Simple Faith with Rusty George

Narrator: Welcome to Leading Simple with Rusty George. Our goal is to make following Jesus and leading others a bit more simple. Here's your host, Rusty George.

Rusty George: Hey, everybody. Welcome to Leading Simple. So great to have you with us today. We're going to dive into my journal one more time of the things that I messed up along the way. I told you a few episodes ago that I once heard a podcast called How I Built This. Great podcast. Continues to launch new material of people walking through how they started their business and startup companies and those kind of things, and just really great stuff.

And I thought, That's really cool. But you know, who I learn the most from are people that tell me they're failures because then I learn what not to do. So I've been in a process over the past few months of sharing some of those very things. I've had two episodes already on the podcast called How I Broke This, and here comes the third installment of that.

And it deals primarily with teaching and how we choose to communicate here at Real Life Church. Specifically, how I choose to preach. We'll get into that here in just a second. I want to thank Brittany Schools who left a review for us. She writes this, You should subscribe. I welcome this podcast into my latest episode folder. I always look forward to listening.

It's helped me as a leader and I've shared lots of episodes with friends and vocational ministry and some who are not. blschools. Brittany, thank you so much for writing that review. And you have now been entered into our contest to win this great prize at the end of the summer. And so I'm inviting others to leave a review.

Just go to wherever you get your podcasts and you can click on leave a review and type that in there. Please make sure it's kind and we would love to interview in this contest. Reviews really help us get the word out much more than just helping my ego. It helps get the word out as to what we're trying to do.

So thank you for doing that, Brittany, and thank you to everybody else who's already left a review.
Well, today we are sponsored by stadiachurchplanting.org. Stadia's mission is to plant churches that intentionally care for children. And why is that? Because as more churches close their doors, fewer people are experiencing the life changing hope of Jesus.

Stadia prepares leaders to start healthy churches that intentionally reach the next generation of believers, spreading the hope of Jesus farther than ever before. And we won't stop until every child has a church. stadiachurchplanting.org. Love to Invite you to check that out and make sure that you go there and you can sign up to plant a church.You can sign up to sponsor a church plant. Love to have you be a part of that. stadiachurchplanting.org. Okay, here we go with episode 211 as we walk through how I broke this.
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Well, today, I want to talk about how I broke preaching. Now, right now, some of you might be thinking, well, it doesn't involve me. I run a construction company. I am a retired CPA. I am a stay at home mom. Whatever your profession may be, I think this is going to tie into you a little bit because we all differ from our calling. And here's what I mean by that. God is uniquely gifted you with your specific gift mix, personality experiences, heartbeat, passion, abilities to do something specific.

In other words, God didn't create Moses and then figure out something for Him to do. God had a plan and created a Moses to meet that plan. And He did the same with you, and he did the same with me. And I'm afraid for probably decades of my life, I have veered off that plan in order to try to be more like someone else.

Now, there's nothing wrong with emulating what you do after somebody else if you're CPA. There's probably somebody who taught you how to do that. If you are a golf instructor, you learn how to play golf from somebody else. Even the great legend Tiger Woods would tell you that he learned how to play golf from various people that he watched along the way.

All of us have people we emulate. All of us have mentors. All of us have heroes and leaders. The question is, how do you make it your own? What is God uniquely created you to do and crafted you to do in a certain style and way that you could do that and lead that out of the overflow of your gifts?

For me, one of the gifts that God has given me is the ability to communicate to people specifically in a teaching type of role. It's something that energizes me, even though it exhausts me. And you know what I'm talking about. You can be physically drained, yet spiritually charged after you use your spiritual gift. And for me, that has been teaching.

I've known for a very long time that I was to be a teacher way back and as early as second grade, I remember communicating to the neighbor kids, to my sister, whoever would listen, emulating preachers that I had heard. And it just stuck. I just kept doing it all through high school and college. And certainly after I got my first job at a church working with a young adult ministry, I got this job working with college age students, and I found myself teaching to them on a weekly basis.

