All Saints Center Podcast

In this conversation, Brock Bingaman and Connie Willems dive into some basics of the kingdom of God:

·      How are we to understand it?

·      Why are some Christians focused on it while for others it’s not part of their thoughts or vocabulary?

·      What do we mean when we pray, as Jesus taught us, “Your kingdom come . . .”?

·      How does the “dynamic rule and reign of Christ” interplay with what we might think of as “ordinary Christian life”?

Find out more about the resources, authors, or ideas in this episode:

• Morphew, Derek, Breakthrough: Discovering the Kingdom, Cape Town: Vineyard International Publishing, 1991  

• Ladd, George Eldon, Gospel of the Kingdom Eerdmans, 1959

Some of the links mentioned are “affiliate links,” meaning that All Saints will receive a small commission if you purchase an item through the link.

There is something in the air recently at our church and others, regarding mentoring and discipleship. In this All Saints conversation, Brock Bingaman talks with Roc Bottomly, who has a lifetime’s worth of experience in the value of mentoring.

Mentoring doesn’t have to be complex or difficult or intimidating. Lots of people have reservoirs of wisdom to share with others – wisdom gained through doing life with God, over time. You don’t have to be perfect or have had no struggles to be a good mentor. In fact, just the opposite: broken people who have walked through hard times make good mentors.

How do you get started? We’ll give some practical help for

• How to start a mentoring relationship

• What to talk about during meetings

• How often — and for how long— to meet

The process isn’t complicated, and the results can be life-changing—and life-bringing.

In this podcast, Brock Bingaman and Connie Willems explore some of the core elements of leadership, as Brock describes how he first encountered a series of leadership groups that changed an entire church. We’ll touch on the essence of leadership: empowering others — and we’ll talk about the value of humility, human limits, listening, and vulnerability.

All Saints is moving into our course on Christian History, so we wanted to highlight a key mentor from the past: Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). In 1577 Teresa began writing a book that her mentor had asked her to undertake. It became The Interior Castle, a model of how a person’s interior life with God can move into ever deepening communion with him. In it, she describes the soul as a castle in which there are many different dwelling places with God. For us, as for Teresa, this deepening communion with is the source of fruitful work for him. It results in deeply practical service and love for others.

When you open your Bible, we’d love to have you ask, “I wonder if there’s more than I’ve been getting from my normal reading.” Because there always is. In this podcast, Brock and Connie talk about some of the discoveries and questions that have been arising from the Biblical Studies course. The first is about application.

 What about Application?

A typical approach we often use in Bible study is that we move through the steps of observation, interpretation, and application. Yet we’re halfway through the Biblical Studies course and haven’t been focusing on application. Even so, God is applying Scripture to our lives. In fact, there’s not a better applier of Scripture than Christ himself.

 Exegesis or Encounter?

Another question we’ve raised is whether we’re going to take the evangelical, exegetical approach to Scripture or whether we’ll look at Scripture as something that provides encounter with God. The answer is . . . both. They are not mutually exclusive. That’s why some students are reading both How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth and also reading about Scripture from an Eastern Orthodox perspective. That perspective talks about the intent of Scripture as being to “mediate a transformative experience with the Holy Trinity.”  

“…the Philokalia underscores the intent of Scripture: to mediate a transformative experience with the Holy Trinity. As we saw in Maximos, reading Scripture is meant to bring one into the presence of Christ. The written word, Maximos says, is intended to draw the believer into an encounter with the living Word.”

—Brock Bingaman, in What Is the Bible?

Find out more about the resources, authors, or ideas in this episode:

• Gordon D. Fee and Douglas Stuart, How to Read the Bible for All Its Worth, Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2003.

• “Scripture as Divine Mystery: The Bible in the Philokalia” by Brock Bingaman, in Matthew Baker and Mark Mourachian, eds., What Is the Bible? Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016.

Some of the links mentioned are “affiliate links,” meaning that All Saints will receive a small commission if you purchase an item through the link.

Sometimes we take the ancient view when we look at God's work in history. And sometimes we look at the Holy Spirit's activity in more recent events. In the 1970s in the U.S., God intervened to reach and rescue a generation. Today, we call them the Jesus People. Our guest for this podcast, John Ruttkay, saw many of the events firsthand . . . and is still seeing God move today.

