State of Faith
State of Faith Debrief
Welcome to the Life Renovation Podcast.
We're your co-hosts, Glendie Loranger and Elizabeth Morrison.
And together, we're breaking down the walls that divide us through meaningful conversations around faith, family, and sexuality.
Good morning, Elizabeth.
Good morning, Glendie.
This is always so fun.
We tape in the morning, so you guys might be watching this at midnight.
But for us, it's bright and early.
We are just back from our Christmas break and just back from our last podcast in which we had a guest speaker.
Yeah, we had Pastor Nate Mead from North Church.
This episode, we're just going to be kind of debriefing some of that.
But if you haven't listened to that previous episode, The State of the Church, go back and listen to that.
So Glendie, what stood out to you in that?
What was kind of your biggest takeaway in what Nate said?
Well, I think first thing, it was fun to have one of our friends on.
Nate is a dear friend of mine.
And I think there were a couple of things first when he shared that he never saw himself as a pastor.
I hear so many people in ministry.
I talked to a lot of other executive directors of nonprofits who were like, I never saw myself doing this.
But just his obedience to saying yes to the Lord transforming his heart and then stepping into a lead pastor role at North Church.
Yeah, and he's done so well with that.
And like we said, it was during COVID, and it's only been in the last two or three years.
And so just stepping into that, I felt like he was very eloquent in the ways that he phrased things.
Like there's so many quotes, which I know we'll get to later in the episode, of things that he said that I'm like, oh, I got to write that down.
Right.
So just the way that he explains things, you can tell that he has that gift of preaching and teaching people the word.
So it was just so cool to have him here and hear his heart for his church, too.
Agreed.
I know there were a couple of really key things that stood out to me.
He talked about where the church is going.
We're going to get to the great de-churching.
He referenced that book that 40 million people have walked away from the church.
But one of my favorite quotes of his, he said, I want to be the kind of pastor who remains culturally relevant and pastorally sensitive.
Oh, my goodness.
That's the heart that you want to hear because we deal with really hard issues around sexuality, around abortion, around life choice and sexual trauma.
And I would say that's our heart for this podcast.
We're going to be talking about a lot of things.
Glendie kind of comes with that pastoral theological element, and I'm kind of bringing that.
Let's center it.
Let's apply it.
But we do want to be relevant.
We want to be truthful to the scriptures.
But we also want to meet you where you're at.
And the whole part of our podcast is meeting you right where you're at with some big things.
Can we just start with the whole de-churching thing?
Yeah.
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Revival, Faith, and Returning to God in a Dechurched Culture
So can you define that for us, Glendie?
Because that was a term I hadn't heard until we did the podcast with Nate.
So can you tell us what that means and what Nate had said about de-churching?
Yeah.
It comes from a book called The Great De-churching.
And in it, it was new research out.
The Great De-churching is one of the largest religious shifts in the United States ever.
There were several other religious shifts towards more revivals towards the church, especially like after the Civil War and a couple others called the Great Revivals.
But this shift is of people leaving the church and that the pandemic that we all just came through, right, this is it's 2024 right now, but the pandemic that we've come through in the last four years didn't actually cause this shift that it was more of a catalyst that people's identity, their Christian identity and their Christian values were really being put to the test.
So many people have walked away or left the church and then replaced it with other things in their life.
So Elizabeth, I don't know what you've heard, but I've heard so many people have reasons for why they haven't come back to church since the pandemic.
Yeah, I've heard a lot of people say we haven't gotten there yet.
I've fully returned in person to church.
That's the perspective I'm coming from.
But, you know, a lot of my friends have said we haven't gotten back into the rhythm or we really like the convenience of some churches have online churches that they have available and people say that they're going to listen online or just works better for families.
So there's a ton of reasons I've heard that people aren't fully as invested as they were pre-COVID, I guess I would say.
Yeah, and I think, you know, COVID really brought us into this isolation mode where we weren't meeting in groups for anything.
Yeah.
Right.
We didn't I mean, people couldn't have their weddings, they couldn't have memorials, funerals, that kind of thing.
There weren't conferences going on during the pandemic.
And so in some ways, we almost got out of that rhythm or that habit, or even the value of meeting together in groups.
And so I think there's a lot of mentality still that we have that, well, it's okay for me to just do church by myself on my couch or at my computer screen.
And I don't really need people.
And I love that Nate kind of pushed on that and said, wait a minute, we do need people.
He did.
Yeah.
And the other thing he did is just kind of share with us like the state of the church and why people are leaving.
He said that it's not just millennials, right?
It's any demographic.
It doesn't matter what age you were when COVID happened.
It's kind of happening across the board and that COVID wasn't necessarily the main thing that started it, but it's just kind of the catalyst, like the last straw.