And then much like everybody, I would listen for feedback. Well, I just so happened to have a variety of seminary students that would come to our event. And these were great, great people, but they sat in seminary classes all day long. They would sit there for an hour or 90 minutes, listen to people, take apart a piece of the Bible or talk endlessly about philosophy or world religions.

And then they would come to my 25 minute message and they'd find it a bit lacking. I remember one particular student telling me, and it seemed a little disjointed. It's a little bit shallow, you know. There's just not much meat there. And so I started thinking, All right, what do I got to do to make them happy? And I tried to teach like a seminary professor, and I just put people to sleep.

Then there was a guy that was really big at the time I was leading this ministry. He was a pastor and still is a pastor by the name of Louie Giglio. He was running a college aged ministry just south of where I was running mine, and he had thousands of kids showing up. He had a very unique and creative way of teaching filled with with statistics and creative illustrations and a lot of enthusiasm.

He would randomly yell "Hello, hello" during his message. Sounds weird now, but at the time it was really cool. And so I thought I got to be more like Louie. And so I would preach with a passion that was kind of manufactured. I'd randomly yell, Hello, what are we talking about here? And it just didn't fit me. It didn't make sense.

But I was trying to be what I thought the audience wanted. Well, after about nine years of that, I decided to take this job in sunny California and be the lead pastor of Real Life Church. I thought this is a good chance to reinvent myself, no longer trying to be a seminary professor, no longer trying to be Louie Giglio.

I'll come to real life and I'll be who I am. And I tried that for a while. And then I began to figure out that we're our churches. We are in the heart of what's called Master's University, which is a great university that's heavily influenced by the teaching and writings of Pastor John MacArthur. And his teaching style is very exegetical and very, shall we say, old school at times preaches for 45 minutes and verse by verse, expositional style.

And after I'd heard enough, people tell me, "Well, it's just not like John" or "Have you heard John speak?" I thought, Well, I guess I got to be more like that. And people would leave our church and say, I just need more meat. I need it to be deeper. I remember one particular family who we were very close to, very good friends with, told me they were leaving the church.

I asked them why and they said, We just need something deeper. I thought I knew what that meant and I tried to appease them with various things that I would offer. I changed my teaching style. I changed the sermon series. I used more Greek words. I tried to read for more commentaries, and that couple still left. I was surprised to find out, though, that they had joined a charismatic church down the street.

When I came to find out was when people say I want something deeper, they have a variety of reasons. For instance, sometimes they mean, I want to hear something I didn't know. They need to walk out of there and say, Well, I never thought of it that way before. I never heard that piece of information about what happened in Israel and to 80 B.C. Perhaps they want it to be on Sunday morning when they go to church.

In other words, you can offer classes during the week, but if you're not offering that on Sunday morning, if you're not creating a Sunday morning experience with deep teaching, then they're not going to get it because they're only going to give you one hour a week.

For some people, depth meant I just want to be yelled at. I need someone to convict me. I had one guy tell me he was leaving our church because I didn't yell at them enough and he needed to be taught to like he was being coached. Another reason people want depth is they say, I'm afraid we're not dealing with sin. They feel that if you don't get up there and make people feel really bad or talk about how bad the world is and how awful people are, then we haven't really dealt with things.

Some people might say, I'm afraid we're not teaching enough Bible as if just more reading straight from the Bible rather than explaining it or taking one passage and breaking it down, they'd rather you read and talk about an entire chapter would make them feel like that's more depth. Some people would say, I want to feel something. I need something emotional to happen, which is what this one couple met when they left us and went to a charismatic church.

For some people, they would say, You know what, this is serious stuff, no humor, no videos, no creative music. Let's just be serious. And others would say and they wouldn't articulate it this way. But the truth is, they want to overlook the incongruence of their life by obsessing with knowledge. In other words, I don't want to do anything with it. I just want to bat around ideas. I just want to sit through a little lecture. Here's what I learned.

