Daniel Rose: The Pastor Next Door

Hey guys, welcome back to the Pastor Next Door podcast.

I am really glad that you are with me here.

This is season zero, episode one.

Season zero?

Yeah, because here’s the thing.

This podcast is going to be a little bit different in the sense that I’ve scripted out four seasons.

And these four seasons I hope will all be evergreen content.

You know, content that you can come back to over and over again.

Hopefully it’s content that as you walk through different seasons of your life, you may find them more helpful or less helpful at any particular time.

So it’s almost as though these four seasons will be like mini webinars in a sense.

And so we are beginning.

We’re going to look at it.

The seasons that we’re going to look at are seasons like spiritual fitness.

We’re going to talk about faith and doubt and deconstruction and reconstruction.

We are going to look at leadership, you know, building community, that kind of stuff.

So we’re going to cover a number of different things over these four seasons.

The first season is going to be focused on spiritual fitness.

And that idea of spiritual fitness is going to really weave its way through the entire thing, all four seasons.

We will probably be talking a little bit about spiritual fitness over and over again.

And so I think in this kind of season zero, episode one kind of thing, I think it would probably be good to just try to get a sense of what it is that I’m talking about.

What do I mean by spiritual fitness and what do I not mean by it?

So what I hope that at the end of the day you’ll walk away from this is understanding that this entire project, this entire Pastor Next Door project, is firmly rooted and grounded in grace.

Because grace is the absolute center of the Christian life.

It is the center of, I would argue, the life of faith.

I would go so far as to say that grace is really the necessary grounding for us to really experience our full humanity.

Because you see, we live in this broken world, right?

We live in a world that’s not perfect.

We live in a world that’s messy.

We live in a world where people let us down, where we let other people down.

And in that, then, we have to figure out how to deal with it.

How do we deal with the missed expectations?

How do we deal with the hurt that inevitably will find us in our lives?

How do we deal with the suffering that we experience, whether that’s a suffering that is self-inflicted or inflicted on us by others?

And I think the thread that can help us deal with this, that can help us work our way through those things, is indeed grace.

And so I don’t want you to think about spiritual fitness as something that is exhausting, right?

I don’t want you to think about the pursuit of spiritual fitness as something that is just one more thing that you are going to potentially fail at.

And I know as I think about that, it brings up all sorts of emotions and things that run through my own heart and mind as I consider that.

Because when we are constantly chasing something, when we’re constantly trying to chase this pursuit of God or some sort of religious experience, we can experience a very real religious burnout due to our spiritual striving.

We can try so hard to be spiritual that we miss the whole point of it.

We miss the grace.

We miss the rest.

We miss the mercy, the compassion.

We miss out on so many things because of our striving.

So this idea of spiritual fitness isn’t meant to be exhausting, nor is it meant to be moralistic, right?

I’m not going to have five rules of how to be spiritually fit.

There’s no recipe here.

It’s not a step one, step two, step three, step four, add the Holy Spirit, and you’re good to go.

That’s not what we’re talking about.

Because if we were, then the fear that you might be wrestling with, that I know I wrestle with all the time, is that the pursuit of the spiritual life is going to be nothing more than one more thing on my list of fails.

And so we want to deal with that.

We want to address that.

We want to pay attention to those feelings.

We want to acknowledge the reality that religious and spiritual burnout is real, and it is often because of the systems that we find ourselves in.

It’s often the result of faith communities that we are a part of that have created systems that are not grace-centered.

We’ve created systems that are all about our work and our effort and our striving.

If you’re like me, sometimes people might ask you questions like, how’s your relationship with God going?

And I can very quickly and immediately jump to a list of hoops that I think that they expect me to have jumped through.

The idea of have I read my Bible every day?

Have I had quiet times?

How’s my prayer life?

Do I pray the right prayers?

Do I read the right things?

Am I studying?

Am I also reading for devotion?

Am I reading Christian books?

Am I listening to Christian music?

Am I, am I, am I, am I?

And I get all spun out.

