Metro District Podcast

You were built with what Mike Plunket calls an "adoration apparatus" — you were made to worship. The only real question is what you'll worship. In this episode of Blueprint for Revival, Mike turns to Jesus' conversation with the Samaritan woman at the well (John 4) to answer three questions: what is worship, how do we worship, and what does worship require of us?

Mike shows that worship, at its root, is "worth-ship" — recognizing something's worth and responding to it, the way a new mother responds to her newborn without being taught how. He offers a simple diagnostic: what makes time disappear, what you worry about most, and where your money goes when things compete for it all reveal what you actually worship, whether or not it's what you'd say you worship.

The heart of the episode is Jesus' call to worship "in spirit and truth" — what Mike calls order and ardor, structure and fire held together. He closes with a question Jesus put to a woman who came to a well expecting judgment: what obstacles are we putting up, when God wants so much to give us Himself?

Blueprint for Revival is a weekly teaching series from Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.

Three thousand people baptized in one day. That's not a strategy — that's a visitation. In this episode of Blueprint for Revival, Mike Plunket sits with a question most of us skip when we read Acts 2: not "how do we admire this?" but "what would it look like if this happened to us?"

Mike shows that revival isn't better programs or getting the culture right — it's the Holy Spirit making Jesus real, not theoretical, to a people and through them to a watching world. Drawing on Tim Keller's "five vitamins" for a living church (teaching, koinonia, worship, evangelism, and social concern), he makes a sobering point: a church can have all five and still be dead without the Spirit's presence animating them together.

The episode lands on a single foundation underneath everything else — a righteousness not our own. Mike draws on Richard Lovelace's observation that most professing Christians, even with sound theology, quietly shift the weight of their acceptance with God onto their own performance instead of resting entirely on Christ's finished work.

Blueprint for Revival is a weekly teaching series from Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.

We read Acts 2 and think: I want that. Three thousand people saved in a day. A community so marked by love they sold what they had so no one would go without. But in this episode of Blueprint for Revival, Mike Plunket asks the question we usually skip past: how did it happen?

Mike traces a pattern that shows up throughout church history — crisis, desperate seeking after God, and only then, visitation. Applied to a crisis like racial injustice, he argues the church can't program, manage, or apologize its way to the "no longer Jew or Greek, slave or free" unity Scripture describes. The only well the Spirit fills is one kept clean of "rubbish" — the quiet, unconscious belief that we produce our own salvation through effort, record, or respectability.

Using the transformation of Saul into Paul, Mike shows how the gospel of "Jesus plus nothing" doesn't just change what someone believes — it dismantles both self-righteous contempt and fear at their shared root, because both are fed by the same lie: that we have to earn our worth.

Blueprint for Revival is a weekly teaching series from Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.

Why did God ask Israel to stack up twelve ordinary stones the moment they crossed the Jordan on dry ground? In this episode of Blueprint for Revival, Mike Plunket looks at Joshua 4 and a truth Scripture keeps circling back to: we forget. Give it one generation and the miraculous becomes a memory. Give it three, and it's gone.

Mike traces how this forgetfulness is really a symptom of something deeper — a heart that's drifted from its center in God — and how even our Bible reading can quietly become self-focused instead of an encounter with who God actually is. He points to the Northampton revival of 1735 and Martyn Lloyd-Jones's later warning that fear, control, and a discomfort with anything "messy" can talk us out of ever experiencing the Spirit's work at all.

Mike closes with a personal story from 2009 — a near-fatal bout of malaria in Uganda that became one of his own "twelve stones" — and a challenge: what is your Jordan, the place where God already parted the waters, that you've quietly let yourself forget?

Blueprint for Revival is a weekly teaching series from Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.

Every survey ever done on why people come back to a church after their first visit says the same thing: they felt loved. Not impressed. Not entertained. Loved. In this episode of Blueprint for Revival, Mike Plunket shows why that isn't a marketing strategy — it's part of God's blueprint, drawn up long before we got here.

Walking through Acts 2:42-47, Mike unpacks what real koinonia (fellowship) looks like: unity that isn't uniformity, gifts that fit together like stones cut and shaped at the quarry before ever reaching the temple, and a love that makes the first move toward repentance and forgiveness rather than waiting for the other person to go first.

The question isn't whether a church has fellowship — it's how deep people are willing to go with one another. This episode closes with a simple, personal question: who is God asking you to move toward this week?

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.

What's the one thing you can't live without? In this episode of Blueprint for Revival, Mike Plunket looks at the life of Isaac — a man who lost everything but his need for water — to ask what's truly essential in our own lives.

