The Meet Hope Podcast
The Meet Hope Podcast
98: Unity, Humility, Love, and How We Choose Them Right Now with Pastors Jeff Bills & Heather Mandala
Are you feeling the stress and tension of existing alongside others who think or feel differently than you right now? Join in as Pastor Jeff Bills shares insights from Andy Stanley's compelling book "Not In It To Win It." We confront the challenging reality of election seasons, where fear and anger often overshadow compassion and understanding within the church. Jeff emphasizes how crucial it is for faith communities to prioritize unity, humility, and love, mirroring the harmony Jesus envisioned. Our hope is that this episode brings you encouragement, especially in a season where we know it may feel harder to find.
NOTES & RESOURCES:
- Book - Not In It to Win It by Andy Stanley: https://a.co/d/daCIUh5
- Reach out to Pastor Jeff: jeff@meethope.org or Pastor Heather: heather@meethope.org
- The Messy Middle series: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t7pl9GPIF-Q&list=PLEQixiufAbFrni2F_GP6766X7ALQyhFoa
Thanks for being a part of the HOPE community as we continue conversations about faith and hope! You can learn more at meethope.org or find us on socials @meethopechurch. Join in for worship on Sundays at meethope.live! Have a question? Contact us at podcast@meethope.org.
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Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast, where we have conversations about faith and hope. Hope is one church made of people living out their faith through two expressions in person and online. We believe a hybrid faith experience can lead to a growing influence in our community and our world for the sake of others. Welcome to Hope.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Meet Hope podcast. We're so glad you've joined us today. My name is Heather Mandela and I am here with our lead pastor, Jeff Bills. Welcome, Jeff, Thanks.
Speaker 3:Good to be with you guys.
Speaker 2:So we are excited about one of the small groups that you are just wrapping up right now. It's based on Andy Stanley's book Not In it To Win it Right. So tell me a little bit about you know your elevator pitch, about the book itself. What's the book about?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I actually came across the book about two years ago and it spoke to me in a way that I thought I want to share this with some folks at Hope around the election time. So Stanley was reflecting on the 2020 election and specifically how churches were engaging in the political environment, and to the point that they were totally on board. He's an evangelical and he's from the South, so he's specifically speaking to that community, although the principles apply across the board, and really calling out the church for engaging in behaviors that are more reflective of a political action group than what the Church of Jesus Christ is supposed to be about, and so I appreciated his directness, I appreciated his clarity and I appreciated his the way that he really brings scripture to bear on this subject.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so it's a really important book, I thought.
Speaker 2:Particularly during this time. It was no mistake that this is when it was scheduled for.
Speaker 3:Yeah, right, yeah, I've been holding it for about a year and a half waiting to.
Speaker 2:Waiting till we got to election season? Yeah, because it is a divisive time. Any election season, yep, uh, but this is, of course, always feels like the most. But, um, whatever our current is, we always feel like oh, but it's. This is it. This is the right, because it's what we're living in in the moment yeah.
Speaker 3:So the first election that, uh, I was pastor of hope was George HW Bush running against gosh. Who was he running against back in the day? Bill Clinton, okay, yeah, so you know again, it was energized and people on both sides were saying if the other guy wins, they're leaving the country.
Speaker 2:So yeah, but we mean it this time, that's right.
Speaker 3:I haven't actually seen anybody leave the country, but maybe they have.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I don't know, but it definitely brings out the worst in all of us. Fear, yeah, fear, exactly, exactly. It's all about what we're most afraid of.
Speaker 3:And that's been the game all along right. So the thing that energizes people to act is fear and anger, and so political parties are masters at fueling our fears and getting us riled up and angry. And then we will give money, or we'll give votes, or we'll get active.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And it's so corrosive and it does such great damage and it's gotten certainly more intense, sure, certainly in the last 35 years.
Speaker 2:Well, you have the influx of social media and 24-hour news cycles and all of those things that just put it in our face all of the time and amp up those emotions. And in the mental health world, we talk about the fact that anger is a secondary emotion, right? So when we're angry, we're actually fueled by something else, and usually that's often I shouldn't say usually often that's fear, and certainly during election series seasons, that's what we're seeing. Is this playing on fear of it'll never be the same, everything will be bad. If this doesn't happen, something's going to happen. That's worse, and so it just plays on that. And that makes us, because we're afraid, that we're angry and we lash out and we don't think clearly about what we're saying or doing or how we're acting, but we're fueling ourselves based on this righteousness that is. That's imaginary.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's, it's a lot of manipulation and so forth, and so. So what's the?
Speaker 2:answer then.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:So we've identified the problem clearly. So what is the answer? How should? What does Andy Stanley say about it? What do you say about it? How should we be approaching a time that's divisive like this? We?
