Today's Conversation

In Today’s Conversation with Leith Anderson, Kay Warren offers insights and advice from her experience as a pastor's spouse in the public limelight.

In this podcast, you’ll hear Kay share:

How to manage spoken and unspoken expectations of the pastor's wife;

What pastors' spouses can do to set boundaries;

Her experience being vulnerable and grieving publicly; and

Advice for church members in caring for their pastor's spouse.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: So Kay you have been in ministry your entire life; you are a pastor’s daughter, a pastor’s wife. So I’ve got to ask: Did you grow up wanting to do this? Did you want to be a pastor’s wife?

Kay: You know, I actually wanted to be a missionary. And growing up in the ‘50s and ‘60s in a pretty conservative denomination, that was really the only option open to me as a girl if I really wanted to serve the Lord full time. So that was the direction I was heading, and I was not opposed to being a pastor’s wife. I had good feelings about growing up in a pastor’s home, so it wasn’t something that I ran from. But I sure didn’t anticipate it.

Leith: So, a life in ministry can be wonderfully rewarding and meaningful but can also be deeply challenging with unexpected pressures and stresses — many of which are kind of unique to pastors and their families. So let me ask you a question that I have been asked, but I will put it to you specifically, and that is: What is something you would tell young people who are entering this unique position of being married to a pastor?

Kay: Well, I really do believe it is a sacred privilege. You alluded to the title of a book I am in the process of writing. And when I first started teaching it to ministers’ wives almost 30 years ago, I first called it “The Changing Role of the Pastor’s Wife.” I was young in ministry. Everything around me was changing. It wasn’t the world that my mother — my mother as a pastor’s wife, I was used to that — and this role was changing, so I called it “The Changing Role of the Pastor’s Wife.” And then as Saddleback began to grow and expand, I changed the material title to “How to Grow With Your Church” because then those were the issues I was having to deal with as our church was growing and nothing stayed the same and how did I adjust to this expanding ministry.

And then I kind of hit a more difficult stage of both life and ministry, and I changed the material title to “How to Keep the Ministry from Killing You,” and taught that for several years because that really reflected what I saw a life in ministry. I was having to do everything I could think of to keep it from killing me. Now I as settle into this fourth decade of ministry, I really do see it as a sacred privilege.

So when I talk to women — and increasingly more men whose wives are becoming pastors or senior pastors — I really want them to understand that it is a privilege. There is a lot that changes through the years — through the decades. There are periods in which you are going to think that it’s going to kill and what do you have to do to keep it from killing you. But to settle into that space of believing with all your heart that it is a privilege.

My mom is 92 and has dementia, so there’s a lot of her personality and her memories that are fading. But when I ask her about her years — 50 plus years — in ministry she says the same thing every time. She says, “I always thought being in ministry was a privilege.” So that set it up for me to look at this as a life of privilege. It’s different than any other profession. It has some pitfalls, and some — as you said — disappointments that other professions don’t have.

And honestly there have been more than a few moments in which I have wished that Rick had been anything but a pastor — that I had married a plumber or a pool cleaner, I don’t know,

In this podcast, you’ll hear Kay share: How to manage spoken and unspoken expectations of the pastor’s wife; What pastors’ spouses can do to set boundaries; Her experience being vulnerable and grieving publicly; and Advice for church members in caring for their pastor’s spouse. Read a Portion of the Transcript Leith: So Kay you have ...

In Today's Conversation with Leith Anderson, Adelle Banks takes us inside the world of religion reporting. 

Faith and spirituality are a powerful motivation or undercurrent in many stories of our day. Good religion reporting helps us understand these trends and motivations.

In this podcast, you’ll hear a veteran and well-respected religion reporter share:

The challenges of reporting on religion, particularly evangelicalism;

How America's changing religious landscape impacts reporting trends;

Tips for pastors and others who are interviewed by the media; and

Her insight on the coming top religion stories.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: So Adelle, let’s just start with you. How did you get into this business and this profession of religion reporting?

Adelle: My whole journalism career, which began right when I finished college, has had a touch of religion — if not a focus on religion — throughout it. I covered religion at every job I have had since I left Mount Holyoke College. My first job was at a paper in Binghamton, New York, and I covered the traditional stuff reporters cover when they start their careers such as different cities and towns and school boards. But I also covered some about religion. I remember writing about clergy couples, and I also wrote about church outreach to singles and stories about various major religious holidays. When I moved on to my next job farther up in upstate New York, I covered towns and schools again, and business stories too. But then I expressed an interest in the religion beat, because I had enjoyed covering that topic previously and am generally fascinated with the topic. And I got the religion beat. And I covered things like the local Catholic bishop and Jews and other faith groups as well. Then I went to my home state of Rhode Island, and at that newspaper, The Providence Journal, my colleague who covered religion had been doing it for a long time and did it for a long time after I left there. And so I knew if I wanted to continue on the religion beat, I would have to do it somewhere else. And I ended up becoming the religion reporter on the Orlando Sentinel for six years before I moved to Religion News Service. So it has sort of been my professional lifeblood for a long time.