Some of you might have had church wounds.
Some people, they already were thinking about leaving their church and then COVID gave them a great excuse, right?
But what we've seen is that people haven't returned.
Close to 40 million people have just stopped going to church.
And what we want to do today in this episode is we want to bring you back up.
It's not hopeless, that Jesus Focus is still the church and that we really have a call and Nate gave us that, a call and a charge to not just play church, but to be the church.
So in just a moment, we will talk about what that looks like.
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Welcome back to the Life Renovation Podcast, I'm here with Glendie and we're debriefing our previous podcast about the state of the church.
And so Glendie, before we broke, you had said that we were going to talk about that concept of being the church, first playing the church.
What does that actually look like in our lives?
Well, I know for me, let me start personal and then I'd love to talk a little bigger, almost a global scale.
For me, it means I don't check a box.
Playing church means I go and I just check off that box.
I sit through a sermon, I sing a worship song or whatever, and I pat myself on the back for the day.
I did good.
God, did you see me?
I did good.
Being in the church is different.
Being in the church means I'm there and my eyes are open to minister to that person sitting all by themselves, or I'm actually going to take the time to have that conversation with that really challenging person who always tracks me down on a Sunday.
Being in the church, I think goes beyond Sunday.
So I think we all have to determine what being in the church looks like.
I think that's what I would love to just inspire people towards, that playing church doesn't draw us closer to God.
Why Genuine Relationship With Jesus Matters More Than Simply Playing Church
Playing church is legalistic and often deceives us, right?
We can deceive ourselves into a lifestyle that is devoid of the joy that comes with the pain.
Yeah, just so dissatisfied, right?
You just walk away like, oh, another checkbox.
Yeah, yeah.
And I think Nate actually talked to that effect that people who come to church just playing church often don't walk away more hungry, hungry for more of Jesus, so we can really be the church.
I didn't want to be so disheartened by that 40 million walking away, you know, it was almost like a punch to the gut.
But I was reading a few different articles, and I came across this one by Lifeway Research encouraging trends in global Christianity.
And this isn't necessarily about playing and being the church, but Christianity as a whole is Christianity losing, right, in this great de-churching, and a couple of the stats here that this research gave was that the global population is increasing at a 1.18% rate, and the population of religious adherents has a 1.26% growth rate.
Now, religious adherents could be a number of different things, so it goes on to talk about Christianity, and Christianity is growing at a 1.18% rate, and it's also the largest religion in the world with an estimated 2.6 billion global adherents.
So, if you listening, if you consider yourself a Christian, you're part of the largest group of people who aspire to be more and more like Jesus.
Learning what that looks like for you, I think, is super important.
That's super encouraging, because I know you look around at the world, and you're thinking like, where is God, right?
But then when you have stats like that where it's saying, no, there's actually like Christianity is growing, whether it's in America, whether it's underground churches in China, right?
It can be anywhere, but overall Christianity is growing.
That just comforts my heart.
So encouraging, right?
Here's the hard part is we all know that it's going to get darker before Jesus returns.
And so nobody can guess when he returns, only God knows when Jesus will come back.
And so we can't guess that, but we can look around and we can celebrate what he's been doing.
Elizabeth, do you remember the Asbury revivals?
I think it was in February of 2020.
Yeah, our producers over here going, yeah, the revivals, that caught my attention.
And when I was thinking about, you know, this 40 million leaving, I thought, no, wait a minute, there is still a remnant and a remnant of Gen Z years, right?
Then this Generation Z who are hungry for more of Jesus.
So that Asbury revival started at Asbury University and it was just a worship service.
And it just didn't end.
It was only supposed to last an hour.
And all of a sudden, the people leading it looked around and people were kneeling and confessing their sins to each other and worshiping.
And it went on and on and on for days.
And I believe it then there was another revival that started at Samford University and then Lee University and then Azusa Pacific got involved.
I came across at Asbury, Asbury University, there was a new student body president, her name is Alison Perfader.
And she got up to address the entire crowd about revival.
And here's what she said, she said, when you seek revival, what you get is a performance.
But when you seek Christ and seek God's face, you find freedom.
Isn't that powerful?
It is.
And that kind of goes back to playing the church and being the church.
Because if you play the church, it's a performance, right?
You're just there for the check mark.
Or maybe you're there because you feel obligated because you've always gone or because your family goes.
But what you're saying is that it needs to be genuine.
It needs to be genuine and it really does start with us.
Yeah.
Revival is that place where we draw close to the Lord.
And I love that God's given us this example with these university students of what can happen when a group of people draw close to God.
Thanks for joining us today.
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And we're back with the Life Renovation Podcast.