Speaker 3:just went back to the principles that we introduced in the series the Messy Middle and it's not what Andy Stanley did, but it was consistent, I think, with what he did in his book and we said really, the church, the things that we need to be focused on as God's people, as the Church of Jesus Christ, are unity, humility and love. As we go through this season, and because what's happening is, as the church is getting more politicized, it's becoming more divided. So if you are not united with me in my party affiliation or my commitment to a candidate, then I can't be with you, right, and so it doesn't matter what Jesus said about our being unified. We're dividing over these political arguments and that's just wrong.
Speaker 3:Yeah and that's just wrong. And so to reaffirm and to say that Jesus said that he wanted his church to be one, even to the point of the way that he and the Father are one. So in John 17, as he's praying that prayer, he's calling on God to let the church in the future, he's talking about the future church right.
Speaker 3:Not the church, then, but those who will follow because of the message of the disciples that they would be unified, and so it's a really important thing. We don't often take it seriously enough, and the other thing that's happening is churches are putting winning elections over witnessing for Jesus A really important point that Andy made and so people who disagree, you know, and the country is divided, seemingly 50-50. Apparently so. If you take a side, you're ignoring 50% of the population for Christ.
Speaker 2:Yep.
Speaker 3:And that's just wholly absurd.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it does feel a little incredible, and yet it's so easy to get caught up in when that's what everything in the culture is doing at that moment. And so this is one of those ways that I think that we get to be different. It doesn't mean we're apolitical, but it means that we approach politics with the idea of unity, humility and love, and that I can love you as an individual, even if I disagree with you politically, and we can agree these are important issues, but agree that we're going to vote differently on these important issues.
Speaker 3:And one of the things I assume everybody who's listening to this knows and understands is we have folks across the political spectrum here at Hope and who feel strongly about different issues that are important to the country and matter to them, and that's all fine.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:That's where humility comes in, that I may hold these positions and believe that they're correct and right, um, but I'm humble enough to know that somebody else, with a different set of experiences, with a different set of backgrounds and uh, uh, priorities and so forth, may see it very differently than I do, and uh, and so when I sit down with these folks and we talk together, I may be unchanged in my perspective, but at least I now understand how somebody came to that position.
Speaker 2:And I can treat them with respect Was able to say I really firmly believe that, while we are voting differently, you're voting your choice because, you know, this gentleman really thought it was the absolute best way to ensure his family's safety and to be able to provide for those he cared for and loved, and I can respect that. That's the position he was taking, right? I can disagree with him and think that I'm supporting my. That's the position he was taking. I can disagree with him and think that I'm supporting my family by voting in a different manner, but I can also say, hey, I can be at peace with you regardless, because the reality is I'm still going to get up and I'm going to go to work the day after the election the same as I did the day of the election and the day before the election.
Speaker 3:Right, right. So then we as a church, you know, and so we come at it as individuals, of course, and we're citizens of the United States. But one of the points that Stanley makes and he's really good at turns of phrases he said you know, we make a pledge where we say we are one nation under God, but when we reverse that and we say we have one God under our nation, that's when we get into trouble, when the national concerns and my focus on the nation supersedes my devotion to God.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:And when that's perceived out in the broader population. That that's what we're doing. We lose our prophetic voice yes, we do. We lose the ability to witness to folks about the transforming power of Jesus Christ, yeah, and so we're trying to make our country great at the expense of the message of Jesus Christ, which invites everyone to the table and is a transforming power for everyone, and so the whole idea of humility that we come at these issues all recognizing that we know in part, we understand in part. We don't know the full picture on anything.
Speaker 3:And that any decision that we make is going to have unintended consequences. Right, yes, and so even those things that we think are absolutely right.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 3:I share this story often because it's got a personal connection. My great-grandfather, james, was a Methodist preacher, okay, and he was very involved in Prohibition, okay, back in the early 20th century, for lots of good reasons. Sure, alcoholism was rampant in the US. It was devastating families, it was doing all kinds of health damage to people. Children were left fatherless and motherless, and so it was a pandemic kind of event or epidemic kind of thing.
Speaker 3:So all the right motives of if we can get rid of alcohol, we'll save our country, of if we can get rid of alcohol, we'll save our country, and they invested enormous amounts of time and energy and resource to get an amendment to the Constitution that prohibits alcohol in this country and they won Yep Right and how'd that go?
Speaker 2:In some ways, yeah, did they win. Right All of these unintended consequences right of creating a black market and I mean, some great music came out of that, this little speakeasy culture, you know, like we yeah.
Speaker 3:Another unintended consequence. There you go, yeah. So again you know this humility of we see in part, yeah, they were doing a good thing, they had the right intent, but trying to force people to live a righteous life through, laws and so forth.
Speaker 2:You can't legislate love. Yeah, you can't legislate love.
Speaker 3:Yeah, and the power of the gospel to transform a heart is so much more powerful.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:So the humility part of this is a value. So when we're talking about how we have people think about elections and politics and so forth, the unity of the faith, the unity of the church over all of those things, a humility that we don't know everything, we don't have all of the answers.
Speaker 2:We cannot possibly predict what's coming down the road.
