Crackers and Grape Juice

Richard Stearns is a leader who has been tested as a CEO in both secular companies and also as the head of one of the world’s largest Christian ministries. After stints as CEO of Parker Brothers and then Lenox, Stearns accepted the invitation to leave his corporate career to become the president of World Vision US, where he became the longest serving president in their seventy-year history. During his tenure there he implemented corporate best practices, lowering overheads while tripling revenues. His leadership in calling the American church to respond to some of the greatest crises of our time, notably the HIV and AIDS pandemic, and the global refugee crisis, challenged Christians to embrace a bold vision for compassion, mercy, and justice. In Lead Like It Matters to God, Stearns shares the leadership principles he has learned over the course of his remarkable career. As a leader who has navigated both secular and sacred spaces, Stearns claims that the values Christian leaders embrace in their workplaces are actually more important than the results they achieve―that God is more concerned about a leader's character than a leader's success. With wisdom, wit, and biblical teaching, Stearns shares captivating stories of his life journey and unpacks seventeen crucial values that can transform leaders and their organizations. When leaders embody values such as integrity, courage, excellence, forgiveness, humility, surrender, balance, generosity, perseverance, love, and encouragement, they not only improve their witness for Christ, they also shape institutions, influence culture, improve team performance, and create healthy workplaces where people can flourish. Through this book, Stearns will inspire a new generation of Christian leaders to boldly take their values into their workplaces to tangibly demonstrate the character of Christ, the love of Christ, and the truth of Christ as they live out their faith in full view of others.

Tim Gombis joins the pod to talk about his newest book, 'Power in Weakness: Paul’s Transformed Vision for Ministry.' Tim and Teer explore a model for church leadership as old as Paul's letter to the Romans.From the publisher:After Paul’s encounter with the risen Christ on the road to Damascus, he turned from coercion and violence to a ministry centered on the hope of Christ’s resurrection. In earthly terms, Paul had traded power for weakness. But—as he explained in his subsequent letters—this “weakness” was actually the key to flourishing community that is able to experience God’s transformation, restoration, and healing. What would it mean for pastors today to take seriously Paul’s exhortation in 1 Corinthians 11:1 to “imitate me as I imitate Christ” and lead their congregations in this way? Instead of drawing leadership principles and practices from the worlds of business, education, and politics—which tend to orient churches around institutional power and image maintenance—Timothy Gombis follows Paul in resisting the influence of the “present evil age” by making cruciformity the operating principle of the church. Gombis guides the reader through practices and patterns that can lead a congregation past a focus on individual salvation, toward becoming instead a site of resurrection power on earth.https://www.eerdmans.com/Products/7125/power-in-weakness.aspxBefore you listen, do us a solid and help out the podcast. Head over to http://www.crackersandgrapejuice.com. Click on “Support the Show.” Become a patron. For peanuts you can help us out....we appreciate it more than you can imagine. Follow us on the three-majors of social media:https://www.facebook.com/crackersnjuice https://twitter.com/crackersnjuice https://www.instagram.com/crackersandgrapejuice

“My vocation was supposed to be joy, and I was speaking at funerals.” Shortly after being hired by Yale University to study joy, Angela Gorrell got word that a close family member had died by suicide. Less than a month later, she lost her father to a fatal opioid addiction and her nephew, only twenty-two years old, to sudden cardiac arrest. The theoretical joy she was researching at Yale suddenly felt shallow and distant—completely unattainable in the fog of grief she now found herself in. But joy was closer at hand than it seemed. As she began volunteering at a women’s maximum-security prison, she met people who suffered extensively yet still showed a tremendous capacity for joy. Talking with these women, many of whom had struggled with addiction and suicidal thoughts themselves, she realized: “Joy doesn’t obliterate grief. . . . Instead, joy has a mysterious capacity to be felt alongside sorrow and even—sometimes most especially—in the midst of suffering.” This is the story of Angela’s discovery of an authentic, grounded Christian joy. But even more, it is an invitation for others to seize upon this more resilient joy as a counteragent to the twenty-first-century epidemics of despair, addiction, and suicide—a call to action for communities that yearn to find joy and are willing to “walk together through the shadows” to find it.Dr. Angela Williams Gorrell joined Baylor's George W. Truett Theological Seminaryin fall 2019 as Assistant Professor of Practical Theology. Prior to joining the faculty at Baylor University, she was an Associate Research Scholar at the Yale Center for Faith & Culture, working on the Theology of Joy and the Good Life Project, and a lecturer in Divinity and Humanities at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. She is an ordained pastor with 14 years of ministry experience. Dr. Gorrell is passionate about finding issues that matter to people and shining the light of the Gospel on them. She is the author of always on: practicing faith in a new media landscape and a new book, The Gravity of Joy: A Story of Being Lost and Found, which shares findings of the joy project while addressing America’s opioid and suicide crises. Dr. Gorrell’s expertise is in the areas of theology and contemporary culture, education and formation, meaning-making, joy, new media, and youth and emerging adults. Dr. Gorrell regularly consults, speaks, and leads workshops and retreats on her research and areas of expertise.

Brian Zahnd is the founding pastor of Word of Life Church in St. Joseph, Missouri. He's also the author of many wonderful books, including, Water into Wine, Beauty Will Save the World, and most recently, Unvarnished Jesus. Brian was our first guest five years ago so we invited him to join us for our 300th episode. He talks about his incredibly successful Prayer School, his upcoming corollary, How I Read the Bible, and how the Church muddles through the post-Trump years.

