All Saints Center Podcast

There is something in the air recently at our church and others, regarding mentoring and discipleship. In this All Saints conversation, Brock Bingaman talks with Roc Bottomly, who has a lifetime’s worth of experience in the value of mentoring.Mentoring doesn’t have to be complex or difficult or intimidating. Lots of people have reservoirs of wisdom to share with others – wisdom gained through doing life with God, over time. You don’t have to be perfect or have had no struggles to be a good mentor. In fact, just the opposite: broken people who have walked through hard times make good mentors.How do you get started? We’ll give some practical help for• How to start a mentoring relationship• What to talk about during meetings• How often — and for how long— to meetThe process isn’t complicated, and the results can be life-changing—and life-bringing.

In this podcast, Brock and Connie explore some of the core elements of leadership, as Brock describes how he first encountered a series of leadership groups that changed an entire church. We’ll touch on the essence of leadership: empowering others — and we’ll talk about the value of humility, human limits, listening, and vulnerability.

All Saints is moving into our course on Christian History, so we wanted to highlight a key mentor from the past: Teresa of Avila (1515-1582). In 1577 Teresa began writing a book that her mentor had asked her to undertake. It became The Interior Castle, a model of how a person’s interior life with God can move into ever deepening communion with him. In it, she describes the soul as a castle in which there are many different dwelling places with God. For us, as for Teresa, this deepening communion with is the source of fruitful work for him. It results in deeply practical service and love for others.

When you open your Bible, we’d love to have you ask, “I wonder if there’s more than I’ve been getting from my normal reading.” Because there always is. In this podcast, Brock and Connie talk about some of the discoveries and questions that have been arising from the Biblical Studies course. The first is about application.

Sometimes we take the ancient view when we look at God's work in history. And sometimes we look at the Holy Spirit's activity in more recent events. In the 1960s and 70s in the U.S., God intervened to reach and rescue a generation. Today, we call them the Jesus People.

Through what lens do we look at Scripture? How we answer that question shapes not only how we see the Bible, but how we relate to God.

In this All Saints podcast, Connie and Brock talk with Brad Kilman, the worship pastor at Our Lord’s Community Church. Brad has been leading worship for more than 20 years, ever since he encountered God as a teenager. In the conversation together, we explore the risk and mystery of worship — and talk about what Brad would say to a roomful of young worship leaders.

In this podcast, we continue our conversation about the prophetic. As we talked about before, God’s communication is central to life with Him. But what is the actual process of hearing Him like? We’ll talk about what we can do to prepare ourselves to hear God and what it’s like to hear Him — and also how we can discern.

In this podcast, we talk about the spiritual gift of prophecy — the kind described in 1 Corinthians 14 where Christians “speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation” (verse 3). Wayne Grudem defined prophecy this way: “Telling something that God has spontaneously brought to mind.” Prophecy is based on who God is: One who speaks and communicates, whose written word begins and ends with His speech. First and foremost, this is a call for us to cultivate friendship with God, to relate and listen to Him, and to saturate ourselves with His words in Scripture.

“The Philoka …what?” That’s what many people might say when they hear the word philokalia. It’s a Greek word that means “love of the beautiful or good.” The Philokalia is a collection of writings from within the Orthodox tradition written from the 4th to the 15th centuries by 35 different monastic authors. You could call these their “best of” spiritual classics. They instruct people on prayer and the life of Jesus — and are surprisingly applicable to our modern world.

         “Praying the scripture,” Jeanne Guyon tells us in her book Experiencing the Depths of Christ, “is not judged by how much you read, but by the way in which you read.” And it’s true: You can’t hang out with Jesus in the Word of God without it getting into your bloodstream — without it transforming your mind and heart.And from John Cassian, we hear from the desert fathers who taught him how to pray. A monk named Abba Moses used the image of a mill grinding wheat to help John understand how our thoughts will always be grinding away at something. We get to choose what that something is: “. . . it is within our power to feed it either with spiritual meditation or with worldly concerns.”

Spirituality can be a fuzzy word — it’s used in all manner of ways in our culture today. But when we talk about spirituality in All Saints, we’re going to the heart of the term: the practices and experience of Christian life with the Holy Spirit.

In this podcast, we continue talking about Church History, with the aid of thoughts from Justo Gonzales, author of The Story of Christianity. It’s when we discover the past that, as Justo Gonzales says, we begin to recognize the lenses through which we see Scripture and Christianity. Even Christians who may feel they don’t have much to do with the past often learn that the modern movement they are in is a response or reaction to things of the past.

"Church history is the study of the work of the Holy Spirit in human history. That is not boring or irrelevant; it's exciting and rewarding." History is not only human history or church history — it’s the story of God Himself.  If you’re going to study the work of God, you can’t avoid history, because God enters into human history, from start to finish.However, we also must know that there are going to be some glorious moments where we see what God is doing, but there will also be very disturbing moments. Church — and biblical — history is full of lots of ups and downs, potholes, and broken people. Even so, to study church history is more than to study groups of human beings who are doing it well or not doing it well. It is to study the works of God through human beings.In this podcast, we'll focus on some key thoughts from Justo Gonzales, author of The Story of Christianity, a core book we'll be using for the All Saints course on Church History.

In this episode, you’ll discover:• Some common approaches to Scripture• What we can expect to encounter when we open the Bible• The difference between a relationship with a book and a relationship with the God who wrote the book.  “We want to see scripture as an avenue of worship. We want to have our hearts inflamed with love and our minds flooded with the light of God’s truth. That’s what’s going to happen in All Saints.”

The Bible isn’t merely a textbook to be studied or a useful life manual full of wise principles. Scripture is a sacrament — a conduit through which the presence of God comes to us, through which we encounter God. The point is not to read words and master them, but actually to encounter the one who gives us these Words.  A life-giving way to encounter God in Scripture is to pray a phrase or passage back to Him, and in this episode we’ll show you what that sounds like. This doesn’t mean every time we open the Bible we will have an Encounter — it’s often barren and mundane and routine. But even then, God is mysteriously working. In this episode, you’ll discover:• Why Scripture is a conduit through which we experience God• How to open Scripture in a way that makes it more likely we’ll experience God• How to pray a passage of Scripture• What to expect when we open ourselves to God through Scripture

In this podcast, we're continuing to talk about watchfulness — paying attention to our thoughts — and we have two practical ways we've used to turn our thoughts to God: Focusing on who God is, and arrow prayers drawn from scripture.

Watchfulness means that we're paying attention to what we're thinking about and guarding what makes it into our minds and hearts.

In this All Saints conversation, Brock Bingaman and Connie Willems talk about theology, what it means to have fellowship with the Holy Spirit, and how we reflect on and experience the Holy Spirit.