because that makes us so much more authentic um if we're a beleaguered minority now of course the church is going to say this is different this is going to be a challenge but let's work at it and we can see in the fourth and fifth and sixth centuries they did work at it they made mistakes as we all do but they they were also confronting the Empire as well as working with it for the good of people and changing the way that people thought about what it meant to be human I mean you know things um the Public Public awareness of things like the exposure of unwanted infants the church didn't do that Roman society Greek society did that and the church's moral position on several issues actually transformed the way that people thought and that's gone on being the case so that it isn't that the church must always be sniping at the Empire it's much more interesting and complicated than that I mean when I was Bishop of Durham and I was um member of the House of Lords in London and so on um it was quite clear to me this didn't mean that the state was telling me what to do or that I was telling the state what to do it meant that I was sitting down with people who were trying to run the country wisely as best they could and try to figure out because we in the church actually knew some of the poorest and worst communities much better than the local Bure bureaucrats did so they would come to us and say can you help us with this particular school which is failing here we say sure we've got 2,000 years in education actually we rather like getting involved with that etc etc and healthc care as well and particularly of course the care of the poor and the poorest of the poor that often governments want to do something for the poor and don't really know how the church ought to be saying well excuse me again we've got form on this one and we can work together and then of course the the the Mantra which I've used is we have to learn how to uh how to um oppose with without dualism and collaborate without compromise in other words we have to hold up a mirit to power and say you're getting this wrong you're you're um basically working towards chaos rather than towards go a god-given order but we have to do that without implying that from now on everything is going to be a big Clash Church versus Empire likewise we have to collaborate where people of Good Will are trying to do the best for their folks um in in local politics in National politics we have to collaborate but without compromise we have to know where the where the boundary lines are and we will gain respect actually by doing that I think part of our trouble is as I say ever since the 18th century we have been taught in Britain even though we have an established church we have been taught like you Americans have been taught that there is a great Gulf between religion and politics so never the twain shall meet so the church has nothing to say to the Empire and the answer is no The Church Must look hard at whatever rule is going on and must be prepared as is appropriate and possible to say this is where you're going wrong and we suggest you do it like this you can see Paul doing this throughout the Acts of the Apostles he gets in trouble for it but he gets away with it because actually he tells the truth and he he points his finger at key places where officials are doing things wrong um so I mean this is going to vary enormously you live and I live in a liberal democracy and in and which Mike Bird and I argue in the book is actually has grown out of the Christian tradition the danger is that it forgets that and lurches this way and that in consequence and treating Christianity as a football that can be kicked away somewhere um whereas in in fact uh there are many Christians in many countries who don't have anything like our system of government and where the church facing their government um may have a really really tough time I remember at the Lambeth conference in 2008 overhearing a conversation with some delegates from Myanmar and somebody saying are there any closet Christians in the hunter who are running Myanmar right now and I suddenly thought oh my goodness they're living in a world which is totally different from my world where where they're liable to be imprisoned or or whatever um and you know the the unfortunate Mr naal in Russia who was very very much a self-proclaimed Christian right very definite in his opposition to Putin as as a Christian um and look what happened to him so we live in a dangerous world but the church's witness is more subtle than simply being against or simply being for yeah that that that's great Tom and I I think the the challenge I'd like you to speak into this if you could Tom is that we we see the side of resistance we see the side like you said there's this this gulf that we you know are thinking we need to put between church and state um but then we've also seen the flip side of where uh you know lots of talk about you know being a Christian Nation and you know where where the the government itself taking on the role of U you know a Christian leadership you know for for a particular country sure so so how do how do we address that because I mean there's a lot of tensions here right so so how do how do we navigate all of this in a way that that really honors God right absolutely and in i i the way Mike Bird and I wrote this book is that he combed through a lot of stuff that I'd written over the last 20 years and pulled it together into a sharply focused thing but then he wrote one or two new chapters and I wrote one long new chapter the one power and the powers in early Christianity and it was funny because I was writing that chapter right after um our new King in Britain King Charles was crowned and so I start with the coronation service and you know I want to say I would much rather live in a country where the head of state comes into a church and the first thing that he says is I come not to be served but to serve and the the the whole thing was full of Christian language and about Jesus being Lord etc etc now that lots of irony in there but I'd much rather be in a country which did that than in a country which said no no that's all for the birds all we're going to do is is to run with kind of Brute Force and and push out the way anyone who gets in our way but it's it's difficult then then to handle it and particularly as you say what does it mean to be a Christian Nation now supposing the vast majority in a country were actually practicing Christians were saying their prayers were reading their Bibles were trying to love their neighbors