Leith: There is a part of me that want to say you must know more religious people and know more about religion than just about anybody in America, but let’s just keep talking about you and other reporters on religion. How does your own faith impact how you report on issues of faith or religion?

Adelle: I think in my role as a church member that it has made me more sensitive to the various trends and issues related to clergy and congregations in particular, as well as to the average person in the pew. But I also think that reporting on this topic is not something that has to be done by a person of faith. There have been very good reporters who had no faith at all who have covered this beat very, very well. And I have sometimes found that just being in a place of faith — not necessarily my own — can trigger story ideas and open up my eyes to things that are going on or things that are coming up. For instance, I sing in local chorale and that chorale happened to have rehearsed at a Catholic church at one time and just going by the bulletin board at the church I got story ideas. So I think that you can be a person of faith, but you don’t have to be. But it helps to be in places where you can see where the stories are.

Leith: So you have an angle or maybe an altitude that is kind of different from everybody else. Most of us live in our small worlds of our church, our parish, people who are like us. And then there are the outsiders, and maybe we don’t even know them personally. So from your view — from this high altitude, as well as close to the ground — how is Americ...

Faith and spirituality are a powerful motivation or undercurrent in many stories of our day. Good religion reporting helps us understand these trends and motivations. In this podcast, you’ll hear a veteran and well-respected religion reporter share: The challenges of reporting on religion, particularly evangelicalism; How America’s changing religious landscape impacts reporting trends; Tips for pastors ...

In Today's Conversation with Leith Anderson, Vinh Chung shares his amazing refugee story of rescue and redemption. 

Vinh was born in South Vietnam, just eight months after it fell to the communists in 1975. His family lost everything and fled the country when he was three and a half years old. They joined the legendary “boat people” and sailed into the South China Sea, even though they had no destination in mind.

Now as a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Medical School, Vinh runs a successful dermatology practice in Colorado Springs and serves on the board of World Vision.

In this podcast, you’ll be inspired as you hear Vinh share:

How God used a small group of Christians to bring his family to the United States;

How his family overcame cultural, economic and language barriers as they adjusted to life in small town Arkansas;

His experience returning to Vietnam as an adult; and

The parallels between today's refugee crisis and his family's experience.

Vinh also shares his family's story in "Where the Wind Leads", published by Thomas Nelson.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: Let’s start out by understanding a little bit about what was happening in Vietnam, and how your family fit into all of this.

Vinh: Back in Vietnam my family was very wealthy. My father’s family had this rice milling empire that was probably worth millions of dollars in today’s value. And during this time, there was a civil war between the North Vietnamese and the South Vietnamese. And the North Vietnamese government won, and after August 1975 they declared victory. And they punished the defeated South Vietnamese. My family was from South Vietnam. And they also targeted ethnic Chinese, because at that point there was tension with China. My family was also ethnic Chinese. So those were two strikes against us. And then the other strike against us was that we were wealthy. They did not like wealthy people. And so they took everything away. They took away our business, kicked us out of our house, and we were forced to live in this little shack in the rural Mekong Delta. We had no electricity, no running water, and it was eight months later that I was born. It was just a daily struggle for my parents to feed their eight children. And they knew that we may survive if we work really hard, but there was no future. Because we knew that regardless of how hard we worked — whatever we saved up, whatever we tried to do to better ourselves — at any moment anything could be taken away, because it had already happened. And so this is when my parents decided to load up their eight children and leave the country to seek a better life.

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Vinh was born in South Vietnam, just eight months after it fell to the communists in 1975. His family lost everything and fled the country when he was three and a half years old. They joined the legendary “boat people” and sailed into the South China Sea, even though they had no destination in mind. ...

Many of us are stunned by harsh and mean-spirited comments from both sides of the political aisle — whether from presidential candidates or our own Facebook friends. In Today’s Conversation, Leith Anderson talks with Richard Mouw on incivility in the public square and how to address it.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from a distinguished evangelical statesman, who has spent much of his life and career addressing civility, on:

How to bring "conviction" and "civility" together;

The differences between the tenor of today's public discourse and that of past decades;

Which Bible passages challenge our own rhetoric; and

How the cultural marginalization of evangelicals impacts the way we interact with others.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: So let’s begin by making sure we agree on terms. So how do you define “civility”? What does it look like? What does it sound like?

Richard: Civility is — to put in kind of more basic terms — it’s just being a respectful person in public life. The word comes from the word “civitas” for “city” and in the ancient Greek state — city state — civility was learning how to get along after you’ve learned how to get along with kinfolk — later on with friends — learning how to treat people in the public square from different nations, lifestyles, different races, religions, with a genuine respect that took their fundamental shared humanness with you seriously.

Leith: Well today, in the USA, it is a topic of frequent conversation, because it sort of feels like American public life is unusually divided — political attack ads; people forward emails with inaccurate messages; there are all these social media posts, many of which are just intended to provoke incivility. So it’s certainly not difficult to find it, and there are real policy changes and differences along the way, but there’s a question that many of us are asking, “Is that the way we have to be? Does it really need to be so mean-spirited in today’s political world?”