Drawing from Genesis 26 and Paul's declaration "for me to live is Christ," Mike unpacks why renewal doesn't usually come from finding something new, but from digging again into wells God's people have already found life in before: the gospel, prayer, dependence on the Holy Spirit, and genuine community. He traces this pattern from Isaac's wells to the outpouring at Pentecost, showing how God brings unity without erasing the beautiful diversity He created.

Every well runs the risk of getting clogged — not because the source dried up, but because fear, pride, or complacency filled it back in. This episode asks: which well does God want you to reopen?

Blueprint for Revival is a weekly teaching series from Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.

What if the confusion, division, and anxiety we see around us today isn't a surprise to God — but part of a pattern He's always worked within? In this opening episode of Blueprint for Revival, Mike Plunket unpacks three words that define our calling in this cultural moment: Resistance, Renewal, and Resilience.

Drawing from Ephesians 1 and the story of the desperate father in Mark 9, Mike explores why so many people today aren't simply indifferent to the gospel — they're spiritually resistant, having been "inoculated" by a watered-down version of Christianity that leaves them thinking they've already rejected the real thing. He makes the case that the answer isn't better programs or more effort, but a return to genuine dependence on God.

Mike closes with seven practical responses to prepare your own heart for renewal — from deepening your prayer life to watching for divine appointments — reminding us that God's blueprint for His Church hasn't changed, and He's still writing this story.

Blueprint for Revival is a weekly teaching series from Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance.

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.

In this episode of the Collective Leadership Podcast, Metro District Interim Superintendent Omar Niebles sits down with Reverend Brian McMillan — Lead Pastor of CenterPoint Church in Massapequa, NY, and Metro District Director of Church Planting — for a rich conversation about the future of church planting in the Metro District and beyond.

Brian shares the story of planting CenterPoint in 2002 with just 25 people, no money, and nothing but faith — and what that journey taught him about reaching the unchurched. He breaks down the three biggest obstacles church planters face today (finances, launch teams, and facilities), and casts a compelling vision for what it would look like for the Metro District to move from simply planting churches to becoming a church planting district — where Kingdom expansion is woven into the DNA of every congregation.

Whether you've never planted a church or you've been doing it for decades, this episode will challenge and inspire you to ask: How can my church play a part in something bigger?

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.

What does it look like to pursue kingdom justice and mercy in a deeply divided cultural moment? In this episode of the Collective Leadership Podcast, Interim District Superintendent Omar Niebles and Kingdom Justice and Mercy Coordinator Jasmine Young sit down with Rev. Phil Gilmore, lead pastor of Saint John's Community Baptist Church in Newark, NJ.

With over 25 years in pastoral ministry — serving the same neighborhood where he grew up — Phil shares how his church and city come together across differences to meet real needs, from food distribution to workforce development. The conversation dives into the challenges pastors face navigating divisive cultural and political conversations, the importance of maintaining a prophetic voice rooted in Scripture rather than partisan allegiance, and how the church can engage issues of poverty, immigration, and justice without losing its identity in Christ.

Phil also shares practical wisdom on having hard conversations with grace, encouraging believers to approach others with a posture of education over judgment — and challenges all of us to consider what it means to be "purple" in a red-and-blue world.

Whether you're a pastor wrestling with how to lead through division or a believer trying to stay rooted in the kingdom, this conversation will encourage and challenge you.

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.

Join Metro District Interim Superintendent Omar Niebles and special guests for an in-depth conversation about church production, technology, and ministry excellence.

In this episode:

• Nick Simpson (Metro District Communications Coordinator)
• Michael Hoddy (Lead Pastor, Long Hill Chapel & Founder of Somerset Media Group)
• Luis Sanchez (Sunday Experience Coordinator, Risen King)

What you'll learn: 🎥 The true value of production in church ministry - it's not just about Sunday mornings 💡 How to build and empower your tech team, even with limited resources 🎯 Why excellence in production is about serving people, not perfection 🔧 Practical tips for churches at every stage - from mobile setups to multi-camera systems 👥 The power of investing in young volunteers and seeing tech as discipleship

Key takeaways:

• Production is ministry, not just a technical function
• Start where you are with what you have - even smartphones can create powerful content
• Focus on people over equipment - invest in your team's growth
• Excellence means doing your best with what God has provided
• Young people (especially middle schoolers!) can become your greatest tech assets

Whether you're a church leader wondering how to improve your production quality, a volunteer looking to grow, or someone passionate about using technology for Kingdom impact, this episode provides both practical wisdom and spiritual insight.

Metro District Podcast is the voice of the Metro District, Christian and Missionary Alliance — resourcing and connecting churches across NY, NJ, and PA.

🌐 Learn more: https://metrocma.org
📧 Contact: [email protected]
📍 2 Denman Ave, Clark, NJ 07066

📷 Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/metro_cma/
📘 Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/metrodistrictcma

Subscribe so you don't miss an episode — and if this encouraged you, share it with someone who needs it.