Litchfield Church of the Nazarene Podcast

In some countries, taking a selfie is against the law. Too many people were walking into traffic while they did it.

David Graves opens a week of camp meeting with that, then asks everyone to take a different kind of picture.

The text is 2 Corinthians 3, where Paul reaches back to Moses coming down the mountain with his face still glowing, and then covering it up as the glow faded. Graves, a General Superintendent Emeritus in the Church of the Nazarene, works through what it means to come before God with nothing covered, and why the word Paul uses for what happens next is the same one we get metamorphosis from.

He also tells about being coached on exactly how to behave in front of the queen mother of a small African country, and what she did anyway.

Evening service, Thursday, August 13, 2026. A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

There is one book in the Bible that never mentions God. Not once. Gustavo Crocker picked that one to preach at an ordination service.

It's Esther, and he reads it as a story about the church. Esther is the church. Mordecai is the Spirit. And the word that reaches her, while she's safe inside the palace, is that being comfortable and being safe are not the same thing. Esther held no office and had no title. What she had was a position, and a moment.

Crocker, a General Superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene, also works through what happens to faith across three generations, why he says he can spot a first-generation believer in about ten seconds, and what a physical therapist in Switzerland told him about the church while working on his neck.

Preached to a room of pastors and lay delegates, and it doesn't let either off the hook.

A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

What happened in the heart of Billy Graham before he rented that first auditorium? What was going on inside Mother Teresa before she gave her life to the sickest and poorest people in India?

Those are the questions Steve Hoffman opens with. He's the District Superintendent for the Prairie Lakes District, which covers Minnesota and both Dakotas, and this is his annual report to the churches.

The numbers are in there. 919 people said yes to following Jesus across the district this year. 322 baptisms. Two new churches registered. But Steve spends most of his time on Moses, who at 80 years old told God to please send somebody else, and on a mentor named Keith Wright, who died this year, and whose advice about prayer was to get a little crazy about it.

Then he reads from a notice that a small group of people printed in Los Angeles in 1895.

A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

Excuses are like belly buttons. Everybody has one.

Moses had real reasons not to go back to Egypt. He was 80 years old. He was wanted for killing a man. He wasn't a good speaker. Every one of those was true.

God doesn't argue with any of it. He asks something else entirely: what is that in your hand?

Gustavo Crocker, a General Superintendent in the Church of the Nazarene, works through Exodus 4 and what a shepherd's staff actually was. Not something you bought. Something you carried for forty years, bent and scarred and repaired, with your whole life scratched into it.

Then he tells about a Labor Day Monday in Cincinnati in 1990, two used chairs, and a mile-long walk downhill.

A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

Missionaries usually bring pictures. Camilo Gonzalez left his at home.

He had planned to show the photos and the video, the way missionary speakers do. Then he sat with the theme of this year's district assembly, The Next Yes, and changed his mind about what he was supposed to bring.

What he brought instead was Isaiah 6, and a question about the four words everyone quotes from it. Here am I, send me. Camilo points out that something happens before that line, and that most of us skip straight past it. Isaiah sees God first. He sees himself second. Grace arrives third. Only then does the call come.

Camilo serves the USA/Canada Region as Nazarene Missions Teams Coordinator. He also tells what happened after he and his wife were approved as missionaries, and then waited.

A bonus episode from our 2026 Prairie Lakes District Assembly and Family Camp. Theme: The Next Yes, Becoming Christlike Disciples.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

Jesus talked about money more than he talked about heaven or hell. Half his parables are about it. Jon Stoe wants to know why.

The answer he lands on is uncomfortable: according to Jesus, the number one competitor for your heart is not the devil. It's your bank account. Jon works through Matthew 6, where Jesus says flatly that nobody can serve two masters, and Mark 12, where a widow drops in two coins worth almost nothing and Jesus tells his disciples she just outgave every wealthy person in the room. God measures a gift by what it cost, not what it came to.

Jon also tells about his first job out of college, a youth pastor position in Topeka, two small kids, not much money, and a car that broke down at exactly the wrong moment. And what a woman he had never met handed him a few days after that.

A standalone message on generosity, from Acts 20, Matthew 6, Mark 12, and 2 Corinthians 9.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

A hundred years ago this church did not exist. In 1898, the man who would eventually plant it was in a Litchfield city park, training young men to go fight in Cuba.

