Welcome back to the Messy Reformation.

My name's Jason Rice, and I'm the associate pastor at Bethel CRC and chaplain at Central Wisconsin Christian in Waupon, Wisconsin.

My co-host is Willie Kroenke.

He's a member at Pease CRC in Pease Minnesota.

We're just a couple of guys who love the Christian Reformed Church and want to see Reformation happen in our denomination.

But we realize that whenever Reformation happens, in the history of the church, things get messy.

And after the last couple of synods, and as we move into this rebuilding phase of the Reformation, things continue to be messy in the Christian Reformed Church.

So we're taking the opportunity to have conversations with pastors and leaders throughout the Christian Reformed Church to find out what's going on in our denomination, but also to talk about what Reformation and rebuilding might look like.

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With all that said, we're going to get to this week's episode, which is part two of our first ever roundtable discussion with Chris Gansky and Jared Mickelson on the nature of the church.

On the one hand, you have a kind of folk church, okay?

A folk church is a church that is just the church of the nation.

And you still hear this from a lot of Anglicans today.

You don't need to join the Anglican church in the Church of England.

If you get married, if you baptize your kids and never show up.

This is a church for the nations.

You don't need to be members in a formal sense.

Now, I'm uncomfortable with that.

That allows the church to kind of be the chaplain to the nation without having the kind of prophetic, distinctive voice which calls out the nation.

And we can talk about how that can go radically wrong, but even now, there's always a temptation to soften the church's witness in order to maintain that national pastoral role.

On the other hand, And what I think we're a lot more tempted to today is what, again, I'm using Anabaptists because I don't want to assume that Baptist churches are the same as this today.

There's a lot of diversity in different Baptist churches.

But that says there was an incredibly rigid distinction between the church and the world.

And historically, the Reformed tradition were actually somewhere in between that.

They were not just a folk church.

There was membership.

And yet there was, we might even say to put it somewhat provocatively, sometimes at least, a more flexible approach to membership.

And so I think calling people to this higher vision of what it means to be a Christian and how you fully live that out, but also having a porous community, having ways that people can enter into the community without fully embracing this way of life is potentially, again, a strange, a missional resource which reformed Christians have.

We're not totally set off against the world.

Again, neo-Calvinism was really good on this, like having a positive vision of the church as impacting the world beyond just what's happening on a Sunday.

Sometimes they would use the kind of distinction between the church as organism and as institution to get at that, and that distinction can be used well or poorly.

But it's making a really important point that the church is actually embedded within a society, that it's not totally separate, that we can't pretend that if, for example, if we're a church in whatever country, but let's say America or, you know, the United States or Canada, that we're not deeply impacted for good and for ill by our society.

We are not just a separate culture.

We are a outpost of the kingdom within this culture.

And so that duality that the reformed tradition gets, I think is really helpful for thinking missionally about how do we stand out from the culture, but also recognize that inevitably we're impacted by this culture?

And can we embrace that by having this kind of porous approach that allows people to be included in our communities before they fully get it, so to speak?

Yeah.

Amen.

Well, let's try to nail down a couple of things in particular.

You both have kind of hinted at the fact that you feel like, you know, reformed theology has some some real unique gifts and unique things we can offer the world right now.

If, if you were to have to define like what makes a reformed ecclesiology or the reformed church different, how would you define that in, in a brief statement?

I probably couldn't.

But one thing that we haven't touched on, I think we're circling around a lot of things right now.

So I think the heartbeat of reformational ecclesiology is rightly distinguishing and relating God's action and ours.

There's a worry that sometimes God's action is just collapsed into the activity of the church.

That whatever, if the priest does the ritual in the right way, God automatically acts.

Or that, and you know, there's more of a sense that God is free to act when and where he can.

And that we, yes, we participate with God, but also God acts directly and immediately by his spirit.

But another related aspect that is really central to Reformed ecclesiology is the distinction between the visible and the invisible church.

And I'm going to just set you up, Chris, to follow up on this, because you brought up the kind of apostolic descriptions of the church.

