Episode Transcript
All right, we are recording now in three, two, Daniel M., thank you so much for joining me today on the Revitalize My Church podcast. Bart, it's great to be with you. I'm really excited about this conversation for a couple of reasons. Number one, I have been listening to and reading content that you have been creating for a really long time. I don't know how long, ten years at least. So the fact that we've got a chance to kind of hang out together and I get to pick your brain on some stuff is exciting to me. But also the topic that we're going to be talking about today is one that is near and dear to my heart. You and I were talking before we started recording, and I said that one of the things that I'm really concerned with is churches discipling people to a point that they're not just smart about the Bible, but that actually living out what God's word teaches them. I think that's critical for us in churches. For sure. Yeah, your heart is well aligned with that. You wrote a great book that we're going to dive into here in just a few minutes called The Discipleship Opportunity. But before we get to that, why don't you just share with our audience a little bit of your story, how you ended up in ministry, how you ended up where you are today? Yeah, yeah. So my parents immigrated from Korea to Vancouver, Canada in the seventies. So my three older sisters and I were all born and raised in Vancouver area, which if your listeners aren't familiar, it's sort of like Seattle, but Canadian. Better. But, you know, you got to say that because you're, you know, be nationalistic in that way. So, yeah, so we grew up there and I grew up going to a Korean church. My dad was an elder at the church, helped the he he and my mom helped plant the church. I was as a part of the team, not as pastors. I was actually the first baby child. born into that church after it was planted. So a long history. Even my grandmother was an evangelist in Korea in and around the Korean War era. So there's been a lot of history in and around ministry and love for Jesus. But for me, it wasn't until late elementary school where I first was just struck by the grace of God. And just, I honestly, like that was the word. I was in worship at this retreat that I tagged along. It was a youth retreat. I was too young for it. But my three older sisters were going and I guess my dad had some sway in the church and Him and my mom wanted a weekend by themselves, right? So there I go, grade five at this retreat. And I am in tears for the first time realizing, right? Beyond the memory verses, beyond the flannel graphs, beyond all the musical plays and all that that we had done. I was just struck by the reality of how undeserving I am of God's love and how he has poured that upon me. And that was the beginning, I would say, truly of my personal relationship with Christ. I, you know, like most teenagers and young adults, went through lots of ups and downs, but that would probably be that beginning point. And through all that, my dream was to become a neurosurgeon, like ever since I was a little kid and loved medicine, went into university, into the sciences, and went on a mission trip with Campus Crusade for Christ, right, crew, and met my wife there and also discerned a calling to vocational pastoral ministry. So the rest is history. Okay, so you're in Edmonton now. We were talking before we started recording that I had a handful of years in Southeast Alberta. I've been to Edmonton, never in the winter. Okay, but you had to go Canada's largest mall. I did. We rode the roller coasters in Canada's largest mall. The few times I was there was my kids, my sons played little league baseball and we would go up to Edmonton in the summer for baseball tournaments. And yes, we had to go to the mall and ride the rides at the mall. But yeah, but you spent a few years in the States, in Nashville, working at Lifeway and did some content there, podcast, wrote some books, co-wrote a book with Ed Stetzer. Was that missional? Yeah, Planting Missional Churches. Planting missional churches, that's right. So you've been around the block a little bit, but right now you're leading a church in Edmonton. We were talking about this offline. It's a longtime historic church in Edmonton, Beulah Alliance Church. Give us a little bit of the landscape of what Beulah Alliance Church looks like. What's the church look like that you're ministering in? Yeah, so we're a hundred and four years old. We were the first Alliance church that got planted out West. There was a lot more in Ontario. So if your listeners aren't familiar with the Alliance, that would be tied to A.B. Simpson, D.L. Moody would be Christian and Missionary Alliance names. Probably the most famous ones. But yeah, our church was planted and we're a hundred and four years old. We have four campuses. We're about to launch our fifth campus in the southeast of our city. Our vision is to awaken Greater Edmonton to King Jesus. We're probably now, I mean, we are very multi-ethnic, very, very multi-ethnic. And that would have been different fifteen years ago. But also the city has changed. Yeah. So very multi-ethnic, multi-campus. Multi-generational would be our three taglines as well, because we are five generations. So my predecessor, for example, he is still a part of the church. He was the lead for thirty years, but his grandmother came to know Jesus at the church. He grew up. At Beulah as a baby and his grandkids go to Beulah as well. So long history in the church, great relationship with the city and our partners. And you've been in thirty plus churches. Thirty plus churches have been planted out of Beulah as well. OK. And you're in the senior pastor or lead pastor role. You've been in that role for how long now? Yeah, it was May, two thousand one. So we're coming up on. Oh, yeah. Four and a half years. Two thousand twenty one. Two thousand twenty one. Yeah. Two thousand. Yeah. Two thousand twenty one in May. Yeah. OK. And you had served there for a handful of years, years ago as you was it a discipleship pastor? Was