Re-integrate

What does it take for Christians to pursue "shalom" in every corner of society? How can churches be a blessing to their communities in practical ways to actually make life better for those who live there?

Our guest is Dr. Amy Sherman, the author of several books, manuals, and over 80 articles and essays. Her last book, Kingdom Calling: Vocational Stewardship for the Common Good from InterVarsity Press, won Christianity Today’s 2013 Book of the Year in the Christian Living category.

She has just submitted the manuscript to InterVarsity Press for her next book, which will be titled, Agents of Flourishing: Pursuing Shalom in Every Corner of Society. We discuss how churches can make positive impacts in six areas:

Amy earned her BA in Political Science at Messiah College and her M.A. and Ph.D. in international economic development from the University of Virginia. She volunteers as a Senior Fellow with the International Justice Mission and is a longtime member of Trinity Presbyterian Church in Charlottesville, VA.

Thanks for listening!

Your hosts are Brendan Romigh and Dr. Bob Robinson, the Executive Director of Reintegrate.

Go to re-integrate.org for the latest articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission and online resources for further learning.

There is a Bible study book that you can use in your small group or individual devotions: Reintegrate Your Vocation with God's Mission by Bob Robinson.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find more episodes and ways to email us to comment on this podcast.

How do we actually reintegrate our faith with our work? Not just theologically or theoretically, but actually work in a way that is impacted by our faith? Is there no practical connection between Sunday worship and Monday work?

Our guest is Dr. Matthew Kaemingk. His latest book, co-authored with Calvin Seminary professor Cory Willson, is Work and Worship: Reconnecting Our Labor and Liturgy (Baker Academic).

Matthew tells us that faith and work are best reintegrated through gathered worship. Sunday worship that is “vocationally conversant” purposefully invites Christians to bring our work frustrations, failures, praises, and prayer requests into the church gathering where we can engage God with our real lives. In turn, the rituals of Sunday worship should be done in order to strengthen our spiritual muscles so that we can do good work for God’s glory. Sunday worship is meant to gather us in order to disperse us, called to serve others in our work and proclaiming the good news of Jesus Christ.

Matthew Kaemingk serves as associate dean and assistant professor of Christian Ethics at the Texas campus of Fuller Theological Seminary. Matthew earned his Master of Divinity from Princeton Theological Seminary and holds doctoral degrees in Christian Ethics from Fuller Theological Seminary and Systematic Theology from the Free University of Amsterdam. He, his wife Heather, and their three sons live in Houston, Texas.

Thanks for listening!

Your hosts are Brendan Romigh and Dr. Bob Robinson, the Executive Director of Reintegrate.

Go to re-integrate.org for the latest articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission and online resources for further learning.

There is a Bible study book that you can use in your small group or individual devotions: Reintegrate Your Vocation with God's Mission by Bob Robinson.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find more episodes and ways to email us to comment on this podcast.

What does it look like to be a Christian at work? How can we be healthy and whole people who are better able to contribute? What is our mission in the workplace? How can we be agents of justice in and through our work?

Our guest on this episode of the Reintegrate Podcast is Lisa Slayton. Lisa is the founder of Tamim Partners where she comes alongside leaders and their teams to grow in wholeness and cohesion as they seek to serve their organizations for the common good and for the flourishing of their city and the world.

She is also the Director of CityGate, a new initiative of the Denver Institute for Faith and Work, which is creating a community of workers, leaders, thinkers, and makers committed to both personal transformation and bringing healing change to their cities through holistic expressions of the gospel.

Lisa lives in the Pittsburgh metro area. She has been married to Roger for nearly four decades, has one adult child and two Labradors.

Bible Passages:

"Jesus Christ...gave himself for us to redeem us from all lawlessness and to purify for himself a people for his own possession who are zealous for good work." (Titus 2:14)

"When Abram was ninety-nine years old the LORD appeared to Abram and said to him, 'I am God Almighty; walk before me, and be tamim (whole, healthy, with integrity), that I may make my covenant between me and you, and may multiply you greatly.'” (Genesis 17:1–3)

Thanks for listening!