One holy Catholic apostolic, right, as in creedal, related to the creeds.

And I think this is a place where a reform kind of do have a distinct, at least a somewhat distinctive take, not totally distinctive amongst all Protestants.

But what do we say to someone that says, you're telling me the church is one?

Actually, you guys, reformed Christians can't even get along with one another.

You're telling me the church is holy?

It's riven by scandals.

It's, I mean, turn on the news and watch the, listen to the latest podcast.

How can you possibly believe this?

And part of the dynamism of a reformed approach to the church is to say, we are sinful.

The church is a visible, imperfect human quantity made up of sinners that are not fully redeemed.

And yet it is united with her head, who is Jesus Christ, and he is holy.

And in him, there is only one baptism.

There is only one church.

There is only one body.

And so we can live a lie, which is what sin always is.

We can live as if there's multiple churches, though there's not.

We can live in a way that doesn't represent the grace and love of Jesus well, that is self-seeking and that is divisive.

But that's not who our true being is our, our true, going back to ontology, our true being is in Christ.

So that duality that recognizes that when someone says, how can you be a Christian when the church is so wicked?

We can say, yeah, you're right.

Because the church, thank God the church is wicked.

Because if it wasn't, it wouldn't be a place for redeemed sinners.

It wouldn't be a place for you if it wasn't.

But we can also say this is not how it's meant to be and lay forth this theological vision of the invisible reality of the church in Christ.

Yeah.

Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly with everything that Jared said.

I would maybe just, to kind of continue answering the question that Jason asked, I think just understanding how, for Calvin in particular, but really the Reformed tradition that came after him is how important the doctrine of election was for the doctrine of the church.

So this is not how we approach election today.

We tend to take the doctrine of election and we put it under kind of the category of ordo salutis, right?

The sanctification of the individual person.

But really for Calvin, he moved election.

So, you know, there's the doctrine of election, and then there's the doctrine of the church.

And you see this even in the Heidelberg and how in the commentary section at least.

And so this forces us, one, then to think in more corporate terms about election.

And I'm not suggesting that the individual is in what door, how door to approach it is wrong at all.

They're complimentary.

But I think that sense of the way that election is like that, you know, God, you know, we have all this to put it personally or not.

or maybe in our context of the CRC, I just feel like for the past 10 or since I've been a part of the church, the CRC, there's just been so much hand-wringing around the church, around like, do we have a future?

The church is going to die.

You know, like just so much anxiety.

And I think this is broadly shared in denominations in the United States.

And so often it can be like, somehow the church depends upon us, right?

Going back to stuff we've already sort of said.

And I just remember I was preaching through Romans 9 through 11, and I was just really struck, especially in chapter 9, where it's like thinking about the church.

It's like, no, church exists not because we want it to exist.

The church exists because God wills it to exist.

And there's a kind of comfort, and you can kind of relax a little bit when you have that sense, you know what?

You know, as Jesus said, the gates of hell will not prevail, right?

And so I'm thinking about – and then historically, Heiko Obermann in his book The Two Reformations, where he compares the Lutheran and the Reformed Reformation, has this beautiful kind of section where he reflects on the function of the doctrine of election for the Reformed, especially for the refugees.

Because for them, the doctrine of election was a great comfort because you have so many of these refugees in France that are fleeing to Geneva and other places and to England because of the king and the queen are brutally killing them.

And there was a sense of comfort that they had knowing of God's sovereign control over the life of the church that not even the monarchy can snuff out the church.

And I just think that, you know, what would it mean for us today to kind of recover that same hope?

We think that somehow in a secular age or, you know, like somehow that how could the church ever exist?

And you have all these books.

I have a bunch of them on my shelf about how the church is dying and all these things.

I'm just like, you know, like there are regimes far more powerful and systematic and their hatred of the church that have tried to kill the church.

And I always love this quote from G.K.

Chesterton, where he says, you know, everybody's like the church is going to the dogs, you know, but it's the dogs who die.