that? Yeah. Yeah. When I. When I graduated university, I first was a youth pastor in Montreal, and then we pastored in Korea for two years, and then we came to Beulah, and we were here for four and a half as the groups pastor. Okay. Discipleship groups, and then Nashville for five years, and now I've been back for six and a half. So when we came back, it was a very intentional overlap baton pass process, and then, yeah. Mm-hmm. It's very interesting because you said fifteen years ago or so, the church probably wouldn't you wouldn't have called it a multi-ethnic church. And you were you were basically there serving as the discipleship or groups pastor fifteen years ago. So it wouldn't have been multi-ethnic at that time. But that's changed a lot the last fifteen years. Oh, yeah. You know, I mean, if someone's listening to this podcast, you may or may not know from my background. name that I'm not Anglo, I'm Canadian, but I'm also Korean, English. And you may not know that English is not my first language, but English isn't my first language. I went to ESL in kindergarten because my parents were immigrants from Korea. So all they did was speak Korean at home. They didn't know English. Yeah. So there's this sense of, yeah, I mean, I am a person of color, but I wouldn't say that the shift from being more Anglo white to uh western is because of me um there is uh the the city is radically changed the diversity in the city has increased significantly um but there still stands the case of of all the large churches in greater edmonton i would beulah would be the only one led by a person of color okay um so there is that sense of you know as people are moving to the city and in the last few years there's been over two to three hundred thousand people that have moved to edmonton from inside of canada outside of canada so it is a booming uh a booming place for at one point six million people We're the northernmost populous city in North America. And in the next fifteen years, they're expecting us to grow by another six hundred thousand people. So, I mean, that may sound great, but realistically, there's a lot of issues with infrastructure, taxes, capacity, schooling, hospitals, all this stuff. So I've actually when we went into our capital campaign that we're in the middle of right now, There was a lot of talk initially about, oh, the city's growing, the city's growing, that we need more churches because we don't have enough churches to reach everyone here. But I've eased off on that language because I think most Edmontonians are sort of like, uh, there's not enough room in our schools. Traffic is getting bad. Hospital wait times are crazy. You can't find a family doctor. And the allure of a lot of people moving here is weighed off. So when we talk about lostness, I have to talk about it a little bit differently. Yeah, it's interesting because Alberta, having lived there for seven, eight years, I lived there. The best part of Edmonton, Calgary, Red Deer is that they're kind of... They have big city features, but didn't feel like big cities. But clearly, last time I was in Calgary, it was feeling much, much more like a big city and growing much, much more multi-ethnic for sure. I mean, it has been for a long time, but I've still got family in Medicine Hat. My grandkids are in Medicine Hat. So we were just up there back in October. And I'm assuming that Edmonton's experiencing that same type of growth, which, you know, if you're trying... If you're trying to lead a church that you want to see grow, one of the best ways to do that is leverage the fact that you've got people in life transition in your community. Oh, a hundred percent. They don't have relationship. They don't have community connections. And, you know, with the... with a posture of hospitality in your church, it can really, you can really see your church grow. I mean, all you have to do is really just have a great welcome mat and make sure that people can find you. And there's a really good chance that your church can experience some growth. Oh yeah. I mean, over the last several years, sorry, several would be the wrong word, but over the last four years, we've been we've seen like we have received three thousand first time connect cards of so brand new people every not over four years but every year over the last four years there's been about three thousand so if a family of five come that would count as five of the three thousand so there's there's a clear opportunity and i know that's different and and every church has different challenges and things that we're working on right so for our context it's not a matter of us trying to figure out how to get people into the front door But it's a matter of how do you get people connected? How do you get people to feel home, be seen, experience connection? Because it may sound great if you hear about, oh, three thousand new people. Yeah, but our church didn't grow by three thousand each of these years because we can't handle that. We don't have the infrastructure and systems to. Yeah, so there's a lot of pain in both ways, right? Yeah, well, I just want to make sure this is clear because we say this on this podcast often. Our goal in revitalizing churches is not to make small churches bigger, but to make all churches healthier. Oh, yeah. I love that. We're going to pivot into a conversation about one of the things that really, really matters when it comes to leading and having a healthy church, and that is having an effective, intentional discipleship pathway. So let's talk about discipleship. The book that you read, I recommend at the beginning of every year about half a dozen or so books that I've read in the previous year. I read a lot of books every year. This one made my list, Daniel. Oh, thank you. I've shared this with all of my colleagues, with many of my colleagues, the discipleship opportunity. What led you to write the book in the first place? Yeah, there's a sense of, I wrote, so part of the story is my heart of hearts. My deepest longing is that followers of Christ understand the calling and