Your hosts are Brendan Romigh and Dr. Bob Robinson, the Executive Director of Reintegrate.

Go to re-integrate.org for the latest articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission, online resources for further learning, links to the Reintegrate YouTube channel, and more.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find ways to email us to comment on this podcast.

What is the greatest need for Christians who have leadership roles in their companies or institutions? Our guest today is Suzi Lantz, a senior consultant with Giant Worldwide, training leaders to increase their leadership skills, communicate effectively, and excel at work (and life). Suzi believes that the greatest need is for leaders to become healthy themselves, to know themselves to lead themselves, for the sake of loving those they lead to become all God wants them to be.

Find free resources for your leadership development: https://www.giant.tv/suzilantz

Thanks for listening!

Your hosts are Brendan Romigh and Dr. Bob Robinson, the Executive Director of Reintegrate.

Go to re-integrate.org for the latest articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission, online resources for further learning, links to the Reintegrate YouTube channel, and more.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find ways to email us or call us to comment on this podcast.

Are you experiencing loneliness? We drive to work. We drive back home from work. We watch some TV. When we have some free time, we are scrolling through something on our smartphones. No wonder we’re so lonely! We’ve been set up to not be connected to our neighbors. 

Today’s guest is author and pastor Eric O. Jacobsen. Eric is the senior pastor of First Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, Washington, and received his Ph.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary.

His latest book is Three Pieces of Glass: Why We Feel Lonely in a World Mediated by Screens (Brazos Press, 2020). As the subtitle suggests, we are experiencing loneliness because we spend so much time not walking among people so that we can have authentic relationships. Rather, our world is mediated through our windshields, our televisions, and our smartphones. 

His first book was Sidewalks in the Kingdom: New Urbanism and the Christian Faith (Brazos Press, 2003). He wrote a more in-depth theology on this subject with The Space Between: A Christian Engagement with the Built Environment (Baker Academic, 2012). Eric is dedicated to the idea that people should be connected in a good way by the built environment, but that we humans have not taken the care to create such spaces for human flourishing. 

Thanks for listening!

Your hosts are Brendan Romigh and Dr. Bob Robinson, the Executive Director of Reintegrate.

Go to re-integrate.org for the latest articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission, online resources for further learning, links to the Reintegrate YouTube channel, and more.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find ways to email us or call us to comment on this podcast.

How and why should we read the Bible? Why is evil a bad reason to not believe in God? Why is evil the best reason to believe in Jesus? What does the Bible teach about slavery?

These are the questions we ask Dr. Michael Wittmer, Professor of Theology at Grand Rapids Theological Seminary and the Director of the Christian Worldview Center at Cornerstone University. His latest book is The Bible Explainer: Questions and Answers on Origins, the Old Testament, Jesus, the End Times, and More (Barbour Books, 2020). We ask only a handful of the 251 questions asked and explained in this book.

Mike Wittmer is the author of many books, including books on worldview like Heaven Is a Place on Earth: Why Everything You Do Matters to God (Zondervan, 2004) and Becoming Worldly Saints: Can You Serve Jesus and Still Enjoy Your Life? (Zondervan, 2015).

Thanks for listening!

Your hosts are Brendan Romigh and Dr. Bob Robinson, the Executive Director of Reintegrate.

Go to re-integrate.org for the latest articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission, online resources for further learning, links to the Reintegrate YouTube channel, and more.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find ways to email us or call us to comment on this podcast.

Insurrectionists storming the Capitol and Rep. Josh Hawley, who supported those who stormed the Capitol, invoking the name of Abraham Kuyper. How can white evangelicals learn from this ugly chapter on America's history? What can we do, as we seek to follow the Lord Jesus Christ, to move forward?

As a Black man and an evangelical theology scholar, Dr. Vincent Bacote is able to help white Christians better navigate the nexus of evangelical culture, politics, theology, and race.