Richard: As a Christian I certainly wouldn’t say it’s the way we have to be. It’s certainly not the way Christians have to be. But I think given our created humanness, it’s not the way we’re made to be. We’re made to respect people, to acknowledge that people with whom we disagree are created in God’s image and that they deserve a civility from us. So I think it’s a very important time to be saying, “This is not the way it’s supposed to be.”

Leith: It begs the question of whether or not things are different now than they’ve been in the past. CNN has recently run a series about previous presidential elections, and I’ve seen only a few of them but I’m kind of stunned to find out about some of the uncivil things that have been done in the past. But what’s different today in public discourse? Or is it just the same way it’s always been, and we’ve just sort of idealized the past and demonized the present?

Richard: I think there are really two different answers to that. And the one is, even if it’s not brand new, we’re surrounded by it much more. I mean in the old days, when I was being raised on television, you watched the Camel News Caravan for 15 minutes at night and a little bit of Walter Cronkite or something, but today, it’s 24/7 — you can tune in any time. And the coverage that’s given — I mean the tremendous media coverage — and then furthermore, just the ways in which people interact with each other on the web. I was a columnist for something called Beliefnet for awhile. I would write something, and somebody in the comments section would say something to disagree with me and somebody else would disagree with them, and there may be 143 comments, but only the first couple have anything to do with me. People are shouting at each other — as it were — on the internet, and I think we’re just seeing it a lot more.

In this podcast, you’ll hear from a distinguished evangelical statesman, who has spent much of his life and career addressing civility, on: How to bring “conviction” and “civility” together; The differences between the tenor of today’s public discourse and that of past decades; Which Bible passages challenge our own rhetoric; and How the cultural marginalization of evangelicals impacts the way ...

In Today’s Conversation, Leith Anderson and Nick Hall talk about evangelism among young people and the spirituality of young adults in America.

In his junior year of college, Nick wrote a paper about how to reach his generation with the gospel. The paper went viral and turned into a student-led movement of over 1,000 students responding to the gospel, and then spread out to other campuses, reaching more than 50,000 in just a couple years. Nick has now shared the gospel at hundreds of events to millions of students and is regularly featured as a speaker for pastors gatherings, training events and festivals around the world.

In this podcast, you’ll hear Leith and Nick discuss:

The state of evangelism in the United States today;

Nick's personal calling as an evangelist;

What young people want in a local church;

Messages that help reach the younger generation for Christ; and

How evangelism and discipleship work together.

Read a Portion of the Transcript

Leith: Let’s talk about you. And let’s talk about young evangelists. It seems to me that there were more evangelists a generation ago then there are today. So, are there many of you out there?

Nick: You know, that’s a good question. I don’t know if there’d be many who want to claim to be like me. I don’t know I’m the cool kid, so I’m not sure if there’d be many that would want that reputation. But it is an interesting time. As you said, it seems like a generation before maybe the word “evangelist” — or being in that vocation — was a more prominent field. And I would say it’s certainly true that fewer and fewer people seem to be grabbing onto that vocation, or mantle, or whatever you want to call it. There are a few people out there certainly that we know of, but we really feel like it’s a church kind of dynamic where the church has kind of stopped talking about the evangelist as a vocation. And so I believe that there are just as many evangelists as there always was, because God hasn’t stopped calling these different offices and different people in the Church. But I think that the Church has maybe stopped making as much of an emphasis on that vocation, largely probably in reaction to some of the negative things that happened in previous generations — whether it be prosperity or scandal or whatever else. But it seems to be not exactly the most popular word when you say “evangelist” today.

Leith: Well, let’s trace your journey. So you start out writing a college paper — I wonder when you were writing it if you ever imagined the impact that it would have — and then from that college paper to full-time evangelism and worldwide ministry. How did this work? What’s the trajectory here?

Nick: Yeah, well, at the end of the day — I think as in so many things — as God calls, and God enables, and God opens doors. You know, for me I was 19 years old, I was a freshman in college, and God really was rearranging my life around this calling towards evangelism and being an evangelist. And the only guy I knew of who was an evangelist was Billy Graham. And you know, you talk to young people today they don’t know who Billy Graham is. But for me, I knew that his book was on my grandparents’ coffee table, and I knew my parents used to have Billy Graham crusades on the television at home. And so I read his biography cover to cover and started praying, and God really gave me this statement of “My life exists to put Christ at the pulse of a generation.” Hence, where the word “pulse” came in, was really from this statement.

And so, as you said, I really wrote this paper in my English class. I was a junior when that happened — a secular university back in North Dakota — and really from there, God just began opening doors. I was traveling with the Billy Graham and Luis Palau teams, and really learning under these individuals that had been my heroes — travelin...

In his junior year of college, Nick wrote a paper about how to reach his generation with the gospel. The paper went viral and turned into a student-led movement of over 1,000 students responding to the gospel, and then spread out to other campuses, reaching more than 50,000 in just a couple years. Nick has ...