the joy of being a disciple who makes disciples who makes disciples. and how transformed our world would be the vision of like what sort of transformation would actually happen in our world if every single disciple realized they weren't consumers they weren't spectators they weren't whatever right but they were disciples who made disciples like our world would be absolutely transformed So part of it for me then being very systems oriented in my gifting and my thinking, I wrote this book, no silver bullets back in two thousand seventeen and a lot of discipleship pathway stuff. And basically fast forward to pandemic post pandemic, the tension of feeling in the last. I mean, I'm not talking about two thousand one. I'm talking about like two thousand five, two thousand six, the tension of that. oh so it seems like people aren't necessarily getting back into serving the way that they used to oh it seems like people uh like they're they're a lot more laid back or consumeristic than they used oh there's quite a quite a bit of division and we've sort of gone backwards in our maturity because conflict doesn't happen because people just block each other and ignore each other. And there's all of these pieces of when it comes to maturity. And I shared this with our church this last weekend, I was like a life of following Christ is less like us just going on a walk in the, in the river Valley or in the city. It's more like we are on a moving sidewalk at the airport, but we're going the opposite direction. It's not going so fast that we'll fall backwards. It's, All you have to do is have a gentle pace and you can keep up going the opposite way on the moving sidewalk. But the only way that you're going to get off the moving sidewalk or make progress and get to the other side is if there's intentionality in your walking and your pace. There's no gentle sauntering of a walk. You won't move anywhere. And how many disciples, they are either just standing on these moving sidewalks year after year after year thinking they're maturing but actually they're going backwards uh you know politics is becoming king more than jesus being king the the kingdom of our world is shaping our decisions more than the kingdom of god right on and on and on and on and and this sense of yes so how do we walk intentionally and then as a pastor I'm not just talking about on an individual way, but as a pastor who we need to not just be leaders of ourselves, but we need to be good leaders of others and leaders of leaders and leaders of ministries and then leaders of the organization. How do we create pathways and systems where our people are maturing in Christ and we don't have to be there? Because if we are one-on-one with everyone in our church family, yeah, God has called us and placed us in a position with experience that we can. We have the ability to disciple people toward maturity in Christ. But that's like Moses and Jethro. Jethro being like, you're crazy, Moses. You can't live like this. And as pastors, a lot of us have this savior mentality. And it's like, I sort of like helping people. but it's a sense of our responsibility to scale. So that was really the idea around the discipleship opportunity. In our post-everything world, how do we create systems of discipleship? How do we actually need to shift the way that we preach and disciple and evangelize in light of the fact that most of the books that are behind me were all written pre-pandemic? And the big reason I make, and I don't spend a lot of time talking about this in the book, it's more just here. But the reason the pandemic is a, as much as it's something no one likes to talk about, I find that it's sort of like nine, eleven, where up until last year, I don't know if you ever noticed this, but every time you flew, you had to pay a nine, eleven fee. I did not notice that. Yeah, I just noticed that it's gone. And I don't know if that's just because of the city in and out I flew out of or whatnot. But there was a nine eleven fee instituted afterwards. And I was like, yes, if you ever flew before nine eleven, security is completely different before then. And now it literally changed the systems of our society. And we're seeing continuously the effects of the pandemic on the systems of our society. Just wait, right? Gen alpha, gen Z, the way that are, I mean, any sociologist and anthropologist is having the time of their life because of all the research that's going to come out as a result of what happens. So part of it was like, okay, so for the church, how do we grab hold of this opportunity that we have? to not just let people move backwards and saunter on these moving sidewalks, but actually move forward with intentionality. Okay. Love that. I love that analogy. And I envision this moving sidewalk that I'm walking on. And I've been in a lot of airports lately. So I've done this. Charlotte, the Charlotte airport is full of these things. It was just in Charlotte a couple of weeks ago. And I'm moving one direction, but it's not just the path that I'm on is moving the opposite direction. There are other people that are moving past me the opposite direction. I'm having to dodge them, navigate all of that. So a simple saunter isn't going to do it. You've used the word a couple of times. You've used the word consumers a couple of times. And I know that every pastor gets their knickers in a knot a little bit about thinking about the consumers in their church, people who are just coming to take. And yet, I think oftentimes we don't realize that the systems and the processes that we have or don't have are ultimately what often create change. consumers. And in the book, you describe people in three different categories. You use the term sleepers, seekers, and consumers. Can you break down those three groups for us and who they are and how they fit into the context of a church? Oh, for sure. Okay, so I'll try to do this as fast as I can. Pre-seventy years ago, and seventy years has a, there's a reason around the seventy, but before seventy years ago, the majority of our mindset, before and