Vincent Bacote, PhD, is Associate Professor of Theology and the Director of Center for Applied Christian Ethics at Wheaton College.

Bacote's latest book is Reckoning with Race and Performing the Good News: In Search of a Better Evangelical Theology, published in November 2020 in the Brill Research Perspectives series. He is also the author of The Political Disciple: A Theology of Public Life.

Thanks for listening!

Your hosts are Brendan Romigh and Dr. Bob Robinson, the Executive Director of Reintegrate.

Go to re-integrate.org for the latest articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission, online resources for further learning, links to the Reintegrate YouTube channel, and more.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find ways to email us or call us to comment on this podcast.

Our guest on this episode of the Reintegrate Podcast is Sam Van Eman, author of Disruptive Discipleship: The Power of Breaking Routine to Kickstart Your Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2017).

As a specialist with the CCO’s Experiential Designs team, Sam creates disruptive and transformational experiences that are designed to jolt us and reorient people so that they can grow in discipleship to Jesus Christ.

In the last episode of 2020, Bob and Brendan began their conversation with Sam. Be sure to check out that Reintegrate podcast. In this episode, Sam provides insights into how we can get our faith unstuck by intentionally creating space for spiritual growth.

Purchase the book at Hearts & Minds Bookstore.

Thanks for listening!

Go to re-integrate.org for several years’ worth of articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission, online resources for further learning, links to the Reintegrate YouTube channel, and more.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find ways to email us or call us to comment on this podcast.

We are blessed to have Sam Van Eman on for two episodes. Here, right before Christmas, Sam shares with Bob and Brendan ways we can ignite Christmas hope in the midst of hardship. How can hope be defined by adaptability so that our days are full of Christmas wonder? Sam sparks our imaginations as to how we can do things out of the ordinary for those around us.

Sam Van Eman is the author of Disruptive Discipleship: The Power of Breaking Routine to Kickstart Your Faith (InterVarsity Press, 2017). Sam helps people by creating disruptive experiences that are designed to jolt us and reorient us so that we can grow spiritually. He is a resource specialist for the CCO’s Experiential Designs (XD) team, where he creates transformational experiences for college students, professionals, and organizations. As a public speaker and facilitator, Sam has taught (and played) in barns and boardrooms, canyons, classrooms, and auditoriums. 

Purchase the book at Hearts & Minds Bookstore.

Thanks for listening!

Go to re-integrate.org for several years’ worth of articles on reintegrating your callings with God’s mission, online resources for further learning, links to the Reintegrate YouTube channel, and more.

On Reintegrate’s podcast page, you’ll find ways to email us or call us to comment on this podcast.

What are we saved for?

God's inviting us to join his mission to reconcile all things back to himself. JR Rozko helps Bob and Brendan understand the connections between salvation, discipleship, and mission.

Salvation is the embodied experience of participating in what God is now doing in the world. "Discipleship is less about me trying to be like Jesus, and more about me trying to live my life as though Jesus were me."

JR is the Executive Director of The Telos Collective, a national church leadership training organization of the Anglican Church in North America. They teach, train, and coach a new generation of church leaders to proclaim the gospel of the kingdom, to engage culture, to create missional congregations, to experience the presence and peace of God, and to be formed into the likeness of Christ. 

JR is a graduate of Malone University and Fuller Theological Seminary, where he received a Master’s degree focused on a missiology of Western Culture and a Doctorate in Missiology exploring the relationship between salvation and discipleship in churches within Post-Christendom.

After 12 years of ministry in diverse local church contexts focused on youth, young adults, and congregational formation, JR co-founded Missio Alliance, helping thousands of diverse church leaders to have theological conversations on how we participate in God’s mission in our day.

As an Anglican priest, JR along with his wife Amy now serve as Co-Lead Pastors of First Church of the Resurrection, a two-century-year-old church in Canton, Ohio. They have three children, Aubrey, Junia, and Aidan.