as themselves etc etc I'd much rather live in that Society than one where that wasn't the case but the danger is and if if I dare mention one particular instance when I was younger apartheid South Africa thought of itself in exactly that way um that the the Dutch Reformed Church reckoned that this was the Christian way that they had to be separate from um the the the other races who were in South Africa and I think the whole world looked at that whether Christian or not looked at that and said that is not the way and part of the difficulty then is that the Christian Vision which is so clear in the New Testament about a community which is of every nation and every Kingdom and every tribe and every tongue every language every color this that and the other neither Jew nor Greek neither slave nor free no male and female all one in Christ the church has not even tried to model that in so many cases and in my country and in your country there are black churches and white churches almost side by side on the same street um or perhaps even more worrying in different parts of town the one richer and the other poorer or whatever it might be right and the fact that we haven't called that out long since is real shame on us there's two things going on here and if I was in pastoral Ministry myself I would want to be preaching about this carefully and respectfully on the one hand at the time of the Reformation the reformers insisted on having liturgy in their own language excellent we want liturgy in and hymns and so on in our and the Bible in our own language but that means that the church is divided according to language groups which meant they divided according to ethnic groups and nobody noticed that that was actually a denial of Ephesians 2 which is all about the church being Jew and Greek getting together as a result of which the principalities and Powers take note because they couldn't do that and this the the the idea of modeling New Creation by the church being one body across traditional lines the church forgot that for 400 years we've somehow got to recapture that and that's a political issue as well as a theological and sociological issue you um but then as as a result of that um we've we've allowed ourselves to collude with the idea of different theologies of different schools of thought we kind of wave at each other from the other side of the street if if if that's if that's all and this this is a tragic situation from which we need to break out so there are other things but I'll I'll just leave it at that for the moment and you can come back a me yeah yeah so a as as we're thinking from the um the posture of a Pastor a local cheat Church leader um how how can we be careful we're not Slipping Into You Know The Temptations of trying to engage in a way politically that the church gains more power in a way right like like like how do we how do we keep like kind of Kingdom ideals in mind what does that practically look like when it comes to resisting um and confronting Empire but not becoming Empire right yeah that's the challenge it is a challenge but the church at its best has always had those priorities I mentioned before which do go back to Psalm 72 and lots of other places in the Old Testament and certainly earthed of course in Jesus own uh work as well as his teaching which is the care of the poor the the looking out for those who are in most need um when the church has been at its best that's what it's been doing um and I was discussing with somebody last week and I think this comes on the back of Rodney Stark's book the rise of Christianity why did people become Christians in the first place when the Romans were trying to stamp the movement out and the answer was the ancient Pagan world had many gods but nobody ever said that Zeus or Poseidon or afrodite or anybody loved you and the church said no there is one God and he loves you God so loved the world and if that's incredible well come and join us and you'll see what that love actually looks like and feels like so the church being a community of Welcome a community which was of there for healing and for restoration of enabling broken humans to put their humanness back together again if you like and that meant that when people talked about a god of love this wasn't just a fancy fuzzy idea it actually meant something and people resonated with that because ancient paganism had nothing like that now um the tragedy is that so much in Western Christianity has not really wanted to talk about the love of God it's more wanted to talk about hey you're all Sinners and if you're not don't watch out you're going to hell which I say the danger then is that we preach sermons when people hear God so hated the world that he killed his only son rather than God so loved the world that he gave his only son and so when the church gives itself away when the church is there for the world and doing um the things for the world it's not in any danger of setting itself up as an Empire um of course in order to have a voice in the councils of state in order to be heard then you have to learn the the clever Arts of writing newspaper articles of getting elected to a local um body and being able to speak not from a triumphalist point of view well I'm a Christian so you better listen to me but knowing how to argue things from the ground up that actually the way we're treating these people here is is dehumanizing and we have to find a better way of going about it and and making arguments which can Appeal on a broad front which since we're all human that ought to be possible so it it's about the rehumanizing of human beings and the church embracing that instead of thinking oh Being Human that's for the birds it's just because we're sinful we've got to get out of here and go somewhere else so uh but going going back several steps I did did just want to say the idea that in the gospels you have Jesus in the kingdom and in the Epistles you have Paul preaching about the death of Jesus for our sins of course that that's that's um a false antithesis but the church has regularly gone that route the church has regularly said Paul will give us a Theology of atonement to help us get to heaven and Jesus gives you the kind of some of the nuts and bolts of of what to do while you're on the way but the the word Heaven is never used in the New Testament as a designation for the place where we're all going to end up that that astonishes people but it's true right um rather um God is offering us the new heavens and the new Earth modeled in Jesus himself and they are characterized by self-giving love which