during, over the last seventy years, our mindsets around ministry and formation and how you do church were predominantly split between, are you reaching non-Christians or Christians? Right. So you got churches very much over the last seven years. So church growth movement, seeker sensitive church health movement, you know, on and on and on it goes. Whereas like, oh, yeah, we are going to be seeker sensitive or we are going to reach non-Christians. We are going to be evangelistic, et cetera. And then you had other churches who were like, no, we're going to be discipleship focused, formation focused. The word we're going to preach the word and we're going to feed disciples. And just very maturity, depth focus. The interesting thing about this dichotomy is in the end, you ended up having churches who are great at evangelism, weak at discipleship, or great at discipleship, weak at evangelism. This is a broad generalization. Having said all that, as I was observing, not just because of the pandemic, but over the last several years before even the pandemic, I started noticing different folks where it was like, hey, you could be Christian, but just because you were Christian, it didn't mean you were passionate about being a disciple maker. You were consumeristic. Yeah. And we have seen that for so long. So like, what is that? And then I also saw non-Christians in our midst and in churches who had come, whether it was Christmas, Easter, or because of a baptism or this, that, or the other. And some non-Christians who are like taking an alpha or doing other initiatives where they're really wanting to ask questions and they want to find Jesus. And then other non-Christians who are just very uninterested. They're sleeping. They're literally sleeping in the pews. And you're like, why are you here? Right. And especially if they've come by themselves. It's like it's literally why are you here if you're going to be sleeping? It makes no sense. So in this dichotomy, I was like, actually, we haven't we haven't actually just had non-Christians and Christians. We've had uninterested non-Christians and Christians, and we've had interested non-Christians and Christians. So that's the quadrant in the book where I then pose, okay, so then how would you evangelize, disciple, and preach differently to the sleepers, to the seekers, to the consumers, and to the disciples? And really, it's a thought exercise and effort to say, hey, what would it look like if instead of being a church that reaches non-Christians or Christians, what would it look like if we actually became churches who focused on the interested? And we didn't try to get people into our doors, but we focused on who the Holy Spirit was stirring and bringing into our midst. And then the inevitable question that people ask is, oh, well, what about all the lost and our neighbors? And I was like, yeah, no, totally. You got to equip the disciples in your context to reach the sleepers in their lives. And yeah, so I talk about those three dynamics for each of the churches. You, you're, you're much smarter and, and much more studied in these things than I am. But the first thing that comes to my mind is the angle, the angle scale of, Oh yeah. Right. And I, and you know, you think about this and the angle scale, you know, you start it. I don't know. I think it starts at negative, negative spiritual interest, negative. Uh, if you spend all of your time, um, investing your energy and doing everything that you can to try to reach people who have zero spiritual interest or negative spiritual interest. I think, I mean, it's not that people don't need to hear, those people need to hear the gospel, but their hearts are hard. The seed's not going to take root and you're going to find yourself as a disciple maker, extraordinarily discouraged and frustrated because you're not You're not going to see fruit. It's kind of like the, it's Dave Ramsey's snowball method, right? Pay off the smallest debt you have first, because it gives you a sense that you can actually accomplish something. And I think when we focus on engaging with people who are showing spiritual interest, people who are asking those types of questions, and I think it's a growing demographic. I think it's a growing sector. Oh, yeah. In fact, the statistics are telling us that it's young men. It's a lot of Gen Z men in their, you know, twenties and early thirties who are showing more and more interest. And when we preach to them or we engage with them, I think we're more likely to see the fruit sooner, faster than we want. And then we mobilize those people to go and reach the people that they're connected with, right? Oh, completely. Because here's the thing, Bart. If you're a preacher and you're getting up to preach, And you know that in your congregation, you have folks who've been followers of Jesus for sixty years and others who may have been following Christ for the last six days. And anyone in between, it's the inevitable challenge of how do you preach Jesus? to such a varied audience and then in a context like Beulah where we are multi-generational and I have ninety-year-olds and eleven-year-olds in the pews and everyone in between of different ethnicities and generations and all of that It's the sense of how do you preach faithfully in your thirty five minutes or however long you have for the message. So in this previous dichotomy of we're a church to like in the angle scale, we focus on, you know, the negative or we focus on the zero to plus two is we're going to focus on the Christians and then or you're the non-Christian and you're focusing on the negative ten to negative one. It's so hard because you end up inevitably alienating one of the one of the crowds and And then there's a lot of systemic effects and results from that. Versus, what if you actually preach to the interested? Knowing that whether you're a non-Christian or a Christian, you're there because they're interested. So when you preach about Jesus, you're not trying to convince people why they should learn about Jesus. You're boldly proclaiming, hey, this