Some of the links mentioned are “affiliate links,” meaning that All Saints will receive a small commission if you purchase an item through the link.

The lens through which we approach scripture affects how we see it, and how we relate with God as a result. As we began our Biblical Studies course in All Saints, it was important to us to talk about what our approach to scripture would be. Otherwise, it would be easy to see the Bible simply as a book we were studying. We want to approach it through a hermeneutic, an interpretive lens, rooted in love.

The early church father, Augustine of Hippo (354-430) summed up this approach well. He said that love was “the fulfillment and the end of the law and all the divine Scriptures.” Because of this,

“If it seems to you that you have understood the divine Scriptures or any part of them, in such a way that by this understanding you do not build up this twin love of God and neighbor, then you have not yet understood them” (Teaching Christianity, [Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 1996], p. 124).

Some of the links mentioned are “affiliate links,” meaning that All Saints will receive a small commission if you purchase an item through the link.

In this All Saints podcast, Connie and Brock talk with Brad Kilman, the worship pastor at Our Lord’s Community Church. Brad has been leading worship for more than 20 years, ever since he encountered God as a teenager. In the conversation together, we explore the risk and mystery of worship — and talk about what Brad would say to a roomful of young worship leaders.
    As we engage with worship, we are — like King David, worshiping for an audience of one: God Himself. In 2 Samuel 6, we read that “David and all the house of Israel were dancing before the Lord with all their might, with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals. . . .”
    Often, there is risk in this expressive level of worship. When David’s wife Michal saw him, she felt contempt for him. But he replied to her that he was worshiping for God. And then David declared: “I will celebrate before the LORD. I will become even more undignified than this . . .” (2 Samuel 6:5, 21-22).
    There can also be mystery in this expression of worship. When we draw near to God to praise Him, there are times He draws near to us as well, and we feel and sense His presence in a way our words can’t quite describe. This is the mystery of worship; God may do something amazing in our presence. Or He may not. We don’t know until we show up to worship Him, and we continue to worship whether He does or not.
    The conversation closes with the ground-level question: “Brad, if you had a room full of young worship leaders, what would you tell them?” Over the years, Brad has mentored many worship leaders, and his remarks are full of his practical wisdom to them.

Along with being a worship leader, Brad Kilman is a songwriter. You can find Brad's music by searching on iTunes or Spotify.

• "We Are Hungry"
• "You Reign on High"
• "Clouds Are Forming"

Some of the links mentioned are “affiliate links,” meaning that All Saints will receive a small commission if you purchase an item through the link.

In this podcast, we continue our conversation about the prophetic. In our previous conversation, we saw that God’s communication is central to life with Him. But what is the actual process of hearing Him like? We’ll discuss what we can do to prepare ourselves to hear God and what it’s like to hear Him — and also how we can discern.

At the core of the prophetic is relationship with God. No matter whether we’re preparing, listening, or discerning, we’re relating to the One who is speaking.

In this podcast, we talk about the spiritual gift of prophecy — the kind described in 1 Corinthians 14
where Christians “speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation” (verse 3). Wayne Grudem defined prophecy this way: “Telling something that God has spontaneously brought to mind.”
    Prophecy is based on who God is: One who speaks and communicates, whose written word begins and ends with His speech. In Genesis 1, He speaks and creates, He speaks throughout the Old Testament, and into the New Testament  . . .  and then the book of Revelation ends with the Holy Spirit speaking.
    Because prophecy is based on who God is, pursuing it starts not with the gift itself, but with relationship and communion with God. First and foremost, this is a call for us to cultivate friendship with God, to relate and listen to Him, and to saturate ourselves with His words in Scripture. It’s an invitation to spend time in the presence of the Word Himself , Christ the Son (John 1:1), who is revealing things to us and through us.

Although several definitions have been given for the gift of prophecy, a fresh examination of the New Testament teaching on this gift shows that it should be defined not as “predicting the future,” nor as “proclaiming a word from the Lord,” nor as “powerful preaching”—but rather as “telling something that God has spontaneously brought to mind.”
—Wayne Grudem, Systematic Theology: An Introduction to Biblical Doctrine (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1994), p. 1049.

Some of the links mentioned are “affiliate links,” meaning that All Saints will receive a small commission if you purchase an item through the link.