Glendie, we were just talking about this concept of revival you brought up, Asbury.
Tell us more about that word revival, because it's not in a lot of people's vocabulary.
You said that didn't sit well with you, with your generation.
Yeah.
A lot of questions.
How Christian Community, Revival, and Personal Faith Help People Move From Isolation Into Spiritual Renewal
So it pulled up just what revival actually means.
And it's something that becomes popular or active or very important in people's lives again.
And so when we think about a revival, it's almost like a reawakening of that fervor that we have of that passion for Jesus, that passion to see other people come to know Him, other people find freedom in Him.
You know, I think about why you and I are even doing this podcast is that we have this passion to see people renovate this part of their life where maybe they've built walls all around a certain church wound or sexual trauma.
And they're living in these little tiny rooms kind of within themselves.
And we have this passion, this fervor to help people break down those walls, to do an internal life renovation and break down those walls through these conversations.
And so revival is kind of an awakening of something that I think draws them back to Jesus, draws them back to Jesus' purposes, draws them back to a work that Jesus wants to do even on a global scale.
Can I tell you a quick story?
So I love listening to podcasts when I work out.
And my most recent one was from Priscilla Shire.
She was giving a sermon in 2019.
And I've heard the story she told by several different pastors, but I love the way she told it.
And we're going to link that message in the show notes.
She talked about that in England back about in the 1940s, there was a professor or ORR.
And he was a professor of theology.
And he loved to get his students kind of outside of the classroom.
And so he would take them on regular field trips to historical sites in and around England.
And one of those times, they stopped at Epworth Rectory.
And that was actually the home of John Wesley.
Back in the early 1900s, he was one of the great reformers of the church.
And he prayed for revival to break out in England and then in America in the early 1900s.
And so many people came to know Jesus through John Wesley.
So Professor ORR is taking his students through John Wesley's actual home.
The Rectory was where he originally lived and studied and worked out of.
And so they walked all the way through this incredible home.
There were books still in the study.
You know, they went through where he ate, and then they went upstairs to his little bedroom.
And all the students were standing there.
And one of the students asked the professor and said, wait, what are those two patches on the floor?
And so they looked down and on the floor, there were two patches where the carpet had kind of been worn away.
And they were right by the bed.
And Professor ORR said, well, it's actually, it's said that John Wesley prayed so fervently.
He would get up first thing in the morning, so fervently for revival and so long, that he would kneel in this place by his bed, to the point that the carpet was worn in those two spots.
And so it was just this powerful moment for his students.
He loaded them all back on the bus, and as he was kind of counting heads, he realized he was missing one.
And so Professor ORR goes back into the rectory, and he's looking all around and goes back up to the bedroom, and he sees a student who's kneeling in that exact same spot.
And he comes up behind the student, and he places his hand on him, and he can hear the student praying out loud, do it again, Lord, do it again, and do it with me.
It's a professor, ORR places his hand on the student's shoulder and says, Billy, it's time to go.
And Billy Graham stood up and walked out with him.
Do it again, Lord, and do it with me.
I really think, Elizabeth, that revival has to start with us.
We can look to great pastors like Billy Graham.
We can look to great local pastors like Nate Mead and say, lead us in something amazing.
Start a revival in your church.
But it starts with us.
It has to start with us.
And so I share that story with you because that's our heart, is that you would say exactly what Billy said, do it again, Lord, but do it in me.
Glendie, that's such a powerful story.
And I think my heart is to bring us around because we've said all these big words, revival is kind of a bigger word.
It's not necessarily in my vocabulary.
I tend to think of like medieval, just kind of like maybe more violence than peace.
But I love how you said passion.
And I guess I would want to reframe that word to just a renewed passion for faith and a passion for our relationship with God.
And I think another point that you had showed me before we recorded this was just about the literacy of the world.
In our research, after looking at this podcast and knowing we were going to debrief it, you'd found a stat that the world has become more literate, right?
Because more people are beginning to learn how to read.
And so the Bible has actually been translated into different languages.
More people have access to the Bible.
And as we use these words like revival, renewal, right?
And we know that the world is looking at the Bible, and there's just more words out there.
I think I'd want to encourage all of us, maybe like a younger audience that knows how to text and shorten all their verbiage, that those big words like justification or sanctification or righteousness, that we don't have to be scared of them.
That just because they're not in our language doesn't mean that the Bible and that that passage isn't for us.
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It doesn't mean that the Bible is not relevant to us.
God wrote the Bible for us, and he wrote it in an original language, whether it was Hebrew or Greek, but he knew that it would be in 2024, read in 2024 for audiences that have different language.
And so I guess I would just encourage us to not be afraid of big words, and that if you do have a word like revival that might stick you and you're like, what the heck does that mean?