is who Jesus is. This is how the spirit of God moves in our world. This is how life is transformed as we draw near to him and we know him and he knows us and we make him known and all of that, right? And it's actually, it is a slight shift, but it does make quite a difference in the way that you preach. Yeah. You were talking about sleepers a moment ago. And I just had this memory, this memory came back, there's nothing to do with the podcast. I was out on the East Coast a few years ago, and I was preaching in a small church that is going through a revitalization. And there was a lady that I noticed There weren't many people in the room, maybe twenty five or thirty people in the in the in the pews. And there was a lady that fell asleep and slept through my entire sermon. And she came up like literally a sleeper. And she came up to me after the sermon and she said, Pastor, that was the most peaceful sermon I've ever heard. You didn't hear any of it. I've not been called a peaceful preacher many times, but in that particular case, I guess I preached her to sleep. So I guess I have a gift. I don't know. That is hilarious. Let me kind of lean into something. I don't remember the specific quote in the book. I should have written it down so I could bring it out. But one of the things that you state in the book is that in church, and this is, if this is not an exact, this is not an exact quote. So fix me where I did it. Yeah, that's fair. You indicate that you look at churches oftentimes that have activities and they have events and they have stuff on their calendar or in their rhythm of ministry that's intended to disciple people. All of it is. Yet they don't have systems or processes designed for all those things to work together to bring a specific outcome for growing disciples. I'm probably generalizing. You can expound on that if you'd like, but I'd like for you to talk a little bit about why you think systems and processes are so important in discipleship in churches. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Love that. So there's this image I got printed in the book of gears. And if you remember from your childhood or someone else's or the nursery at your church, there's often these play sets on the wall where you have different sizes and styles of gears and the the benefit the goal is to basically connect them all and spin one and if you spin one all of them spin and it makes a really cool diagram the image i use that image in the book because there's a lot of things that churches do and if you would think about everything that a church does is like a gear right so what do you do when there's a brand new person what do you do when someone says i want to get baptized do you baptize them baptize them right away or do you put them in a one-year course before that um what do you do if someone is uh wants to wants to serve do they have to be a member first do they have to have been there six months first Or is it different for every ministry? Right. So you have all of these. These are all there are all these things that we do. And if you think of everything you do as being a gear, most churches have thought about, oh, I need that gear and I need this gear and I need that gear because we learn about it through podcasts or conferences or we hear, oh, that worked really well over there. So we better do that, too. The problem is going to that childhood analogy, all the gears are put together, different sizes, different shapes, because we've gotten them from different contexts, even our own context from our previous churches. And you try to spin one and they all, they don't spin, they actually conflict. and isn't that the case so much right where different ministry leads are actually frustrated not with you or the church they're actually frustrated with other ministry leads and they're fighting for stage time or they're fighting for bulletin space or they're fighting for this for the same or it's like you took my volunteer i was like well they wanted to come and and so what would it look like if we actually intentionally saw everything we did through three different systems of systems And that's where in the book I talk about first steps as a system, next steps as a system, and ongoing steps as a system. And I found over the years that that's probably the simplest way to help individuals dream and envision what next could be for their context. And if you were to come to Beulah and you were to ask someone, what are the ongoing steps here? People would have no idea what you're talking. I mean, staff would know what you're talking about, but people would have no, the congregation would have no idea because the point isn't the name. It's the idea, the concept, right? So in other words, when there's someone brand new, what are your systems for first steps for them? If they're new to your church or if they're new to Jesus or if they're new, right? They're just, what are those steps? What are those systems? And that's going to look different if you're a church of twenty versus two hundred and on one and onwards. And then what are your systems of next steps? And this analogy is in particularly helpful for our context because we have we probably around thirty five hundred to four thousand on a weekend across all our campuses and online. And and when I look at the sizes of each of our campuses, they're vastly different. So our largest campus is going to have a lot of next steps. And we talk about next steps as in it's these on ramps, right? On ramps to get on and off highways. And you're in Texas. Texas does it best, right? Those crazy on ramps and off ramps that are like so high. But it's so you're not stopping at a stoplight, right? So you're just keeping going on the freeway. So not the stop way, right? Like the freeway, just keep on going. And I love all that, but that's the piece where like, what would it look like if we, if we had really good on-ramps and off-ramps next steps for people to get onto the highway, which is the ongoing steps of a life following Christ, whether you've been a follower of