And so I think of that, like, what would it mean for us to like recover election language in a more ecclesial way, not just in the kind of, you know, in terms of our individual salvation?

I think that's a great resource and something that we could, you know, learn a lot from.

I think it connects to, Jason, your question about, you said, how would you summarize simply a reformed vision of the church?

And the reason I didn't, and then I don't think Chris did either, is because part of the reason is this.

When your ecclesiology is going off the rails, it's usually because you have a really good grasp on one or two of the New Testament images for the church, and you've lost the elders.

And I completely agree with Chris.

I think we've lost election.

And because we're scared of election, because we think, oh, does this mean that our actions doesn't matter?

Does this means our will is impotent or something like that?

No, it doesn't mean that.

In an ecclesiological setting, my former supervisor, I looked at this quote while he was talking, because my former supervisor was John Webster, who I know Chris likes as well.

And he says this about election in a church context.

Election is the event of sheer creative gratuity, unassimilable and resistance to conversion into a social pattern.

Election is the church's permanent condition.

In other words, lots of other images we have, like we're being built up into a temple that allows us to think in this cooperative terms, which is absolutely right.

But in a pragmatic age, you have that image and it feeds into this idea that the fundamental center of gravity in the church's health and growth is with us.

rather than with God.

So I guess the question would be, what does it look like in practice?

What does it actually feel like on a Sunday or when you're doing discipleship or whatever it may be in the way you deal with church conflict, when a church has lost sight of this aspect of its identity, of the fact that it is always dependent upon and derived from Christ?

And I'll turn that over to you guys, but I think part of what it will look like is the bits of church which are centered upon us as recipients and God as giver will be sidelined.

It is not surprising that the sacraments are no longer as central in our community's life because this is meant to be a moment where we just receive.

You're not doing anything.

You're not accomplishing anything.

If there are practical implications, which I think they are, they are derivative from the fact that you are just in that moment receiving the gospel.

And by the way, you could say the same thing about worship.

One of the reasons that I think in a lot of very secular contexts like the UK and most of Western Europe, charismatic traditions are flourishing.

I don't want to be a prognosticator, but they do have this sense of the point of coming together is just to enjoy God.

And that's actually in a weird way, a deeply reformed intuition.

Yeah.

You have follow-up on that, Chris?

nothing in particular i mean i agree jared and i i we've had enough conversations we're not disagreeing with each other a lot on mission ecclesiology i yeah i i i uh amen to that yeah i mean i think recovering a sense of the god-centeredness of the church um that's that's key right i mean and i and that's one of the things that i i i guess i'll make this connection between uh reformed ecclesiology and piety and the charismatic tradition because i think this might be like again we might think of sacramental church and charismatic christianity is not going together but that's not true that's maybe another podcast uh but the sense i've always i mean i the the sense that the spirit you know this this um we'll call it spirit empowerment right like there's always a sense in the reformed tradition that that the lord is sovereign as spirit it's it's not a kind of mechanical like if you say the words if you preach the text in just this right way the spirit will automatically do its sense there's always a sense of the lordship of the spirit god's commands us to do certain things and we're going to do them but we can't control it but we do have this sense of charismatic outpouring right and it may be it and that is part of our theology that I think can connect with the best parts of the sort of charismatic traditions where they go into worship and they're just like, come Holy Spirit, pour yourself out upon us, give people an experience of God.

And so I think there's a lot of work for us to do in that, how we integrate like word centered worship that's rooted in the tradition, but that still has a powerful pneumatic dimension to it.

You know, again, another podcast for another time, But yeah, I agree.

I agree with that.

Yeah, we had a long conversation about this at the conference, because for one, I pointed out that Bavink centers all of Reformed Ecclesiology around the spirit.

The whole section is the spirit creates a new community.

And so we've kind of focused on the spirit's role in the midst of all of that.

But getting back to a point that you made, we had a really long conversation.

You mentioned how we give, God doesn't automatically work, but he has some freedom to work.

And Bavink made a distinction that kind of caused some confusion amongst a lot of the pastors where he said, Lutherans say the spirit works through the word, but the Reformed say the spirit works with the word.