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Hey, let me interrupt this episode for just a second. Would you help plan a church today? You can do that in a very simple way. Go to stadiachurchplanting.org today to find out more. All right. Back to the show.
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Here's what I learned. I broke my style of teaching because I fell into one of these three traps. The first one is preaching to keep people happy. I've written entire messages for people trying to make them smile, only to realize they didn't show up or to talk to them in the lobby and ask, What did you think? To have them go is fine.

I've created entire programs or entire message series or we're going to go verse by verse four through this. I can often tell when I listen to other pastors what the negative feedback is they've been getting because it shows up in their comments as they teach things like, We're really going to dig deep into this, or We're really going to unpack this for weeks.

We're going to get exegetical through this passage. That tells me they bring in some negative emails and I totally relate. Here's a second trap that I've fallen into and that is preaching to bring people back. Somebody will leave the church. They're mad. We're not deep enough. And then I'll just power through on a whole series through Exodus or something like that.

The problem is, is the people that needed to hear it or wanted to hear it aren't even there anymore. It's just one of those things I do to make myself feel better. Or I'll forward them a series and tell them, Here's what we're talking about. Now look what you're missing out on. What a waste of time. Here's a third thing that I've done.

Preaching to keep people entertained. The pendulum swings the other way as well. And that is to feel like I've got to be just filled with all kinds of humor and stories and videos with minimal Bible just to keep people entertained. So what I've discovered is there's about three things I got to do in order not to break my preaching, in order to be who God has created me to be, and in order for our church to be what God has uniquely gifted it to do in our particular time and area.

Here's the first thing you need to know your audience. Who are you trying to reach? Here's what I mean by that. We like to draw spiritual continuum up on a whiteboard, going from -5 to 0 all the way to positive five. Negative five. We'll call that Saul before he became Paul. And then at positive five is the Apostle Paul who wrote most of the new Testament.

The zero mark is where Saul became a Christ follower, and we see this in the scope of anybody's spiritual journey. They're far from Christ. Maybe not a negative five, maybe a negative three, maybe a negative two zeros when they come to Christ. Positive five is a fully devoted follower of Jesus. Well, I think a Sunday morning can really only impact about 2 to 3 numbers on that grid, and that's out of ten.

You can't hit everybody. So you have to decide, what is my little window? I'm going to go after? Before the pandemic, we were probably focusing on someone between a negative two to a positive one, as you can tell. We really didn't need to get into too many deep things as far as Exegetical speaking goes. We were dealing with the basics of the faith and how to follow Jesus.

But now, post-pandemic, I'm finding that the people that actually show up at church, they're a little bit further along. We're having to find new ways to reach the negative numbers. And so those that show up are probably at a zero to a positive two. And so we're dealing with a lot of basics of the faith, how to follow Jesus, what this means to follow Jesus.

Once you know your audience, then you can determine how to speak to them. Then it kind of comes down to the second thing Know your style. Now there is one particular pastor that I connect with a lot because I think like him, he's very logical, he's very linear. And that, of course, is Andy Stanley and I have emulated my teaching a lot off of him because I like that style.

It just fits me. But where we differ is I like to teach truth with a lot of whimsy and a lot of simplicity. In other words, I'll just make funny comments throughout the message. I'll just laugh about various parts of the scripture that we're talking about. I'll make little weird references to eighties songs or eighties movies or those kind of things.

That's just who I am, and I feel like it engages my audience. So I like to think of myself as someone who teaches truth with whimsy and simplicity. I just feel like simple isn't always shallow and complicated isn't always deep. I just want to make it simple. And especially if I'm zeroing in on someone a negative one into a positive two.

So no, your audience know your style. And here's the third thing. Know your goal. Most people want to argue about evangelism versus discipleship. The question they really want to know is which of those are you trying to do on a Sunday morning for an hour? Here's what I mean by that. The church has two primary missions to evangelize and disciple.

Go into all the world, teach the gospel and help people obey what Jesus said. Evangelism. Discipleship. You have to decide what are you going to try to accomplish in one hour on Sunday? You can't do it all and what churches want to argue about is what the purpose of Sunday morning is. When people say is church for unchurched people, I like to say to them, I believe that the church is full of believers, but I believe the church service should welcome unbelievers.