District Superintendent Steve Hoffman traces the line from J.G. Morrison, a Methodist pastor who prayed for fifty miles at a stretch in a Model T he called Molly, to the room he's standing in a century later. Thirty churches in four years across Minnesota and the Dakotas. One of them was here in Litchfield.

Then Steve names a second man instrumental in the founding of the church, and explains why he personally would not be here without him.

From our Centennial Celebration weekend, preaching from 2 Timothy 1.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

On a scale of one to ten, how thankful are you? And here's the harder follow-up: would the people who know you best give you the same number? Guest pastor Darlene Stratton opens with those two questions, then walks through seven documented benefits of gratitude. Better relationships. Better sleep. Fewer aches and pains. Less depression, less aggression, more resilience. Kids even get better grades. Then she mentions the detail she'd been holding back on purpose. Every one of those studies was secular. Nobody ran them because God asked them to.

From there Darlene takes the congregation to Exodus 15, the song Moses and Miriam sang on the far bank of the Red Sea after God did something for them that they could not do for themselves. They stopped everything and sang about it. Darlene admits she usually skims those songs in scripture, the same way she used to groan as a kid when a movie turned out to be a musical, and she wonders out loud whether skipping the thank you song has quietly become a pattern in her own prayer life. Ask, God answers, token glance, on to the next request. She tells stories about a circle of children who couldn't name a single thing they were thankful for, an ugly house in Oregon with a bathroom the family nicknamed after mission trips, and a daughter adopted out of a Haitian orphanage who once complained about having to peel her own carrots.

She ends with an assignment, not a summary. Write your own song of thanks in three verses: the people God has put in your life, the things he's provided, and the spiritual blessings you might have stopped noticing. Then she asks the question the whole message has been building toward. If your life right now is a song, is it a thank you, or is it a complaint?

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

Twenty years after the resurrection, the church had its first real fight, and it wasn't with Rome. It was with itself. Gentiles were coming to faith by the hundreds up in Antioch, and a group of believers back in Jerusalem sent missionaries north to inform them that Paul had left something out. If you want to be saved, they said, you have to keep the law of Moses. Jon Stoe calls it salvation by surgery. Paul called it worth fighting over, and both sides ended up in front of the apostles in Jerusalem to settle it.

In this message from Acts: To the Ends of the Earth, Lead Pastor Jon Stoe walks through Acts 15 and the council meeting that decided what Christianity was actually going to be. He traces why the religious leaders opposed Jesus so violently in the first place, what took Peter roughly fifteen years to finally understand, and why James ended the meeting with a sentence Jon says should still be the marching orders of the church: don't make it difficult for people who are turning to God. There's a hard line drawn here between the old covenant and the new one, and a case that the Jewish scriptures are the backstory rather than the main story. If you've ever felt like there was a list of requirements you had to meet before you could belong, this one lands close to home.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.

Two apostles. Two prison cells. Two prayers for a miracle. James got the sword. Peter walked out free in the middle of the night, chains on the ground, past sixteen soldiers, without anyone waking up. Same God. Same church praying. Completely different outcomes. In this message from Acts: To the Ends of the Earth, Lead Pastor Jon Stoe goes straight at one of the hardest questions in the Christian life: why does God do miracles for some people and not for others?

Jon doesn't flinch from the tension. He walks through Acts 11 and 12, where the early church loses Stephen and James to execution while Peter gets a jailbreak by angel, and he refuses to offer a formula, because Scripture doesn't offer one. There's no passcode. No bargain. No measure of faith that forces God's hand. What he finds instead is something more honest and ultimately more comforting: miracles are at God's discretion to accomplish God's purposes, and the people who saw the most miracles in history still faced unpredictability, loss, and unanswered prayers. Their faith held anyway, because it was anchored to what God had already done, not to what they hoped he might do next. If you're sitting in a season where you need God to do what only God can do, this one is for you.

Litchfield Church of the Nazarene is a welcoming, bilingual community of faith in Litchfield, MN, whose mission is to produce fruitful disciples of Jesus Christ. We gather every Sunday at 10:45 AM. New messages drop on the podcast each week. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite app. Learn more at litchfieldnaz.com.