And there was a lot of conversation about what, okay, what's the distinction there?

And I went back and studied it deeper, and it was Bavink saying, when you say the Spirit works through the Word, it's almost a mechanical thing.

And we want to give the Spirit freedom to come alongside the Word and work in people's hearts and minds.

And it was a distinction between Lutheran and Reformed, but I thought that was a really helpful conversation that we had in understanding some of the nuances of what we believe.

You know, one of the other things, trying to get it really practical, and this kind of brings the conversation full circle.

We talked at the beginning about the identifying marks of the church in the Reformation, preaching, sacraments, and then there was this debate over discipline, and that did become the mainstream view, but it wasn't initially.

What those were meant to do were to be the moments that signified the presence of the word.

They all went back to the word, right?

You have this kind of Augustinian idea that the sacraments are giving us the word in visible form and preaching is giving it an audible form.

And the reason they added discipline was because of this tension of, okay, but then there's this Anabaptist idea where nothing, this means nothing structural.

Again, it's becoming this kind of totally unrestrained reality.

It actually creates something real.

It creates a real community with boundaries and with something on it.

But I do think thinking in those terms should actually maybe challenge some of the ways we think about preaching.

What if we thought of preaching as more, within the Reformed tradition, you think there are two sacraments, but preaching is nonetheless, when you're thinking of it in this way, sacrament-like.

It is a sign through which God communicates a reality himself.

What if we thought of the role of preaching less as just communicating information and less as doing a public Bible study and more as giving people, is as the audible vehicle through which people encounter the grace of Jesus Christ through the medium of biblical teaching.

I actually think this, this, it kind of challenged the kind of what the reformed tradition is so often accused of being a kind of aridly intellectual tradition, but ultimately the word should, it shouldn't be a dry intellectual endeavor.

And that's the Puritans on their manual manuals and preaching were saying by the end of the sermon, there should be a showing of the Spirit through the way that Christ is presented.

Yeah, not to go into potentially controversial matters, but I was, you know, thinking about the virtual church conversation we had at Synod and connecting up to, I just want to piggyback on Jared's comment there about the sacrament-like character of preaching.

And I think, you know, I think of when I preach, I try to imagine that, you know, part of my goal is for people to have a sense that the Lord Jesus there is standing and he is addressing them.

And it is direct address.

And in my preaching, there are different moments in the sermon where the kerygma, the sort of proclamatory reality where, I mean, I'm not trying to presume Jesus, but I just, I want to speak directly to the soul.

Like, I want you to say, you know, Jesus is talking to you through the word.

Listen, right?

And that sense of direct address where no, like, it's not just information.

There's a sense in which, you know, this is John Webster, who both I love as well.

I mean, Webster is so good.

I mean, he has a sense, yeah, I forget which essay it is, where he talks about, he imagines John in the book of Revelation, and he hears the voice of one who opens his mouth, and it's like the waterfalls.

the water roaring and he's turning his neck right to to hear and there's that sense of of attestation as he uses the language of like pointing and so like there's this aspect of preaching that that sort of points to this one who's glorified who you come into his presence and all you can do is fall down right i mean that's sacramental like in in the sort of general sense um and i so to go back to the virtual church i mean we had this conversation where um like can you have a true church as a virtual church?

That's all virtual.

We're not talking about ministries.

We're talking about an all virtual church.

And it seemed like without question, oh, of course we can do preaching because, you know, you could podcast your sermon.

And I was like, well, you know, we podcast our sermons.

You can listen to them later, but there's something different about the being in the congregation, being in front of the preacher or sit in the embodied character of it and just that experience that is irreplaceable.

You know, I won't take a, I'm new to the denomination and I even think as a role as a seminary professor, I would want to just be, you know, supporting and advising and being a servant, not telling people what to do.

Far from it.

So without getting into the particular issues, I think the point Chris is making is spot on.

Why is it that, I don't know, maybe you three are just incredible preachers But why is it that each week we don't get up in our churches and just show a video of Tim Keller?

