Speaker 1: 0:02

Welcome to Season 3.5 of the Church Renewal Podcast from Flores Coaching. Why is this 3.5? Because we weren't quite done with Season 3.

Speaker 2: 0:11

Anyway, I'm Jeremy. I'm Matt.

Speaker 1: 0:13

Thanks for joining us. When we wrapped on Season 3, there were some conversations that we left on the table, which we're giving you now in this mini-season. Pull up a chair as we sit down with some of our colleagues. This is Part 3 of the conversation Matt and Jeremy had with Dr Ken Quick of Blessing Point Ministry. The first and second parts of our conversation will be linked in the show notes below. Now let's pick up where we left off.

Speaker 3: 0:36

So there was a church that we were dealing with. I'll even give the city it was in Punxsutawney, pennsylvania. Oh wow, yeah, do you mean, phil, groundhog Day? They had to go through it over and over again.

Speaker 3: 0:49

So they had experienced it. There was irony in that, yes, they had experienced some pain over and over again, but they were dealing with one specific issue, and churches will sometimes get frustrated not at all an uncommon experience as they are trying to understand what Jesus is saying, because we keep coming back to that what do you hear Jesus saying about this? And they had gone on for like a half hour and it was because it was something that was pretty fresh. There was still a lot of emotion around it and so it was causing people to struggle to hear what Christ was saying. So again, we just felt kind of the tension rising around that and finally everybody kind of paused and took a breath and I saw a young teenage girl lean over to her mom and whisper something. I didn't know what she was whispering, but as soon as she did, her mom stood up and she says my daughter just heard Jesus say. And then she gave what the daughter had said to her.

Speaker 3: 1:52

And this is what we now recognize is the way we know Jesus has spoken, because when it's articulated, the whole group goes. There's this intake of breath and it's corporate. It's like everybody and I'm getting chills just talking about it here Goosebumps, because I remember that moment so vividly, this thing, that he would speak to this quiet ninth grader's heart to give what it was he wanted that church to hear. So they were not, and this is why it's like Jesus he is teaching them how he communicates through the most humble servants, sometimes a humble of his children, that adults are not necessarily listening to, but they're getting the message if the leadership knows how to listen. That church again had a magnificent solemn assembly to deal with some of the painful things that they had dealt with, and there's a lot of the things I could tell you about that took place there.

Speaker 3: 3:02

But you know, I think that those are the kind of things we see happen regularly. But that idea of resonance where the body knows that they have just heard from Jesus, now it's not scripture, but it's never in violation of scripture. It's usually reinforcing something that scripture has said, and they can all go to their Bibles and point to exactly what Scripture that would be an application of that that message just came from. So there's never anything weird or strange about it. It's always kind of very spiritual, very scriptural, but it's clear, it's clarity, it's clear, it is absolutely clear. Everybody has heard and so we don't have to do a whole lot, then you know, the body is now getting the message, and so then it's just a matter of them realizing that we've got to take responsibility.

Speaker 2: 3:56

You've said this a couple times now, the pronouns that you're working with is our and your, not you and he or she.

Speaker 2: 4:10

And Jesus is not speaking to you, the individual, he's speaking to you, the church position.

Speaker 2: 4:28

As a church leader, it is easy for me to become afraid, to feel insecure, to feel threatened in my leadership, in my position, in the stability of my role, because I have a call, I have something I'm supposed to be doing, I'm supposed to be leading, I'm supposed to be hearing from God and passing on what I'm hearing from God to the body.

Speaker 2: 4:47

And this paradigm takes that and, at least for a time, sort of puts it totally on the shelf and says, no, this is not about the leadership hearing from God. This is about the body of Christ hearing from its head as a unit, as a whole, which means it may not come, it may likely not at all come from the guys who normally stand up here and lead, the guys that we have become accustomed to looking to as if they're going to have the answer. And Jesus comes along and says hey, you remember, good Shepherd, me, did you want to continue trying to carry my mantle, or did you want me to do that for you? And I mean I'm making light of it only because that is a scary place.