Christ for eight years or eight months and, there are certain things that you always do and those, and that would be the ongoing steps. And yeah, so there's, I mean, there's, I could obviously talk about it more in the research and all that. That's one of the, yeah, that's one of the, it's one of the areas of the book that I've hijacked the most for, for years. I, I, I learned this from another ministry colleague, um, you know, Rick Warren, uh, kind of broke down things into similar framework, but your language is actually easier to remember. But he talked about first steps being kind of low vision, low commitment call to action, just so those things. And then you move from low vision, low commitment call to action to a high vision, high commitment call to action. And that moves people to maximum momentum. And so what we're trying to get out of people is we're trying to get maximum spiritual momentum, maximum spiritual growth. So when I think about your framework, And what I've been doing with churches is asking the question, OK, let's make a list of the ongoing steps. What are those things? Well, we want them in a small group. We want them serving in a ministry. We expect them to be supporting the ministry of the church financially. We want them attending weekend worship services. What are those steps? Then we reverse engineer what are the logical first steps and next steps to get people consistently plugged into those things. And, you know, you break it down in the book very, very well. And that's been super, super helpful for me. Oh, that's neat to hear. Just being able to put that in language and even create a visual for churches that we're working with or churches that I'm working with or even the church plant that I'm leading right now. I mean, we literally... Six weeks ago, we're sitting in my living room asking the question, what's our first step? What are our next steps? And what are our ongoing steps? How are we developing the kind of disciples that we believe we want to see in our church? What's a healthy, growing type of look like? And if we don't have an outcome planned for that, it makes it very difficult to figure out really how to get people connected and keep them engaged. So any more that you want to speak on to those, the first step, next step, ongoing steps? Oh. Yeah, for sure. So what's interesting is it's an interesting model where I've been trying to navigate the idealism of, hey, like... hike up your socks. Like if you're a disciple of Jesus, you need to be a disciple maker. Right. And this is the life it's like, stop, stop being a baby, start eating. You know, you, you kind of want to do that. Right. Uh, in, in the idealistic way, you've been a follower of Christ for, for years. Why are you drinking milk? Now, I don't say that from the pulpit or to people's faces, but there is that sense inside of us where like, come on, right? Like, come on. But the piece with the discipleship pathway is if you try to start a church or preach to your church and hit them over the head with that sort of message, no, that's not going to motivate anyone to move. They're actually going to be like shame and guilt have gotten a lot of bad rap, but God has actually wired our brains and our bodies to react to shame and guilt. And when they're used in a healthy way, they can actually direct us toward Christ and toward holy lives, not in a condemning way, right? But in a healthy way. So the interesting thing is the system, what the system does is it helps people understand Okay, yeah, you know what? Yeah, I am new. I would love to be seen. I mean, the biggest issue in our world today, in my view, in the West in particular, is while there might be a resurgence in spirituality, there's not a resurgence in horizontal connection and true transformation. And this is coming from my doctorate that I'm doing in spiritual formation and relational neuroscience. So much of lasting transformation comes horizontally. And yes, it's the Holy Spirit that does the work in our hearts, but he seems to use relationships uh the holy spirit seems to use relationships in a more frequent fashion to to to result in long-lasting character transformation in our lives more than the i've listened to a sermon i've worshiped and now i'm different um that often is a catalyst but what is the thing that's lasting and is going to cement that character change because there's a lot of people who are like i know i should be different but i can't be different my actions are faster than my thoughts. And that's because our right hemisphere functions faster and operates at faster cycles than our left hemisphere, which is our thinking side. And there's no way it's ever going to catch up. Anyways, I'm geeking out here, right? So part of the science around all of this is that the genius of the next steps is it is a form that people love. Because, yeah, I'll go to a four-week class, or I'll go to a one-day seminar, or I'll serve one time for Christmas Eve, or I'll do this. And these are actually the catalytic moments that get them into relationship, that get them into connection. that form the steps to get them on it's the on-ramps to get them onto the highway because it'd be so dangerous to get someone who's parked onto a highway going seventy miles an hour right you can't the on-ramp is so that you can speed up and go in the right at the at the right speed well that's that's how people are supposed to use it unlike that person who stops you're like don't stop what are you doing Yeah, so that's the idea where the next step. So whether if you're a church of twenty in a whole year, you may do two or three next steps because you just don't have time or capacity. If you're a church of two thousand, you may do twenty five next step opportunities. And the three categories are discovering Jesus or developing your relationship with Christ or deploying into ministry. Discover, deepen, or deploy. I'm a pastor, right? You got to alliterate. But that's the science behind that. Yeah, it's very interesting. I mean, I think back even to the seasons in my life