Beyond Sunday Worship

Worship Podcast

#400: A Hopeful Alternative to Christian Nationalism And Deconstruction with Pastor Brian Zahnd

A question I have wrestled with is…what makes the CHURCH different in the midst of our modern culture? What makes our local churches different than what other organizations have to offer?

What happens when our local churches become oriented merely towards pragmatism?

That’s what I talk about with Pastor and Author Brian Zahnd. Brian is the pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, MO and is no stranger to the Beyond Sunday Podcast. He has a new book called Unseen Existences: Of Heaven, Earth, and the Divine Mystery in All Things.

This is a conversation about the church. About the Bible. About the sacraments. About wonder, mystery, awe, and what happens when we lose our sense of transcendence.

If you’re a pastor, a worship leader, a Christian artist, or a follower of Jesus…there is something here that will reorient you towards hope and beauty in an age of cynicism, nationalism, and deconstruction. There is another way.  

Topics Covered:

  • The alternative to Christian Nationalism and endless deconstruction
  • How evangelicalism forsook mystery and embraced empiricism
  • How the Christian Right and the Christian Left co-opt Christ for political ends
  • Good vs bad apologetics
  • A spiritual vs a literal reading of the text of Holy Scripture
  • The value of trying on different interpretive lenses when it comes to Scripture
  • Recapturing mystery

Resources Mentioned

Show Sponsor: Planning Center

This episode is brought to you by Planning Center, helping you sync all your ministry details across your whole church.

Planning Center has become so essential to how I manage a team, that it’s almost impossible to consider local church ministry without it anymore.

Today, I want to leave you with a PCO pro-tip.

Does this sound like a familiar situation? It’s the end of the week. You’re about to leave the office when you suddenly think: Did all of our volunteers confirm for Sunday? You scroll through the schedule and sure enough—there’s a gap.

Instead of allowing yourself to spiral into a  panic, try this:

In Services, Planning Center has gap alerts. Turn them on, and you’ll get a heads-up days before service if positions are still unfilled or unconfirmed. No more end of the week scrambling.

Speaking of less scrambling, did you know you can access everything you need for rehearsals right from the Service media player on your phone? Lyrics, chord charts, arrangement notes—it’s all right there, so you’re not hunting for files in the middle of hitting those power chords.

To see what else you can do to make your Sundays easier, go to planningcenter.com/blog.

#398: Christian Resilience, Women In Ministry, And The Attractiveness of Anglicanism With Tish Harrison Warren

I think so many of us are longing for a faith that meets us right where we are. A faith that we can practice in school car line. At work. On a hospital bed. During a pandemic. A faith that is not merely escapism or triumphalism but a real faith in Christ that works not for the benefits it gives us, but for the ways it opens us up to the mystery of God. A faith that leaves room for questions, doubts, and one in which we don’t have to perform to perfection.

That’s why I love the writing of Tish Harrison Warren. Listen to these book titles: Liturgy of the Ordinary. Prayer In The Night. And her most recent, What Grows in Wearly Lands: On Christian Resilience. Tish formerly wrote a weekly newsletter about faith for The New York Times. She serves as the C.S. Lewis Theological Write-in-residence at Truett Seminary’s Anglican Episcopal House of Studies. She is a senior fellow with the Trinity Forum and an assisting priest at Immanuel Anglican Church.

In this conversation we talk about Christian resilience, what we can learn from the first thousand years of church history, the writings of the Desert Fathers and Mothers, and Tish’s spiritual journey from the Southern Baptist Church to the PCA to now becoming a priest in the Anglican Church.

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#397: Why We Need Anabaptism And The Black Church with Rev. Dr. Drew G.I. Hart

Not all spiritual formation is created equal. Just because you read your Bible, pray, and go to church every Sunday does not mean you are being renewed – as Colossians 3:10 says – in the image and knowledge of your creator.

A very good litmus test for us as followers of Jesus is…do we look like Jesus? Do we love what Jesus loved? Do we love whom Jesus loved? Do we speak as Jesus spoke? Do we embody what Jesus lived and died for?

That has been the historical definition of a Christian for generations: little Christs. 

With the rise of Christian nationalism in our present day, many outside the church look at Christianity in America and wonder, what does it actually mean to be a Christian?

One of my favorite books in the last year was Making it Plain: Why We Need Anabaptism And The Black Church with Dr. Drew G.I. Hart. So I wanted to bring him on the show to talk about the history of anabaptism. The history of the black church. And what we can learn about following Jesus today.

Drew is an author, speaker, and professor of theology at Messiah University in Pennsylvania. With a decade of pastoral experience, Drew is a leading voice in Christian ethics, black theology, and anabaptism.

Topics Covered:

  • Drew’s upbringing in “Black evangelicalism”
  • The difference between “Black Evangelicalism” and “Black Liberation Theology”
  • The history of Anabaptism, its victories and vices
  • The multicultural reality of Anabaptism globally
  • The Christendom mindset and its influence today
  • The history of colonial conquest in America and the birth of the Black Church
  • How The Black Church balances out Anabaptism
  • What went wrong with Christopher Columbus and his spiritual formation
  • Why liberation theology is often resisted
  • The Black Lives Matter movement and why it is so often resisted

Resources Mentioned:

Show Sponsor: Planning Center

This episode is brought to you by Planning Center, helping you sync all your ministry details across your whole church.

Planning Center has become so essential to how I manage a team, that it’s almost impossible to consider local church ministry without it anymore.

Today, I want to leave you with a PCO pro-tip.

Does this sound like a familiar situation? It’s the end of the week. You’re about to leave the office when you suddenly think: Did all of our volunteers confirm for Sunday? You scroll through the schedule and sure enough—there’s a gap.

Instead of allowing yourself to spiral into a  panic, try this:

In Services, Planning Center has gap alerts. Turn them on, and you’ll get a heads-up days before service if positions are still unfilled or unconfirmed. No more end of the week scrambling.

Speaking of less scrambling, did you know you can access everything you need for rehearsals right from the Service media player on your phone? Lyrics, chord charts, arrangement notes—it’s all right there, so you’re not hunting for files in the middle of hitting those power chords.

To see what else you can do to make your Sundays easier, go to planningcenter.com/blog.

#396: Jesus And Therapy, Psychology And Theology With Kate Willsey

When I was a young teenager, I heard a traveling evangelist say the best form of therapy was speaking in tongues. The preacher at the time was criticizing modern therapy as unchristian and, ultimately unnecessary. We don’t need to sit in rooms and endless unpack our problems and our past trauma. What people need more than anything – he said – is the presence of God.

I understand the sentiment. I love the presence of God. I believe there is tremendous value in spiritual disciplines, practices, and experiences with God. But what happens to our formation as people when we are trained to be skeptical of therapy? How would our relationships be different, our marriages be different, our relationship with God be different if we learned to feel at home in the body God gave us? Where we didn’t feel the need to set aside our humanity for performative piety? What if therapy is a gift from God? 

I’m not a therapist or an expert on therapy. That’s why I’m talking to Kate Willsey. Kate is a therapist and coach who specializes in religious trauma. She unpacks the tensions inherent at the intersection of the nervous system, theology, and spiritual formation. I’ve been following Kate’s work on social media and have been so blessed by her work. And I thought you would as well.

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