Speaker 3: 5:41

It is, and it's even scary when it's clear that this is what they need to do.

Speaker 3: 5:46

I remember Lieutenant Colonel Marine Lieutenant Colonel in a church that was chairman of the Baptist Church and chairman of the Deacon Board.

Speaker 3: 5:57

They didn't have elders who said I've been in combat situations where live ammunition is flying over my head, he says I was never so scared as to stand before the Lord of the church and take responsibility for this stuff in our history.

Speaker 3: 6:18

So I mean, I think at any level there is an accurate fear of the Lord dimension to it, where you realize who and what our church is and what its relationship is with the Lord of the church and the implications of Revelation 2 and 3 to that, when he's now speaking about the things that have taken place and who is responsible in his eyes for it. So, yes, it is scary. It was scary for me to have to take responsibility for stuff that took place 20 years before by the time I was dealing with it 20 years before, with the split and the pastor and the way he behaved and the elders looking at what, the way those elders behaved, all of whom left the church. But it didn't change the fact that the present elders had to take responsibility for it, just like with the Gibeonites, you know, sons of Saul, grandsons of Saul, had to pay the price.

Speaker 4: 7:24

There are. This may surprise you or it may not. You've got a broad experience across churches, but there are people in what would be our listening audience that to hear the phrase that the Spirit would want to say something to me would be odd. So they might be used to like you know, god spoke to me through the preached word. That would not be odd to some people in our audience, but sort of the private word would be an oddity to some people in our audience, and even a corporate word would be an oddity to some people in our audience.

Speaker 4: 8:06

I would say that that's a deformity right of some of the people in the tribe that I tend to be in, because the fact that Scripture is closed we talked about this earlier the fact that Scripture is closed, doesn't mean that the Spirit doesn't want to keep communicating, right, it lives inside each one of us. One guy to me that, as I was trying to better develop in the series like so you had the spirit of god, right, I'm like? Yep, he says, and I believe I've got the spirit of god. You think I'm pretty god? Yep, he says. So if the spirit of god that lives in both of us wants to help you grow.

Speaker 4: 8:39

Why would it be odd that he might use me to help you grow? And I was like, hmm, hard to gain say that. And so I think that how have you helped people? I'm sure you've run into churches where this idea of hearing from the Lord is new. It's unfamiliar. They're not necessarily resistant, but they're just not used to it. Right, it's not a part of the spiritual habits of the church or anything like that. So how have you helped people to be—I do get this question, by the way—how have you helped people begin to learn how to listen to the Lord?

Speaker 3: 9:20

Yeah, it's a challenge. Again, I think this is where culture has, I think, played such a detrimental impact on us. Or it's like we've only worked out on one side of our body. We've only got one muscle. You know, our right hand has a muscle. Our left arm doesn't have a muscle, right that you know.

Speaker 3: 9:41

It's not that Christ doesn't speak to us individually, he does. The Spirit of God makes, applies lessons to us every Sunday when we listen open-hearted to the Scripture and ask God to teach us. He does. He does that faithfully. But what we may not realize is there is another set of messages that come to the body and I think this is what Paul was trying to help the Corinthians understand. Gave the great description of 1 Corinthians 11 and what takes place around the Lord's table. Paul follows that with 1 Corinthians 12 and the nature of spiritual gifts within the body and how spiritual gifts are given to enable the body to become healthy. And you need all the gifts.

Speaker 3: 10:31

And again, our churches are often misshapen by the fact that only a few gifts are manifested, given prominence, given space. That's right and seen as important and are paid for what they do, what they do, and it tends to create a again a misshapen, I think, body that we don't know how to listen to what the Spirit of God may be saying through ninth graders. But he will speak if we listen and I think that it makes for a much healthier body if we can understand that, this communication that we need as leaders and I think this takes place at the leadership level, working again with a church that is doing a pastoral search and I encourage them. You need a wide variety of people in here. You need females on this search committee. You don't need just males, you need females and you need to learn to listen to each other, listen to each other's spiritual gift, concentrate when you're together, just talk about let's let the Holy Spirit work in each of us. We all have gifts. Let's try and manifest our gift as we do this search process.

