United Church Podcast

We want to become a spiritual family that is intentional about reaching people far from God. We want to see 300 people baptized, 2000 First Time Guests, and $6,328,000 in giving, by August 31 2026 because we believe the harvest is plentiful and the church mobilized is the hope of the world.

“We are working with God to determine the future! Certain things will happen in history if we pray rightly. We are to change the world by prayer.” — Richard Foster, Celebration of Discipline We are to change the world… by prayer.  We want to want to be people who pray. We want to want to be a people who pray. The problem we are all navigating is that we do not believe prayer to be our true power. Or, at the very least, there is an inconsistency in what we believe. If we—as a spiritual family—believed that prayer is our true power in this world.

 If you are participating in our 21 Days of Prayer and Fasting in any way, you want a healthy and robust spiritual life. We would go so far as to say that if you are even here—fasting or not—in the room or joining us online, it is because you believe, even if it is a vacillating belief or budding belief or curious belief, you believe that there is something of value to practicing the Way of Jesus.  You believe it is at least worth considering. Somewhere, even if buried beneath a mountain of questions, doubts, fears or faults, to be engaged at any level with a local church is at least a small declaration that you want some version of a healthy and powerful spiritual life.

Everyone should be able to add value to others and make a difference in the world.

There are movies about heaven, songs about heaven, and old cartoons depicting people and animals losing their life and floating up to heaven. Even if one did not believe in heaven, a rough survey of one neighborhood or city block would reveal that everyone has thought about it. Even my atheist friends have started their debates with, “Well, if there is a God and He is love, why doesn’t He let everyone go to heaven? And there, in a simple, heartfelt question and even the animated musings of cartoons and Disney films, lies the problem. The idea of Heaven, or rather Heaven, being universally accepted as the logical destination for life after death, has created a widely accepted belief that access to Heaven is as dynamic as the multiverse. What is meant is there is a narrative in the culture and the church that there are many ways to Heaven. Even among people who say they practise the way of Jesus, over fifty percent surveyed say there is more than one way to heaven, according to pew research. Some even believe in multiple heavens. STAGGERING!

Where do you find hope when you are experiencing pain and loss? How do we confront or respond to the reality of death? I know that is a heavy way to start this conversation, but it is something that, whether we like to admit it or not, shapes our actions. Death, pain, and loss are one of the most forming events that can happen to humans. Let’s pull back even from a personal level to a cultural level. We lost over a million of our fellow citizens and 6 million of our fellow image-bearers of God to a pandemic. Do we honestly think that the cultural patterns we see today are not deeply influenced by that? From the great resignation to the hyper-politicization, while not exclusively a result of our collective loss, it is most certainly influenced by it. For those of us who have experienced loss personally, we know that we are different because of it. How that loss shapes us be it personally or collectively, comes from the answer to one question, “Is everything going to be ok?” It’s the question of hope. Hope, in its most base form, is an assurance that everything will be ok. In the face of pain and loss, this is what we ultimately want. We all want to have hope in the face of pain and loss. Hope, in the words of Plato, is humanity's greatest gift. We want to be hope-filled people.

We all want to have an abundant life. We all want life, dare I say, of fullness and joy, of freedom and fulfillment. But to have that type of life requires that we have the right voice leading us through life. The challenge for some of us is that we are unsure which voice to follow. The dominant voice of culture promises us success, acceptance and notoriety. The voice of our political party promises us peace and prosperity. The influencers from movies to sport to social media promise us happiness. So we are left unsure. This is just wrong. We should be sure that the leader we follow and the voice we are listening to leads to abundant life. I understand. I have let poor voices lead me through life, even when I knew they were not leading me to an abundant life. But having come to understand that only one voice leads to abundant life, I learned and am learning to silence the others. Though the outcome of following the wrong leader through life, or listening to the wrong voice or voices can be relatively benign—at least in the short term—there can also be catastrophic consequences. Most of us have never had to endure the leading of a truly dangerous person with a powerful voice, but many others in the world have, and their lives became anything but abundant.

We want the path to how life works best lit clearly before us. We want certainty that we see God, the world, and ourselves rightly. We want to know the way to go that leads life at its best. The problem in our search for the answer to that question is that is there are so many competing answers. There are quite literally hundreds of competing claims, all touting their certainty to light the way to life at its best. And because of these many claims, many of us—even those who profess to practice the way of Jesus—often feel conflicted about which path to take. We often feel torn and pulled in many directions. Everyone should be able to see clearly the path that leads to life at its best, and be able to get on that path. I understand the struggle. With so many competing versions of reality in our very pluralistic society, internal conflict is inevitable. External confusion is probable.

We want to be content people. Even those of us with enormous energy and seemingly unending drive for better and greater still desire contentment. For you to have contentment, or to be a content person, guess what—you must be completely satisfied in your life. The challenge to total satisfaction in life, however, is quite complex. It is complex because there is this gnawing hunger for more that never seems to quiet in us. No matter what we do, what we get, what we own or where we go, the hunger says…more.

What does it take to see a movement of God among a people, a city, a nation?