And that is the result of so many of our church systems that we have built, that we have somehow tried to take the spiritual life and put it into these kind of rules and hoops that we jump through.

And that’s not it at all.

To be spiritually fit is to create and build within ourselves a growing capacity.

You see, there is no ending to the pursuit of fitness.

And I think that’s one of the things that we miss.

We are never going to get to the place where we can say, oh, I’ve arrived.

I have this whole following Jesus thing absolutely figured out.

And the beautiful thing is, is that we don’t need to get to that place.

We do not need to get to the spot where we think we’ve got it all nailed down.

The key thing that we need to be aware of, that we need to continue to lean into, is the reality of our union with Christ.

See, this is, I think, one of the beautiful things about following Jesus is that our lives are hidden with him.

In Colossians 2, we learn about that.

The Apostle Paul writes about this idea of our lives being hidden with Christ.

You see, we are so unified in him that we have our union with him, and that begins to change the way we live.

And so this is why Jesus says, my yoke is easy, right?

It is the sense that in our union with Christ, he is doing the heavy lifting.

He is doing the pulling.

He’s doing the carrying.

He’s doing the work, and he has done the work.

And that work was fully accomplished in the cross, and that was demonstrated in its completion through his resurrection and ascension to the right hand of God.

And so we are not trying to work something up here.

We, in a response to our union with Christ, are trying to develop our capacity.

We are trying to increase the capacity with which we can practice love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, and self-control.

It’s not about becoming impressive.

It really is about becoming available, becoming more and more available to the work of God in our lives, to the work of the Spirit in our lives.

And so we can rest, and we can trust in that reality because grace is the environment where growth happens.

I don’t want us to miss this, right?

Grace is the environment where growth happens.

So if grace is the environment where growth happens, then when we fall short, when we maybe don’t love as well as we want to, that’s okay because now we can experience grace, and we grow.

We grow from our mistakes, from our failures, from our shortcomings, as we embrace grace at a deeper and deeper level because grace is the environment where growth happens.

And so all four seasons that we’ve got planned out are hopefully going to foster an environment of grace.

And in the midst of this, we can take heart in knowing that we are responding to God’s initiative.

And it is God’s initiative in our lives that drives this stuff, that is working through us, and we are simply responding.

And so again, it is not on us.

In Ephesians 2, verses 8 and 9, the Apostle Paul says, For it is by grace you have been saved.

Right?

This is not of yourselves.

It is the gift of God.

Not as a result of works, let no man may boast.

And then from there, from that rooting, he says that you have work to do that God has prepared beforehand for you.

And so we have this initiative of God through grace to us, granting faith, and in that grace, as a result of that grace, we respond by seeking to live out these new lives and doing this work that is before us.

And so our covenantal relationship with God is just that.

It’s a relationship.

It is not a contract.

And so that is a remarkably beautiful thing.

Out of that then, we can understand that our spiritual formation where we are developing and growing in our capacity for spiritual fitness is going to be slow.

It is a slow and patient work.

I think sometimes when we consider what God has done, we think God moves quickly.

The reality is that God moves very, very slowly.

God just doesn’t rush.

God doesn’t hurry through much of anything, right?

So let’s just think about this for half a second and just think of this in terms of the creation.

Some people are young earth creationists.

They say God created the world in six days and on the seventh day he rested.

Some people are old earth creationists.

They believe that God worked through the process of evolution.

God created these laws and these rules of things and it took millions and billions of years for the cosmos and everything to develop.

And so often in that argument, you’ve got the young earth folks that are like, oh, but God didn’t We are going to come back over and over and over again to the reality that grace is what this whole spiritual life is all about.

We’re going to be honest about doubt.

Doubt is part of our reality.

Doubt and faith go hand in hand.

If we have faith, if we are experiencing faith, then we will experience doubt, because faith is looking and trusting in something that we can’t see.

It is this hope that we have, but we can’t see it.

We long for the day when faith is made sight, and so for us to even have faith, we have to have doubt.

That is part and parcel to our walk of faith, and so doubt is not the enemy.

The enemy is certainty.