Speaker 3: 11:46

And they just had a pastoral candidate and there were a number of the guys that said oh, we really like this guy. Oh, we really like this guy. I think this may be the guy and the women were going. We do not like this guy.

Speaker 3: 12:05

And I remember one of the elders came to me and said you know, we listened. He said and I confess we haven't done that before. But we listened and so we told them no, we don't feel like this is where God wants them, he says. But that was one of the hardest things I've ever done. So I think that this is not an easy thing to learn, to do and I think that's why Paul wrote 1 Corinthians 12.

Speaker 3: 12:36

He saw all that deformity in the Corinthian church and you know, we have to learn. Kind of none of those lessons have gone anywhere. They're still there for us and it's just hard to know how to get the application operating in our churches. And especially when you've got a mega church, you've got 3,500 people. How do you go about that? So there's a sense which a body is a body. Whether it's a preemie baby or a 350-pound offensive tackle, the body is a body and a doctor is going to come in and recognize I'm dealing with a body here, whether he's dealing with a preemie, whether he's dealing with a huge guy, and I think Jesus is used to working with bodies. We just have to understand how bodies work. They're still working the exact same, even if they're small, even if they're large. I don't think anything changes in terms of application of the principles.

Speaker 4: 13:37

It's interesting. Maybe you've written on this and I'm not aware of it or somebody else has, but it would be interesting to take the Corinthian example and start a little bit earlier than Paul's letter and write a only mildly fictional account, because I think you could imagine, imagine that the people that were sick and the people that had died, and the ones that were weak, and the elders trying to figure out what is going on, the mothers that had lost children and the brothers and sisters whose siblings were sick for mysterious reasons, did they reach out to the Lord? Did they pray, did they wonder? We would mechanistically be doing tests and, you know, drawing blood, right, but would we have the courage to say Lord, are you trying to say something? I'm not sure that's our. I'm nearly positive, actually, that that would not be our first flex, that would not be the first thing we turn to.

Speaker 4: 14:56

But there it is, it's right there and Paul comes in. They had to be in grief and wondering and trying to figure it out and he comes in and he, he solves the conundrum for them and obviously, you know they responded we're in a healthy church, in 2 Corinthians, right, and yeah, there's something there that I think that could. If it hasn't been written, that could be written. We'll go right ahead Because I think that it's. Yeah, I mean it's just. I think about the crowd that I spent a lot of time with and I think it would have to almost be along those lines and go. Have you asked the Lord why your church is in the spot that it is? Maybe he'd answer you if you asked him.

Speaker 3: 15:42

I just grieve over, because I've been a part of this board meetings that last until 1 am, so much stomach acid generated in the midst of it. And then some other crisis occurs. And so a week later you got to meet again and it's another long, agonizing meeting and you just go from thing to thing to thing, so much so that a lot of guys will say, man, when my term is up, I'm out of here and I am never getting on another church board, that's for sure. And so you burn out leaders, you burn out pastors, you burn out good godly folk, and no one understands why this is happening. They don't know how to ask that question of God, were you with me, with this client last weekend.

Speaker 4: 16:40

Their description was nobody serves on this board more than once, right, right. Who would want to? Oh, man, who?

Speaker 3: 16:47

would want to. So I mean, there are things that I think the scripture make clear to us. If we know how to listen to it and are not trapped in our own little bubble of doctrine that we can't hear or see anything beyond it, uh, where there is, I think, truth, some of it. We have to realize what our culture has done to us, and then we need to be brave, and I would say courage is one of the primary qualifications for beginning to address it, being courageous enough to address it.