Speaker 3:Exactly, yeah, exactly, and really we should be. Ideally, we're all in this together, right. We're trying to solve problems together, right, but too often it's more about my party winning than the country winning. Right and the crown jewel of our faith right is love, that we are called to love others, even those who oppose us. Yeah, and that is so absent in this season right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's hard to find. We're searching for that right now. Yeah, and the church should be the first place you can find it. Yeah, and unfortunately it's not in a lot of cases, right.
Speaker 3:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, or we'll love you if there's always a contingent. You know, like, yes, we love you If you vote the way we do, if you think the way we do if we dress the way we do.
Speaker 3:If we dress the way you, do you know it's contingent. Yep, you're welcome here if and yeah, but love is not that way. Love, you know, the love of Jesus is unconditional love and accepting people by grace, recognizing that they are sinners we are all sinners saved by God's grace and that, and the example of Jesus throughout the New Testament right is. He loved all the wrong people. They weren't.
Speaker 2:And had no interest in politics at all.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 2:Plenty of his followers would have preferred that he had overthrown the king or had overthrown the Pharisees and taken up a political and revolutionary stance. But that was not who he was.
Speaker 3:That was the expectation by some, and again part of Andy Stanley's book is pointing out that the church was at its absolute most effective the first 300 years after the resurrection of Jesus. The first 300 years after the resurrection of Jesus, and during those 300 years those Christ followers were just about that. What does it look like for us to follow Jesus? And they didn't have organized churches. They had home churches all around the place.
Speaker 2:No, hierarchical structure the way we think of it today. None of that, yes, none of that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, they had no resource, you know unified resources. They had no Bible.
Speaker 2:The Bible wasn't put together until sometime in the 300s and yet they transformed the world and ultimately the Roman Empire became Christian, and at one level it was a great success and at another level, yeah, as soon as we got power right, as soon as humans get too involved in any one thing, yeah, we're gonna.
Speaker 3:We're gonna mess it up so, uh, and you lose your humility and it all becomes about. All right, this is the way it's gonna go now for everybody yeah, you're gonna agree with me or you're out yeah um yeah, so you know what that's easier, isn't it?
Speaker 2:oh so much easier to just hang out with people who think just like me, look just just like me, do just what I do. So much easier because I don't have to look at myself, I don't have to examine the possibility that I might be wrong or I might not know it all or I might need to change. So much easier if you change so much easier.
Speaker 3:Yeah, that whole thing of proximity right. When we draw close to people who are different than us, suddenly they become people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, we move from generality to specific and it's really easy to be irate and think the worst in generalities. But once you are sitting face-to-face and talking to someone who is hurting, it's a completely different ballgame Sure and that's why God calls us to be sitting face-to-face and talking to someone who is hurting. It's a completely different ballgame Sure and that's why God calls us to be sitting face-to-face with people who are hurting. There it is.
Speaker 3:Because that's what it's about. So that was it. That's kind of. We had great discussions in that small group and I honestly I went in a little nervous because-. I would have this is an energized time, like we were saying and various perspectives. I had some guidelines for the group and the first guideline was there are no bad people here.
Speaker 2:I love it, love it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so we're going to disagree at times, but there's no bad people here, and so we had some energized conversations, good conversations. I don't know that any minds were changed that really wasn't the point even but that's what the church can do, right. Yeah, but that's what the church can do, right. So the church should be this place where people of different perspectives who are unified in their commitment to Jesus, even if they're in different places in their faith Sure, some having walked in faith for a lot longer, some less, some still exploring it but can come here in a safe place and figure this stuff out.
Speaker 2:Be heard, be seen, be valued, whether they agree with all of the bullet points or not, and through those discussions we get to know Jesus a little bit better.
Speaker 3:Indeed.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you know, god knew what he was doing when he know Jesus a little bit better. Indeed, yeah, so.
Speaker 3:You know, God knew what he was doing when he created this thing called the church.
Speaker 2:Right, yeah.
Speaker 3:I love calling it God's dream community that when we are living as an authentic Christian community, there is no better type of community in the world.
Speaker 2:Agreed.
Speaker 3:So that's what we aspire to, right To be God's dream community right here. And it happens, one decision at a time. Yep, each of us saying you know what? I'm going to pursue unity. I'm going to pursue humility. I'm going to pursue love. I'm going to pursue humility. I'm going to pursue love, I'm going to choose love. And when you have hundreds of people doing that together, oh, it's a force.
Speaker 2:It's a force and it's an amazing thing. So, as we wrap up today, I do want to encourage you as challenging as this season is, you don't have to do it alone, and we are here to support and love each other. And so, as we walk through a challenging week, I just want to encourage you to keep your eyes and your hearts fixed on our God and Lord and Savior and the peace that he offers, and we will catch up with you soon.
Speaker 1:Thanks for being a part of the Hope Community as we continue our conversations about faith and hope. If you don't already, please join us for worship on Sundays or on demand. You can learn more at meethopeorg or find us on socials at Meet Hope Church.