It should be a safe place for them to come in. And so we choose to do evangelism primarily. On Sunday morning, we spent a lot of time talking about what it means to follow Jesus, how to follow Jesus, how to put your faith in Jesus. Some of the basics of the faith. But then the depth of the faith, meaning the discipleship that gets played out in our small groups during the week, and classes and courses that we offer.

You have to decide what are you going to try to accomplish in one hour on Sunday? You want to go to discipleship, that's fine. But then you're going to need to make sure that you're offering evangelism throughout the week and equipping your people to do that. So no, your audience know your style, know your goal, and then it becomes a lot easier when somebody comes in with a complaint and you realize, Oh yeah, you're a positive three and you want Sunday morning for you.

I got it. We're going after zero to positive two, but four positive threes. We've got this course in this course, in this course. And if you're only going to give us an hour a week, well, then I'm not sure if you're a positive three to begin with. In fact, here's the things that I've realized when I talk to people that have pushback on the way we do church and the way that I teach.

I've often learned that they're acting like they're very deep, but really they're struggling with the intermediate things. Here's what I mean by that. I like to ask people, Who's the last person you've led to Christ? Because I don't want to hear about depth when you aren't even doing the ABCs of your faith. That's what we're supposed to all be doing.

People will get into heaven with, Do they know Jesus? It doesn't matter if they understand what Michael was trying to say. It doesn't matter if they've been able to articulate Greek words all throughout the New Testament. That's nice, but that's the luxury of the saved. Here's a second thing I try to walk people through. You know, pediatricians have markers for growth.

And if you're not moving beyond those markers, you're not healthy. And when I meet with people who are stuck and try to meet their needs, I'm not helping them. In other words, people show up on the weekends and they get stuck. They're stuck in their faith journey. And I need to help them in that. And if you feel that's beneath you, if you feel like that, you need something that you just haven't heard before, you can get that from podcasts and YouTube videos and books that you read.

But this is the place where I get to help those who are hurting. Another thing I like to remind people is, you know, I've been to Bible College and seminary and been a pastor for 30 years, but the time when I've grown the most is when I have walked with somebody that's not yet a believer because they ask me questions that force me to go back and reevaluate what it is I believe and wonder, do I really believe this?

Or am I just hitting the faith button, so to speak? In fact, until you sit in church next to a person whose eternity hangs in the balance, you'll never understand why we do what we do. When a person is not passionate about evangelism and looks at us, they think shallow. But when a person who is passionate about evangelism looks at us and the way we do church, they say thank you because they've brought a friend who finally understands what it is that God has to offer them.

So here's what I had to say to you. You've got to figure out your audience. You've got to figure out your style and be you. And you got to figure out your goal. You may very well have a church that needs to do discipleship on Sunday, but then you've got to figure out when you're going to do evangelism.

Your style may be more directed towards discipleship. I heard one pastor that I'm a friend with say I'm just a seminary professor. They've employed to be their pastor. Great. But how are you doing? Evangelism during the week. You've got to figure out that two sides to that one coin and what you're going to spend your hour on on Sunday.

And don't do what I did where you just chase making people happy. Keeping people there or trying to keep people entertained. You be you lean into who you are and the gifts that you have and the style that you have. And God will connect you with the people He's trying to bring your way. Well, that's one more of my failures.

There's more to come. In fact, a whole lot more coming next fall. But for now, I'll stop there with that. As always, thank you for listening. Please leave a review and and we'll we'll read it and will draw a winner. And next week, we'll be back with brand new content. As I have a conversation with a church planner by the name of Carl Kuhl. He's going to make church planning simple. And tell us a little bit about doing that in the New England area. Cannot wait for you to hear that. Leave a review. You'll get a free gift. Possibly. And please check out stadiachurchplanting.com. As always, keep it simple.

Narrator: Take a moment and subscribe to the podcast so you'll get it delivered every week. And subscribe to the Rusty George YouTube Channel for more devotionals, messages and fun videos. Thank you for listening to Leading Simple.