Speaker 3: 17:25

As Jeremy has well said, that you just have people thinking, gosh, I'm going to be responsible for stuff, I'm going to find out where I've been failing. You know, I've been here for 15 years and I haven't seen any of this stuff or figured any of this out, and so much of it has happened under my watch and you know. And so how do I explain that? How do I justify that to myself? You know you just get a lot of things that, for me, I just grieve because I see it happening in the church, and I think you know we live in a time now where people in churches are listening to voices, that and who knows that this isn't a direct discipline from God. So if you're not going to listen to many, you're going to listen to voices that delude, and there's just whether it's conspiracy theories, whether it's lies, whether it's thinking political people are going to be saviors. I have to wonder whether we are looking at an impact on the body of Christ in particular, that is, a manifestation of corporate unhealth at a national level almost.

Speaker 4: 18:42

Yeah, at a macro level. Yeah, it's interesting. For a lot of years I'd read through the Bible in a year. I'd listen through it actually, and you know you come across twice in the New Testament, paul talks about the wiles of the devil. Yeah, and I have with some frequency in working with elder boards or congregations while preaching. So I guess, preach some, as you do as well.

Speaker 4: 19:10

And I wonder I did this on Sunday actually. I was like would we Do I? Because certainly his wiles are different now than they were then. No matter what date you give to the age of the earth, he's had at least 6,000 years to get very good at what he does. Right, this is not a stupid person. He's very crafty and he's hell-bent on dragging people to hell. And so would I recognize it If I was deluded by a while of the devil, would your church, would we as an elder board, would we recognize? Oh, this is Satan, not a person, not something that was said, but Satan's trying to do something. Jesus is trying to do something different. Jesus, what do you want to do?

Speaker 2: 20:11

And just be willing to consider that that might be what's going on. We have stories to help guide us as a society, because it is easier at times to see ourselves in the stories than it is to recognize the reality of what we're actually walking in the midst of. I think about Narcissus, who loved the way he looked so much that he let his body wither and die because he couldn't bear the thought of not looking at his beauty. I think about the emperor. Here's a guy who is seriously invested in his clothing. I mean the time that goes into it, the long game that these tailors are playing with the emperor, and by the time he's taken his naked walk doing the pregame of Thrones thing and the kids like, uh, bubba's naked, not only. I mean he's so invested at this point. Right, that story really, in reality it only has one one ending that kid's dead. That kid's erased from the history books. We don't hear about that kid ever, unless we have the wisdom and the humility and the courage not just to say, hey, there is a problem, but then to look in the mirror and say, and I think I found it.

Speaker 2: 21:37

I think I need to start here, and what's striking to me about the story that you told Ken, is that here you have a ninth grade girl who has grown up probably hearing the truths of Scripture being told and expected to have her conduct follow a biblical model and she can hear Jesus. She hasn't lived long enough to learn the Christian two-step. She hasn't been on the board or on the committee long enough to learn where the closets are, because she has parents, presumably, who love her and are willing to call her on the carpet and say, no, that's wrong. Here's what Scripture says. Here's what God expects of us. Here's what the Holy Spirit's calling you to do. Here's where he's calling you to submit, to change, to grow. I don't remember who said it, but you really do have to become pretty smart to do some things that are so stupid and, unfortunately, as a husband, as a father, as a leader in church, I've gotten all those degrees.

Speaker 4: 22:54

Then I got the t-shirt.

Speaker 2: 22:55

Yeah, by my own hand, the many, many wounds that people of my love now carry in their bodies because of my selfishness, my sin, my pride, my arrogance, my fear. It is a gracious thing that we see Jesus calling to the churches in Revelation to say hey, you're going to stand before me, we're going to talk about this. I'm telling you, we're going to talk about this. This is not going unnoticed. We can talk about it now or we can talk about it before my throne.

Speaker 4: 23:43

Which would you like? Which would you like? Which would you like? Well, and that call to repentance that you so beautifully, you know, have spoken of just now, jeremy, is a gracious call from the Lord. It is so gracious it's to.