It would be way better than any sermon I've ever given.

Or why don't we just read a John Calvin sermon?

There's tons of them.

If we are thinking of church as primarily about, again, a corporate Bible study, we're not thinking of the Sunday worship service at all in the way in which not only the Reformed tradition, But Christians across the ages have thought about this.

We are meeting on Sunday because this is the day of the resurrection, because we are celebrating the renewal of all things, and we are receiving again corporately the promises of God through word and sacraments.

And so if you're learning things, good.

But this is decidedly derivative to the fresh encounter with the resurrected Lord that is what we're doing on a Sunday.

And so, yeah, to be approaching a question like, can you do virtual church?

First off, we need to be understanding, is a Sunday worship service just like any other meeting of Christians?

Is there a difference between gathering on the Lord's Day for word and sacrament?

Or is that, again, why even do this once a week on Sundays?

I'm sure you can get way better things on podcasts.

So I do think that has to be question one.

What is the theology of your corporate worship?

Yeah, amen.

Yeah, we'll leave it at that.

That's good.

That's really good.

Yeah, one of the questions I wanted to ask, and I'd be curious on your thoughts on this, Jared.

There's a lot of conversation.

I don't know if you hear this in Scotland.

Are you in Scotland?

That was what you said, right?

Yeah.

But there's a lot of conversation in the CRC right now saying we want to have a Reformed Catholic vision of the church.

And I hear a lot of different people using that phrase, and I think they're using it in very different ways.

And so a few people have asked for some clarity on how to understand that, or what would be your understanding?

Would you agree with that?

Do you think that's a good way to think about how we want to move forward in the Christian Reformed Church, to have this Reformed, small-c Catholic vision of the church?

And how would you describe that understanding of the church?

Yeah, great question.

So first off, like I said, I'm really excited to be a part of the CRC, and I really view my role in the seminary as being a servant.

And so not telling people what to do or how to operate, but to be under the authority of Synod and to be serving you guys and being in conversation and giving resources.

So with that said, I am a little bit familiar with some of these discussions, but all of us, if you are Reformed, you are a small C Catholic.

Otherwise, you're not Reformed.

The Apostles' Creed says we are one holy Catholic apostolic church.

You fundamentally misunderstand the Reformation if you think this wasn't an attempt to renew and restore the one church of God.

The Reformers are incredibly insistent upon this.

There's a famous quote from Philip Schaff, I'll probably butcher it, where he basically says, the reformers were trying to renew the old church by the Bible.

The Anabaptists were trying to start a new church with the Bible.

So it's actually subtle, but makes a huge difference, which you think you do.

So we don't, if we say, who's your favorite reform theologian?

It is absolutely accurate to say Thomas Aquinas.

This is, we don't, we don't give them those guys.

And we should be striving for unity with them.

Absolutely.

I benefit from contemporary Roman Catholic theologians all the time.

But to be reformed is to view yourself as one branch of the wider Catholic Church of Christ.

And so part of what I think when people—this is a very big movement in theology, in contemporary systematic reform theology, reform Catholicism.

And yeah, it's trying to realize that oftentimes our churches today are produced by a variety of influences.

We talked about revivalism.

We talked about historic Protestant churches, what we would call the mainline in North America, and through, you know, higher church traditions.

And so to me, being a Reformed Catholic is trying to be influenced by this breadth and to not have this kind of myopic focus, which says, if I'm Reformed, or let's say, you know, if I'm in the CRC, if I'm Dutch Reformed, that means the main people I draw from are Baving and Calvin.

No, I also draw from Bonaventure, and I also draw from Gregory of Nyssa.

Well, we're drawing from all those.

And relatedly, oftentimes, therefore, it's wanting to have a richer vision of church.

A vision of church, which is—so just take what we were just talking about, that Sunday morning is not just a mode of delivering education, Christian education, But nor is it just a kind of pump up meeting so then you can leave and go do the real work during the week.

It is a celebration of the world being made new in Christ.