where my own spiritual growth has happened most consequentially. It didn't happen in a church service. It didn't happen with me sitting on the couch reading my Bible in my living room. It happened in the context of life-on-life relationships. Yeah. with people who were a few steps further down the road in their spiritual journey than I was, and being willing to invest in me to help me get where I needed to go. And so the relational component of that is really huge. And one of the things we preach really loudly on this podcast and in our ministry is, is the team effort in all things that we do in ministry. Team-focused evangelism and outreach, team-focused ministry that helps our church function, operate, and helps people grow. And the team is important because relationships are what are so important, you know? If you think too, sports teams have unique relationships with each other because they tend to go through hard things together, right? They train together, they work together, they have a common goal, a common collective, a common enemy to defeat. And when they're working together, you see these bonds form relationally that transform their character and shape them into different people. And I think the church has a lot to learn from that when we put people into context where we say, hey, we have a common goal. We have a common objective. We have a common plan. And sometimes we go through hard things together. If you've ever been on a mission trip with people and you've been in like a third world country and you've been in a hard place. The relationships that you form in those environments tend to be some of the best relationships that you have because going through hard things together can really cement those bonds and it helps you all grow spiritually. So I don't know the science behind that, Daniel. I'm just saying that that's a casual observation I have from my own life. Oh, yeah. And you see that, right? And most Christians will use language like, oh, yeah, and that's why there are all the one and others in the scripture and how in the New Testament, the Greek, the you is actually more of the y'all. It's the plural, second person plural you way more often than the first person or the second person singular you. Right. right? I've been mocked for using the y'all version in the YouVersion app. Have you seen that? I've been mocked for it, but I'm like, I'm in Texas. So we say y'all anyway, whether it's in general or not. Yeah, we get that, right? So there's the sense where, but the neuroscience behind it is fascinating because here's just a quick tidbit. for the first three years of our lives our mother's right brains are communicating to our right brains so for the first three years of our life before we are proficient verbally we actually learn non-verbal communication way faster and that's and actually the right hemisphere of the brain processes information at a faster rate. And that's why, even though our world is very much driven by new information, new knowledge, new this, you know, new explanation of this sermon, or what does the Greek word actually mean? And there's this allure of knowledge and information. And part of it is our modern Western society has been built on this framework of But the fact is, how many people have gone out from a sermon with three points and their life has changed because they've memorized those three points? It doesn't happen that way. New information can be catalytic to our different patterns of behavior, but it doesn't actually lead to a new pattern of behavior and a character change. God, the Holy Spirit doesn't just pour a vial onto us and say, when you pray, let me be more patient. Here is patience. Right. How does patients work? Oh, we wish it worked that way, but it doesn't. But in reality, it's a lot of that's the left brain. We want it to have been left brain. But but on the right hemisphere side of things, what ends up happening is like if you want to know how to be patient, Bart, like this is how you be. OK, let's actually talk about gentleness because. I like talking about that more because that is a fruit of the spirit. And it's one of the characteristics that Jesus actually, one of the only characteristics he called and named about himself, right? I'm gentle and humble in heart. So how can we, and our society needs more Christians and non-Christians who are gentle, right? In our interactions with one another, conflict, all of that. so how can we actually be more gentle yeah we pray holy spirit would you fill me or father god would you transform me and fill me with your spirit fill me with a greater measure of gentleness yes hundred percent we need to start there but how it actually changes in our life how the holy spirit will bring about that change is first we will actually we actually need to think do i know someone in my life who is profoundly gentle And this is actually how it starts. Think, okay, do I know someone? And it's even better if you have a good and healthy relationship with them. So if they're a mom or a grandmother or a discipler or a pastor or someone that you personally know, it works a lot better. But yeah, think about it. And then as you meditate on the sense of, oh yeah, well, that person is, well, why is it that they're gentle? And then think about a particular situation. How is it that in that moment when someone cut them off, they didn't honk and lose their mind? What did they actually do in that moment? And you begin thinking through some of these situations. And then you say, yeah, Jesus, I pray that you would form gentleness in my heart. And then God, what does he, it's the joke, right? You know, you ask for patience and God's going to like put you in some other situation. And I mean, it's not, it's a joke, but the reality is we are going to be in situations where God will test our gentleness, right? And in those moments, we then have to actually examine and reflect. And that's why spiritual saints talked about the practice of the examine in other pieces. Because if we don't reflect upon our life, we're just going to keep