Dr, De La Torre joins the podcast to talk about his latest book, 'Decolonizing Christianity: Decolonizing Christianity: Becoming Badass Believers.'In the interview, Dr. Del La Torre talks about his life in America as an immigrant, makes clear that it is not his job to fix that which White Christians have done, and even disagrees with Stanley Hauerwas.For more information on Dr. De La Torre, visit his website at: www.drmigueldelatorre.comor check out his blog at http://ourlucha.wordpress.com/_______________________________Before you listen, do us a solid and help out the podcast. Head over to http://www.crackersandgrapejuice.com. Click on “Support the Show.” Become a patron. For peanuts you can help us out....we appreciate it more than you can imagine. Follow us on the three-majors of social media:https://www.facebook.com/crackersnjuice https://twitter.com/crackersnjuice https://www.instagram.com/crackersandgrapejuice

On why a baptism "In the name of the Creator, Redeemer, and Sustainer" is not a valid baptism (and you should be re-baptized), the resurrection of the flesh and what it means for burial practices, and the Gospel that gives you Christ and everything that belongs to him...This special episode is a session from the Crackers & Grape Juice House of Theological Studies featuring Dr. Phillip Cary. in this special episode, we share our second session from our Luther and the Gospel class, led by Dr. Cary.Veteran teacher Phillip Cary, an internationally acclaimed expert on Augustine and Luther, will show how Luther’s theology arose from the Christian tradition, particularly from the spirituality of Augustine. Luther departed from the Augustinian tradition and inaugurated distinctively Protestant theology when he identified the gospel that gives us Christ as its key concept. More than any other theologian, Luther succeeds in carrying out the Protestant intention of putting faith in the gospel of Christ alone. Cary will explores the consequences of Luther’s teachings as they unfolded in the history of Protestantism.Phillip Cary has long been a favorite teacher for The Great Courses, and he is a frequent teacher for congregations and laypeople. This will be a wonderful way to go through Lent in 2021.https://crackersandgrapejuice.com/luther-and-the-gospel/___________________Before you listen, do us a solid and help out the podcast.Head over to http://www.crackersandgrapejuice.com.Click on “Support the Show.”Become a patron.For peanuts you can help us out....we appreciate it more than you can imagine.Follow us on the three-majors of social media:https://www.facebook.com/crackersnjuicehttps://www.instagram.com/crackersandgrapejuice

Friend of the podcast and all around Gandalf to the gang, the irascible Will Willimon returns to talk about meeting the Risen Jesus, fighting in church, Karl Barth, preaching, and the new edition of his first book, The Gospel for the Person Who has Everything.

Our friend, Jack Levison, is back on the podcast to talk about his recent book, An Unconventional God, which examines the role of the Holy Spirit in the Gospels. Jack Levison holds the W. J. A. Power Chair of Old Testament Interpretation and Biblical Hebrew at Perkins School of Theology, Southern Methodist University. Raised in a tract house in Levittown, New York, Jack left to attend Wheaton College, followed by an MA at Cambridge University. When he returned from England to pursue doctoral studies at Duke University, Jack fell in love with a divinity student, Priscilla Pope, whose office is now just down the hall from him at SMU. With essays in the Huffington Post, parade.com, relevant.com, and beliefnet.com, Jack's writing and speaking appeal to a wide swath of readers. In the course of his career, he has received the Fitzpatrick Prize for theology at Cambridge University, as well as grants from the National Humanities Center, the Lilly Fellows Program, the Louisville Institute, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, the Rotary Foundation, the International Catacomb Society, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. Jack lives in Lower Greenville, a thriving urban hub of Dallas, with Priscilla--not too far from his adult children, Chloe and Jeremy. Find out more about Jack at jacklevison.com.

"When I started out in seminary, I thought I was going into a helping profession, a community-organizer, a therapist, an advice-giver. And then Gerhard Forde upended all that, showing me how a pastor is one is compelled to preach the forgiveness of sins."Check out his new book! Seriously, go get it. Ken Sundet Jones, Professor of Theology and Philosophy at Grand View University in Des Moines, Iowa, loves teaching undergrads. He was born in Heidelberg, which must be why he likes Luther so much. He was shaped by the Sturgis motorcycle rally in his hometown and by summers at his grandparents’ cattle ranch. His doctoral dissertation covered 16th-century German evangelical funeral preaching. And he knows how to do knitting and Scandinavian flat-plane woodcarving.

“In order to understand why these groups support Trump, it’s important to better understand their vision of the world. Evangelical beliefs are often misrepresented in popular media and in political discussions. These misunderstandings make it difficult to assess and respond to the political situation.”André Gagné is Full Professor in the Department of Theological Studies at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada. He was Directeur d'études invité at l'École pratique des hautes études in Paris in 2017.His research focuses on the (Neo)Charismatic Right, Pentecostalism, evangelicalism, fundamentalism, religious violence and the interpretation and reception of the Bible. In his scholarship, Dr. Gagné seeks to explain how biblical texts and theological ideas are sometimes used by ultra conservative groups to incite social, political and religious tensions.Dr. Gagné is also a Full Member of the Centre for the Study of Learning and Performance (Concordia), a Research Associate with the Centre de recherche Société, Droit et Religion (Université de Sherbrooke), and a Co-Researcher with the Centre d'expertise de formation sur les intégrismes religieux, les idéologies politiques et la radicalisation (CEFIR).