Speaker 4: 23:58

I've been reading a book this week, listening to a book this week. I've been driving out on the road and it's like it's getting back into the fabric of creation. Instead of being against it, it's getting back into it. It's good. The Lord doesn't call us back to beat us up and make us feel bad or whatever. It's kind of like. Why would you walk that way? That's only going to hurt you. Why don't you walk this way?

Speaker 4: 24:22

I made you. I know what's better for you, you know for congregations. This was my idea, this is. I developed this for goodness, so people would come to know me and grow in me. So this is a good thing to come back into health, right? Use the bodily metaphor. Use the bodily metaphor, ken. This has been super, super fun. Thank you for being willing to do this. My pleasure. Flourish helps some measure of churches. Every year, you help some measure of churches. Maybe somebody's listening to this and Flourish is the right choice for them to call but Blessing Point might be. So how do people get in touch with you if they're on the way to the lawyers offices in church and they're like, should we give them one last chance? I love that analogy.

Speaker 3: 25:09

How can people get in touch with you at Blessing Point? Wwwblessingpointorg. Make sure it's an org not a com and you can get on our website. We've just recently redone our website. There are a number of helps there. We at Blessing Point try to give away as much as we can. We just feel like it's just the way we've been kind of shaped is that we're not going to hold a church hostage for money To get some help.

Speaker 3: 25:45

You will find a wonderful little resource on the website for taking an assessment of your church health. It's a very easy assessment. I mean it doesn't take very long. It takes maybe 10 minutes to do. Very much will give you an in-depth response to just kind of what, in five major areas, is going on in your church and the more people. You can easily hand it out to your elders, to your church leaders at any level, and they can give you great input and you can feed back to the website and it will actually give you a readout on just kind of the state of your church's health. Then we have many other services that we make available to churches. The process that I described is one where we come in as facilitators and consultants and that's probably the big piece if you really need help. But we're more than happy to train pastors to do this for their churches without us having to come. We just need to understand how.

Speaker 4: 26:52

So I'm a pastor, I'm listening to this podcast, I'm an elder, I'm like, oh, my church is such a mess. I don't know if I could even help other people see it. What's one of your books that you would recommend that people could pick up, that they could begin to sort of develop their language and their vocabulary and helping others kind of come along? What would you recommend sort of as a first read for people?

Speaker 3: 27:13

As a first read. I think Healing the Heart of your Church is the big one. You can get that on Amazon, published on Amazon. So Healing the Heart of your Church. Kenneth Quick is the author. We have several others that have, I think, developed off of Healing the Heart of your Church, but that's definitely where I would start.

Speaker 4: 27:35

And so as a ministry flourish, we've already used Ken's book, the Eighth Letter, and developed it as a tool that we use at least with one church, and I think we'll use it again. And it's just super provocative. I'm so thankful that the Lord made it so that we could meet and through friends, and I really appreciate you, brother. Thanks for coming on. Thank you so much.

Speaker 2: 27:56

Thank you Matt, thank you Jeremy, my pleasure. Thank you Ken.

Speaker 1: 28:14

Thanks for listening to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching. Flourish, you can Our team of coaches refresh their hope in the gospel and help them clarify their strategy. If you have questions or a need, we'd love to hear from you. For more information, go to our website, flourishcoachingorg, or send an email to info at flourishcoachingorg. You can also connect with us on Facebook X and YouTube.

Speaker 1: 28:38

We appreciate when you like, subscribe, rate or review our show whenever you're listening. It can be hard for churches to ask for help, so when our clients tell us who referred them, we'll send a small gift to say thanks. A huge thank you to all our guests for making the time to share their stories with us. We are really blessed to have all these friends and partners, and a special thanks to Crosspoint Church in Arnold, maryland, for generously letting us use their space to make today's episode. All music for this show has been licensed and was composed and created by artists. The Church Renewal Podcast was directed and produced by Jeremy Seferati in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called you. Bye for now, thank you.