The enemy is certitude.

We can have confidence, and I hope that we will have confidence, but confidence and certainty are different things.

And so if we are certain, if we have certainty, then we are no longer living in the context of faith, and what we are called to do is to live in the context of faith.

So doubt is going to be a part of our journey all the way through.

And I also want our podcast, our time together to be oriented toward ordinary faithfulness.

There’s not going to be some episode about radical faith and radical gospel living and radical this.

We’re not talking about radical stuff.

Nah, we’re going to talk about ordinary faithfulness.

How do you show up for your neighbor?

How do you love well?

How do you just be present with people and extend them the grace that you know that you need?

This podcast is not going to be about self-optimization.

If you want to pursue self-optimization, man, this is not it.

We’re going to acknowledge our messiness, our brokenness, our frailties.

This is also not a podcast about spiritual productivity.

Again, you’re not going to get a recipe to somehow become a super-Christian.

And this podcast is definitely not a replacement for community.

All of the stuff that we talk about here, this desire towards spiritual fitness, man, we need to be practicing in real-life community, face-to-face with other people.

If you need a community of people to connect with, reach out to me.

I would be happy to point you in the right direction.

And so over the coming number of weeks as we look through these handful of seasons and these various podcast episodes, I want you to know that you don’t have to fix your faith to be here.

You don’t have to be somebody who has it all figured out.

You don’t have to feel like you know exactly what it is that you’re doing in your faith.

Simply come as you are.

Stay as long as you need.

You might need season one and say, all right, this is what I got.

This is all I need.

You might get to season four and be like, nah, I need to go back to season one.

Or maybe I need to rest in season three.

Whatever it is, just come and be present with us as we seek to build this Pastor Next Door community through this podcast where we invite people, we invite you to go connect into a real community beyond the virtual because this is not a replacement for in-person real-life community.

But come as you are.

Stay as long as you need.

And I hope that you will do that.

And I hope that you will join us for that.

Now, as we begin to look towards the future, the next episode, we are going to talk about faith.

And we’re going to talk about the kind of faith that we’re trying to cultivate.

And so that will be another kind of season zero.

And we hope that you’ll be a part of that.

Season one is going to be personal spiritual fitness.

We are going to be looking at practices of grace for an ordinary and faithful life.

And so we’re going to work our way through that together.

And I hope that you will stay with us for that six weeks where we develop some small practices.

Season two, we are going to be talking about faith deconstruction and reconstruction.

And so we want to figure out how do we lose bad faith without losing God?

How do we take a look at maybe some of these broken and messed up systems that we found ourselves in or broken and hurtful communities that have inflicted some deep trauma with us?

And so we want to figure out how do we do that?

How do we get rid of the bad without losing God?

How do we deconstruct the things that need to be deconstructed and hold on and reconstruct in a healthy way?

Season three, we’re going to be talking about congregational spiritual fitness.

We want to figure out how do we form communities that can endure?

How do we move from a personal faith to a shared life?

So that’s season three.

And then in season four, we’re going to talk about leaders.

This may, so that’s season four of looking at spiritual fitness for leaders.

That might not be for everybody.

But I want to, I do think I need to talk to some of us that are seeking to lead, whether that’s as a pastor or maybe a ruler or maybe just a ministry leader in a particular congregation.

But we need to talk about burnout and disillusionment.

We need to talk about how do we build on these broader seasons and really begin to develop the ability to lead without losing our souls.

So that’s where we’re going to head.

That’s going to take us a while to go through those seasons.

And so I hope that you’ll join us for those.

And I hope you’ll join us next week as we discuss a faith that endures.

If you, wherever you’re listening to this, boy, it would mean a lot to me if you would comment, like, rate, give us five stars or whatever.

As I try to get the word out about this podcast, hopefully this is beneficial to you.

If it is, be sure to share it with somebody and invite a friend or two to listen.

And who knows, maybe go on the journey together as we pursue spiritual fitness.

But until next time, I’m Dan Rose, the Pastor Next Door, and I hope that you will join me again next week.

Love well, my friends.