Sometimes other higher church traditions did a better job of capturing that than we did.

And we don't need to be ashamed to be drawing on that.

So that to me is part of what it means to be Reformed Catholic.

One, it just means to be truly Reformed.

But two, it means to have this broader vision where you're drawing on these different parts of the church.

uh yeah yeah and chris we'd love to hear your your thoughts on that as well you uh you i think you said on the podcast that you were hoping we would have a reformed catholic vision and um i got a bunch of feedback people what does he mean by that lots of people keep saying that and they're using it in different ways so when you say we should have a reformed catholic vision what what do you think that means?

Well, one, I, I wanted to give a plug to Eric Dirksen, who's, um, out in, in Davis, California, his church, Christ church.

And he's doing a little, I think it's funded through the Institute of Christian worship, but they have a little cohort and, um, that's kind of reflecting on this for a year.

And Eric's a great resource, a good friend.

Um, but let me, um, he, I was telling him, I was like, you guys should have him and I on to talk about this more because he's thought a lot about it.

But I was thinking about this question, and I wasn't able to hear all of what Jared's response was, but maybe I'll start by asking, you know, what is Catholicity, a Reformed Catholic, in contrast to?

And sometimes it's easier to get into.

And so I had, I just wrote down, this is not exhaustive, but four things I would say it's in contrast to.

One, it's in contrast to Biblicism.

In other words, an approach to the Bible that's, you know, kind of just the Bible.

It's an understanding of an approach to scripture that's set within the tradition broadly, right?

Confessions, creeds.

Two, it's an opposition to a sectarian spirit.

So here, I think there's a moral dimension to Catholicity.

This is what I was talking about on the podcast a month ago, and I think this is Ephesians 4 in particular, that the Catholic the moral Catholic instinct is one that strives towards oneness and unity which is given in Jesus Christ that does not want to break the union of one hope one faith one baptism one Lord and Savior of all right the third one I would say about Catholicity is it's in contrast to its fragmentation we live in a world that is fragmented and broken and disjointed.

And this is where Bavink really, I mean, his understanding of Catholicity is one that seeks for a holism and integralism, that the gospel makes whole.

It's like grace restoring nature.

It's like bringing all things that have been broken apart because of sin back together again.

And I think there's an attractive, there's like the Catholic vision is one of wholeness that the gospel brings to people's lives.

And then finally, it would just be that I think catholicity is in contrast to archaeology and and local which is endemic to i think the crc as a denomination and by that i mean that there's a sense in which my conversations sometimes with people in the denomination who have only had the grand rapids experience or the christian school experience it's like um i'm really they think that they're the center of the reformed universe as if you know and i'm just always struck i'm like wow you guys i mean there's just there's not a sense of the breadth of the reformed tradition in this diversity but also as it's set within this broader historic kind of christian context and so those would be some aspects of of catholicity and i and i would just you know again i know people the language of catholicity is a triggering word because of people's association with, say, Roman Catholicism or also, you know, I think they don't, but it's in all the confessions, right?

It's in the Haudenberg.

It's in the Belgic.

Calvin speaks on, you know, like, it is a thoroughly Reformation, you know, embraced word, and I think it's an important one to kind of recover.

Amen.

Yeah.

Thanks.

That's really helpful.

We're coming to the end of our recording and we usually give everybody, we've barely scratched the surface.

We could probably go for another hour, but I don't want to take too much of your time, but we always give our guests kind of a final word at the end.

And so I'll give each of you an opportunity to kind of give a final word for our listeners on this topic of the church.

And we have just so you kind of get an understanding of who listens.

we initially were thinking only pastors were going to listen.

And now we have this wide range of anywhere from even middle schoolers up to, up to retired saints.

And so I'm a whole host of people from the Christian reform church and beyond listen to this podcast.

And so what would be some final words you would want to leave them with regarding the church?

I'll let, I'll let you pick which one of you wants to jump in first.

Shall I give you the last word, Chris?

So you want me to go first?

Yeah.

