The Goodness of God

By Trey Comstock

Every week, Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily talk about Scripture and what it means to try and be the Church in the 21st Century.

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How many episodes does The Goodness of God have?

The podcast currently has 151 episodes available.

The Goodness of God episodes:

May 10, 2024 How to Restart a Church: The New Frontier of Campus Ministry
Campus ministry, like a lot of things in former times, had an understood model. Student would need something like a youth group 2.0 to be a part of during college to hopefully prevent a break in their Christian journey. This has changed. The bulk of students now arrive on college campuses without an previous church experience, and if anything, on a more amorphous spiritual journey. This will need new models for working with college students, but it's also a bellwether for what church as a whole will need to become.
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33min
May 08, 2024 John 15:9-17
To call love a "commandment" should probably means something more to us than it seems to. In the Old Testament, a quick way to become a hero was to die for the sake of following God's law. If all of that love got summed up in a command to love, do we treat it with the safe seriousness? Would be die for the sake of love? We like to wave God's instructions at others, but will we take on the most core commandment ourselves?
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41min
May 05, 2024 How to Restart a Church: The Denomination that Lived
The postponed 2020 United Methodist General Conference being held in 2024 just ended and A LOT happened. The headlines most places focus on the end of the same-sex marriage ban, the lifting of the ban on ordaining LBTBQIA+ folks , and a more regional structure. It's more than that though. It's a move a way from a rules based way of living together to hopeful one more full of grace, peace, and flexibility.
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38min
April 30, 2024 1 John 4:7-21
Love. Love. Love. Love. This text repeats the word love to a comical degree. It's like every other word, but the repetition makes the point that love sits at the core of it all - literally. At the center of creation sits a being described as the motivating force of love. God is love. Love has such power because it carries with it the very power of God. Love is a verb. It motivates and moves. Love is also universal, so all of humanity has known some of God in their lives. We just need eyes to it, and hearts open to share the love of God with others.
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39min
April 26, 2024 How to Restart Church: Hello from UM General Conference
Pastor Trey is in Charlotte, North Carolina for the United Methodist 2020 General Conference being held in 2024. That is its actual name. One of the hot topics that the delegates are working on is worldwide regionalization. This sounds like some sort of bureaucratic shifting, but it actually a fundamental reordering of the denomination toward contextual ministry across its global reach. It's a way to let Africans be contextual to Africa, and Americans to contextual to Americans. It leans into a future where the local needs define what ministry looks like.
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30min
April 26, 2024 John 10:11-18
Sheep die for the sake of the shepherd's way of life. Similarly, kings are served. They aren't servants. Jesus turns all of those things on their heads. In being the Good Shepherd, he turns shepherding on its head just as he turns kingship on its head. We should at some point start conceptualizing a better reality than they one we create for ourselves. The one that God creates for us was made for us by the good shepherd who lays down his life for his sheep.
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37min
April 20, 2024 How to Restart a Church: Interview with Paul Nixon
This week Pastor Trey and Pastor Emily are joined by author and speaker Paul Nixon. He spends his life helping churches find new life, get weird, and get going. Just this week, he put out a totally revised version of his book "I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church," because he wrote the first edition in 2008 and clearly saw that we live in a totally different world now. His work and this conversation are great reminders that modern ministry has to be specific to a context and a mission field. One size no longer fits all.

I Refuse to Lead a Dying Church:
https://www.amazon.com/I-Refuse-Lead-Dying-Church-ebook/dp/B0CYMCTD96/

Weird Church:
https://www.amazon.com/Weird-Church-Welcome-Twenty-First-Century/dp/0829820345/
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47min
April 16, 2024 Luke 24:36b-48
A lot of energy gets poured into declaring Scripture super important. It is, but what if you have a hard time connecting with what it contains? As with a lot of things, you're in good company. The Disciples had been hearing endlessly from Christ, before he died and rose, about the Scripture surrounding his journey. Only now, staring the resurrection in the face do they have a mind to contain it. Connecting with Scripture, like so many things in the life of faith, is a journey but one that we should at least be actively working on.
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49min
April 12, 2024 How to Restart a Church: AI Sermon Writing
ChatGPT and its friends the other Large Language Models promise a lot of things and have a near religious fervor in the tech sector. They offer a way to lift the burden of creative work with just a simple prompt. The writing part of church is a huge sink of time. Could AI be the answer to massively overworked preachers? No. Not if we want to actually make real connections with real people.
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34min
April 11, 2024 John 20:19-31
Thomas gets the bad reputation, but all four Gospel lay out the elaborate series of proofs that Christ offers after the Resurrection. We get these windows into the Disciples processing it in real time, and even with literal Jesus literally in front of them, they struggle. Jesus chides them by blessing those who don't have such direct access - us. Rather than judging our doubts, Jesus blesses that coming to faith can be a difficult journey. Maybe, we should take the same approach with each other.
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39min

FAQs about The Goodness of God:

How many episodes does The Goodness of God have?

The podcast currently has 151 episodes available.