is what the cross is all about so Kingdom and cross go together Paul's message about Jesus is that Jesus has defeated the powers therefore now you can be renewed in knowledge according to the image of the Creator and really political theology is all about the image of God humans reflecting God's image into the world and the church cautiously prayerfully holding up the mirror to power where the powers of the world are not being wise humans looking after God's world the way they were supposed to yeah that that that's very helpful Tom um very very practically speaking as we find ourselves in you know election years as especially in the the Western world as we're wrestling through these things um can you share with us a little bit about the the I I guess I want to talk about within the church some of the divisions that that we are creating within or among our brothers and sisters when it comes to political ideologies and you know hitching our wagons to a particular party a particular leader and and the CH because that is that that that's what we're really facing in many many ways and it as as you've said as as you Mike wrote about in Jesus and the powers that t that behavior will tend to um weaken our witness of the beauty of Christ in the Kingdom to the world so so how do we navigate that or H how should we be addressing that in our date yeah it's it's more difficult if I can put it like this um it's more difficult when you are electing a head of state rather than when in Britain we are electing a prime minister who we could Turf out in in four weeks if he wanted to that happened a couple of years ago um where the elected official is not regarded as a messiah figure who is God's anointed come to save us um of course the position of a of a royal head of state and a royal family has its own ambiguities and I've written about that in the book as well but I think it's much harder for you in America particularly ever since the enlightenment ever since the American Revolution the sense has been and France actually had this too but it's gone horribly wrong for France and so they I don't they believe it anymore but the the the feeling has been that if only we voted right we would get a messiah we would get a hero figure who would fight all our battles and do all our stuff instead of somebody who is given a set of very kind of mundane tasks you know to pay the bills to look after the poor to be wise in in ruling the the the country um and and and therefore I see as I look across the Atlantic I see more power vest in the one person and to to reorganize everything in his way or as it might be one day her way though you haven't gone that route yet um and so I think the church's need to warn precisely against um a kind of Messianic vision and you know that happens at the moment there's one of your candidates who is more obviously would be Messiah than the other but the last one we had in Britain who was sort of like a wly messiah was was on the left um was Tony Blair and and that that didn't end well um and so I I think we have to recognize those dangers in particular um and and recognize that politics is the Resolute pursuit of the least bad and we're voting for the least worst option rather than thinking that that by voting we will produce Utopia you know we we've been we've been voting for a long time now and Utopia is as far away as ever um and and and I think it's it that should make people pause and in particular the thing which comes out to me very strongly as a historian is that the early Jews and Christians didn't much care how somebody got to be in power they came to power through assassination or through a lineal succession or through having to win a war or being the last man standing after a civil war or whatever the church and the Jews didn't care how they became rulers but they cared very much what they did now that they were rulers and as I say they spoke the truth to power the Jews were Past Masters at doing that and the Christians learned that art or best they could now we do it the other way around we think because of the 18th century we've got rid of God God's out of the picture so what counts Vox popular Vox day the voice of the people is the voice of God so if we've elected this person we give them a mandate for four years for five years whatever it is and so having elected them they must be the right person so they can do what they want instead of saying no the minute we've elected you we are going to critique you we've got to be your loyal opposition here's the other thing the church has not been good at that partly because it said well religion is different from politics and and we're just teaching people how to go to heaven which which is the abdication of Christian responsibility but also because um whether you call it the fourth estate or whatever the the the journalists the print media the television Etc they think it's their job to hold governments to account in in the Chicago Herald Tribune building in in Chicago I remember the first time I went into that building there's a great thing carved in in in stone on the wall which says the governments of the day need critiquing the other politicians are not in a position to do it because they're just as compromised as anybody else so somebody's got to critique them and it's going to be us and when I saw that I thought oh my goodness that's John 16 you just stole it from under our noses and we were so busy taking people to heaven we didn't even notice um that that that was going on the church has to reclaim the right to speak the truth to power and that I think is pretty close to the heart of what Mike Bird and I are wanting to say but because it's about the powers the powers are dark messy powers and it's a messy business engaging with them but not to engage is to to to lose all sense of Christian responsibility this is why we pray in the Lord's Prayer Deliver Us from Evil that's basic to Christian responsibility yeah yeah I love that Tom thank you so much as as we kind of close down here I would love um and maybe we I'll toss a couple things out and you can decide how how to really approach this but um one question is you know what what do you Mike hope and you answered this a little bit but hope that pastors take from um this book Jesus and the powers it's a big topic something we're really wrestling through but but also in in that Tom what is what is not just what you hope they would take but what is maybe what are maybe some words of encouragement specifically to our brothers and sisters who are serving the local churches when it comes to thinking