on repeating itself over and over again. So then we look and it's like, oh yeah, Jesus. And we repent, Lord, I'm sorry that in that moment, I just lost my cool. I did not represent you when I was not being Christ-like. And you have that formative moment where you feel guilty. You actually probably feel a bit of shame that you didn't bring glory to the name of Jesus. And then you're like, Lord, so in the next moment, next time that I pray that you would prompt me, that you would shape me. And in and through actually this cycle and feedback of reflection, that's how the transformation begins coming about in our life. And it is exponential when we do it with someone else. Right. Cause there's that accountability and connection. Yeah. But that all comes down to right hemisphere, left hemisphere dynamics. Okay. Yeah. You're geeking out on that stuff. That's what you're studying right now. We're pretty much at the end of our time. So I'd love to kind of tie a bow on this and, I really am grateful that you took time out of what I'm sure is a very busy schedule here at the start of the new year to hang out with me and to talk about these things. I think it's been a great conversation. And I will, if it's been good to you, I will reconnect with you in the future to talk more about some of this stuff that you're studying in your doctorate because it does sound fascinating. Yeah, it is fun. And it sounds like you enjoy talking about it. So I'd love to talk about it more. I do want to say you mentioned your previous book, No Silver Bullets. Obviously, the primary purpose of this conversation today was to talk about the discipleship opportunity. But No Silver Bullets is also a very excellent book, kind of a good tandem. So for those of you who are listening to this podcast or watching our YouTube channel, if you're interested in kind of grabbing both copies of that, that'd be great. And you know what? If you're a pastor and you're listening to this and you can't afford a copy of it, send me an email and I'll get you a copy of it because I want you to be equipped to do the things that you need to do in ministry. And I think this is an area that is super, super helpful. Pastor Daniel, you are a pastor and you're not just a theorist, conference speaker, author. You're like living this stuff out in real life. Ordinarily, when I have guests on the show, I'm like, hey, let us know how our audience can reach out to you. But I'm not going to do that because, well, you've got your own church to pastor. But I will say this. You have a website, right? You have a website where you have all these resources and stuff. And is that, what's the URL for that? Yeah, it's my name, danielm.com. Daniel m.com. And you and your wife do a podcast together. Tell us a little bit about the podcast that you do. Yeah, man, we've been doing it since we lived in Nashville. So it's been a while now. And it's it's gone on a little bit of a pause the moment. Okay, but we have a hundred and ninety eight. Well, numbered hundred ninety eight, but we actually have two hundred plus episodes because we did many ones. In between. So my last name, I am so in between podcasts and this one on marriage and parenting. And yeah, she's this, my wife is a registered provisional psychologist and it's just, it's a lot of fun looking at marriage and parenting from a pastoral theological and also psychological neurological perspective. Yep. That's very interesting. And I appreciate that. For those of you who have made it all the way to the end of this podcast episode, we appreciate you doing that. If you haven't ever subscribed, wherever you listen to your favorite podcasts, make sure that you do that. We drop an episode on the first and the If you find yourself in Edmonton, Alberta on a weekend, go check out Beulah Alliance Church. I'm sure that you won't be disappointed. You have many campuses to choose from. And regardless of what part of the city you're in, I recommend that you go to Edmonton in June, July, August. Not January, February, or even March. You could still run into a snowy weekend on the Easter weekend in early April. So I recommend the summer. The summer is gorgeous. Yeah. Any parting words for our audience here before we wrap this up? Yeah, I dedicated this last book to pastors and churches everywhere because honestly, it's so easy to just give up. It's so easy to, and if you're not going to give up because you need the income to support your family, It's so easy to get into ruts and just phone it in. And my heart and my desire for you is that just like I pray every week, God, would you wake up the sleepers, the seekers, the consumers, and the disciples, right? And that's the quadrant in the book. I pray Ephesians over you, that if you feel like you're in a lull, I pray awake, oh sleeper, rise up from the dead and Christ will give you light. This mission and this calling that God has placed us on, you know, we're stewards of it. it's his mission, it's his kingdom. And man, to wake up every day with the intentional effort to be grateful to Jesus and say, thank you, Jesus, that I get to do this, will actually rewire your mind and your soul in the way that God designed it. This isn't new age hocus pocus or neurological this, that, or the other. God has actually wired And that's why Paul always talks about, I thank my God for you, right? How many times does he do that in the epistles? And was he really, truly always thankful for the Ephesians? I don't think so. But he's like, I thank my God for you. And there's a profound sense of gratitude. So my encouragement to you is, When you wake up, when you go to sleep, and just how can you increase your measure of gratitude for the life that God has given you, the calling he has placed on your heart, the breath that he has given your lungs, and allow the Spirit of God to just move and work freely in and through you for the glory of our God. Amen. Daniel, thank you so much for that encouragement. Thank you again for being a guest on the show. Again, the book is called The Discipleship Opportunity by Daniel M.