Well, only because I don't know what to say.

So you go first, please.

Okay.

I feel like we've talked about a lot of high theology here, but I've often said in my own ministry that the most controversial line of the creed when we reside is, I believe in one holy.

That's way more controversial today than believing in God.

Even believing in potentially in Jesus Christ, not because people do, but just because it doesn't feel as immediately just strange.

And I remember one story I love to just like reflect on in that regard.

Frances Young is a kind of very well-known British patristic scholar, and she has a son with a severe disability named Arthur.

And Arthur was in the, the crash, the, the, like, what do you call that in America?

The, like, uh, play daycare, you know, like where the babies are all the way up to when he was like 10 or 12.

And the minister of the church came to her and said, Arthur needs to leave because all of the other mothers in the church are getting afraid.

And he just, we, this isn't going to work anymore.

And she said, she left the church just feeling like Jesus, the church has turned their back on me.

And my child.

And she said in that moment, she thought about chucking her entire career as a patristic scholar.

And while they were walking home, this Catholic priest happened to be walking by and came up and for some reason had a conversation with Arthur.

And she, a Protestant, said, I met God on that road.

And to me, that captures the duality of the church perfectly.

On the one hand, the church can break your heart and it isn't perfect and it will hurt us even when we're operating with the best of intentions.

I don't think that pastor that had said Arthur needed to move on meant to do anything wrong.

And yet, in the face of that imperfect church, let's say we don't think that Catholic priest gets everyone right, God is still meeting people.

Jesus Christ didn't say to Saul on the road to Damascus, why are you persecuting the people I like very much?

He said, why are you persecuting me?

There is such a union between Christ and his church that God is actually at work through our broken, fallible, imperfect lives.

So I would just want to end kind of with a rousing call to people to say, yeah, the church can break your heart.

It can hurt.

It's not perfect.

And yet it is the place in which people are still meeting Jesus in our world today.

Yeah, that's so good.

I guess I will just end with, again, I don't have anything we've said so much and there's a lot more to be said, but I want to just encourage pastors who are pastoring churches to kind of step back and appreciate how central you are.

One of my good friends, Mike Winovsky, who's now retired, but does interim ministry.

I remember him encouraging me in a season when I just everything in me wanted to leave the ministry just because of conflict and tragedy.

And, you know, it was just really, really hard.

And the Lord kept me in place.

But Mike was like, you know, there is no more strategic position in the kingdom of God than pastoring the church and that you're just on the front line.

And it's where the rubber meets the road.

And it's like the story that Jared just shared.

I mean, I just, too many to think of, of just all these ways that God uses his church and surprising and unique ways to touch and shape people.

And to be there is the most taxing, hard, but life-giving thing.

I always think of Graham Greene's novel, The Power and the Glory.

And he, you know, have this whiskey priest who's an absolute mess.

And yet he's always in this strategic place where he's doing God's work, even as, you know, and in many ways a terrible priest.

And yet God uses them.

And I always think of what ministry is like, is like sort of like if God is like the power line above and you're like a transformer and then you're like holding on and you're just like this in between.

And God's working through you.

And it's really, really hard at times.

And yet the call is so important.

I mean, I think it's one of the great, great gifts and privileges of my life to be able to be a pastor.

A simple parish pastor is how I think of myself.

And I just want to encourage people to pray for their pastors.

Be inspired to be a pastor.

Continue in that work of pastoring, understanding how critical and how important it is.

And so, yeah, that would be the last word I would say.

that's all we have for this week if you want to help us out and support the messy reformation another thing you can do is sign up for our newsletter through sub stack that way you'll get episodes and summaries sent directly into your email inbox it also gives us the ability to communicate with our audience which is one of the biggest struggles of a podcast so head over to the messy reformation on sub stack and sign up for our newsletter but until then don't forget this is christ church and he bought it with his blood.

And we've been warned that wolves will come in trying to destroy the flock.

So keep a close watch on your life and on your doctrine.

Preach the word in season and out of season, and keep fighting the good fight in this messy reformation.