about you know uh Power in in government right I I think I would want to say um don't be afraid to teach the basics of how God wants his world to be run and what role the church should play in that the stuff I've been talking about as I say most preachers uh if they get into politics in the Pulpit at all it's in order to tell people to vote one particular way which is not at all what I'm saying rather most Christians in the western world have not been taught that there is um a Christian way of thinking about what it means to be human what it means for God the Creator to want his world to be wisely run what the pitfalls are and how we address that um you can say all of that without giving the slightest hint as to which way you're going to vote yourself or which way you think your congregation should vote of course if congregations want to sit down with you and say as we pray for our leaders in the forthcoming election um what do you think we should be specifically looking at and and I I want to say there in particular beware of single issue campaigns it's so easy for people to fasten onto one issue I mean in I think in the last election but one um one big issue obviously was abortion and it was Hillary Clinton versus is Donald Trump and Trump managed to position himself extraordinarily as as the champion of conservative values on that one um and Hillary Clinton made no secret of the fact that she wanted to liberalize the abortion laws even more and in a sense she was she was asking for trouble and she got it but um those of us watching from the other side of the Atlantic whatever our views on abortion thought the election has to be about more than that and we have to have a more mature view than simply saying okay this is the issue so there's my C Cate job done we've got to be able to Think Through the different issues and that's where a pastor a wise Pastor I think could try to unpick the mindset which says if you vote on the right on this issue then you're going to vote on the right on this and this and this as well or on the left that and that and that because almost all issues do not in fact admit that kind of simplistic over clarified either or and so teaching people to think in a more nuanced way seems to me absolutely vital and if I was in pastoral ministry again I would love to have in my church kind of study groups looking at different issues and wondering why it is that the same people who are totally opposed to abortion are also totally in favor of 17-year-old young men having kalashnikovs um on the loose Etc you know from almost everybody else looking at American society this makes no sense at all but I know that within America that's how something so to teach the basics of how to think about human responsibility and so that we can be praying for our leaders locally um you know in the state and in the country um praying wisely about the responsibilities they face and and what we can do to help them what we can do to remind them and then particularly training up the next generation of Christian thinkers who will not go for the knee-jerk reactions but will go for the wise nuanced clear statement whether it's in an oped in the New York Times or whether it's in a stump speech somewhere or or whether it's simply in a in a local a local District Council um around a campfire or whatever um we need Christians who have learned how to think wisely about the issues and can then be Salt and Light in the world boy do we need it right now amen thank you brother Tom it has been so good as always to to be with you appreciate your heart thank you for carving the time out to to speak to us and share with us and uh for those of you watching listening along really encourage you absolutely amazing book it takes you to some really deep places uh time it might go really um historical really biblical which is all healthy and good and and and needed and very very practical and Jesus and the powers is the name of of the book and we will have links to the book um in the toolkit for this episode at Pastor serve.org Network so be sure to check that out along with um lot of resources and a Myster leaders growth guide with some insights and some questions from this conversation that helps you and your local church dig more into it so brother um as always it is a blessing to have you with us thank you for making the time thank you very much good to see you good to talk with you and blessing on your work and on those who are listening thank you so much God bless [Music] you now before you go I want to remind you of an incredible free resource that our team puts together every single week to help you and your team dig more deeply and maximize the conversation that we just had this is the weekly toolkit that we provide and we understand that it's one thing to listen or watch uh an episode but it's something entirely different to actually take what you've heard what you've watched what you've seen and apply it to your life into your ministry you see front stage backstage is more than just a podcast or YouTube show about Ministry leadership we are a complete resource to help train you and your entire Ministry team as you seek to grow and develop in life in Ministry every single week we provide a weekly toolkit which has all types of tools in it to help you do just that now you can find this at pastors serve.org Network that's pastors serve.org Network and there you will find all of our shows all of our episodes and all of our weekly toolkits now inside the toolkit are several tools including video links and audio links for you to share with your team there are resource links about different resources and tools that were mentioned in the conversation several other tools but the greatest thing is the ministry leaders growth guide our team pulls key insights and Concepts from every conversation with our amazing guests and then we also create engaging questions for you and your team to consider and process providing space for you to reflect on how that episode's topic relates to your unique context at your local church in your ministry and in your life now you can use these questions in your regular staff meetings to guide your conversation as you invest in the growth of your ministry leaders you can find the weekly toolkit at pastors serve.org Network we encourage you to check out that free resource until next time I'm Jason day encouraging you to love well live well and and Lead well God [Music] 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Length: 41min 40sec (2500 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 02 2024