Look into it.
That's what Google's for, right?
Look at a dictionary.
There's so much in the Bible that we can look at, and I don't want the words to be what stops us.
I love that, because you're a wordsmith.
I am.
You hold a really high value for words, so I love that.
So Elizabeth, how would you want to bring us home?
That's a great question, Glendie.
I think the thing on my heart, and what Nate pulled out of his message last week, was talking about knowing someone.
He talked about if you don't know your wife, if you don't spend time with your wife or your friend or your parent or whoever in your life, you don't really know them.
And the more time you spend with someone, the more you get to know them.
And so we all might have an athlete or celebrity that we know the stats of, right?
But we don't actually know them as a person.
And I wonder how many of us have gone to church, have checked a box, and we know the stats of God, but we don't actually know him.
And what he's calling us to and what we've kind of talked about these last two podcasts are that he wants a relationship with us.
And to know God is to read the Bible.
Whatever translation, you know, as long as it's biblically accurate, that works for you, pick it, right?
There's so many out there.
You don't have to stick with a new King James in order for it to be holier than something else.
And so, I think my heart is that we get more comfortable reading the Bible, that it doesn't scare us anymore.
And I think my biggest heart for us is that we would grow in relationship.
And so, you know, we've kind of backed this train up a little bit to define what Nate had said, and he's a great eloquent pastor.
But if you are listening and you don't have a relationship with Jesus, now might be your time.
Maybe you're listening to this podcast, and this has become your church, because you don't feel comfortable in a church or you haven't found one or you haven't returned because of COVID or whatever reason.
I want to ask you to consider inviting Jesus either into your life for the first time or back into your life.
And when we do that, we're acknowledging that Jesus is the son of God, that he came and he died for our sins, because we are not good enough to get to heaven on our own.
And we're taking that sacrifice and we're saying, Jesus, I trust you.
It doesn't, my world doesn't make sense.
I don't know everything I need to know about you.
I'm a perfectionist.
I like to know everything before I do things.
But in trusting Jesus, I'm going to say, I'm going to learn more about you in this relationship with you.
But I'm going to decide today to trust you and to ask you to come into my life, to start becoming the driver of my car so that I can bow my will to yours and let you guide me.
In the Bible, they talk about the Holy Spirit and how only after Jesus left, did the Holy Spirit come so that we could have a counselor and a guide.
And that Holy Spirit is real.
I know you know that Glendie and Dee because we've all felt it.
But that Holy Spirit can answer some of those questions when we get stuck.
When we're talking about abortions and divorce and porn and these hard topics, that Holy Spirit is the thing that centers us and gives us those questions of maybe it was the abortion that is the reason why I have these anger issues.
Maybe it was this idolization of my husband and that's the reason the marriage failed.
Trust that Holy Spirit.
And so to end us today, I just want to guide us in a space where we can ask Jesus into our heart and realign our lives.
God, I ask you into my heart.
I ask that you become the leader of my life.
I trust you.
I know I don't know all the answers.
I know I still have so many questions, God.
But I trust that you are bigger than all of those.
And I trust that in you sending your son to die on the cross, that that was enough for me to be able to come to you and call you father.
Come to you and say that I know that I'm not good enough, but Jesus you are.
And so I accept that sacrifice on the cross, and I ask you to be my Lord and Savior into my life.
God, I'm sorry if I've walked away from you.
I'm sorry if I've ignored you.
Lord, I ask you to come and fill me again so that I can be used for you, so that I can have a revival or a passion renewed in my life, Lord.
I want to get out of this space of being stuck.
God, I look at the topics that are covered in this podcast, Lord, and I see spaces that I want to be healed, God.
And I ask you to come into those, not to be led by Glendie or Elizabeth, Lord, but to be led by you.
God, and so will you fill my heart?
Will you be the Lord of my life?
And will you show me how to get unstuck so I can have a renovation and become more like you in Jesus' name, Amen.
If you prayed that prayer with Elizabeth, if you weren't aware that it was a prayer, back this podcast up and go back and pray.
But if you prayed that for the first time, we just want to ask that you would share that with us, email us, get ahold of us and get into a church.
We're going to link in the show notes a few ways that you can do that.
Elizabeth also talked about we can know God by studying and reading His story, which is the Bible.
And so we also want to recommend the Bible app and we'll link that in the show notes as well.
But that's an online version where you can read the Word of God for yourself.
How powerful is this?
Elizabeth, thank you so much for leading us in that prayer and leading us into that, just that presence of the Holy Spirit.
We hope you were blessed by this podcast.
We will be back with another one next week called The State of Sexuality.
We'll have another guest and we hope that you'll be joining us.
So until then, see you, bye.
Bye.
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