Travis welcomes Michel Hendricks to the show! In the past few decades, so much of church and the Christian life has been about simply gaining information that leads us to believe and hopefully do the right things. However, as time has gone on, many Christ-followers have felt that there is more. Could there be something that we are missing? As the pandemic revealed, we are built for connection to God first and then with others second. In fact, our brains are divinely wired for both, and yet many within the church have neglected this important part of our makeup. However, in recent years there has been a relational reformation-a hunger to recover the connection with people the way God intended and we now have the brain science to show us what the Bible has been talking about for millennia.

Travis and Michel discuss his book, The Other Half of Church, which he co-authored with our previous guest Jim Wilder. The book has become the go-to text for this relational reformation and rightly so because they have hit on something that many within the church have been saying and feeling for years: there is more and the Bible tells us all about it!

Listen in as they talk about how God has wired our brains for relationships and joy and how we can return to this relational joy the way that God intended!

Learn more about Life Model Works.

Check out Michel's books.

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Help support the ministry of Apollos Watered and transform your world today!

Takeaways:

• The foundational essence of joy in our lives serves as a vital prerequisite for effective discipleship, much like a gas tank is essential for a vehicle's operation.
• Experiencing joy is not merely a fleeting emotion; it is intrinsically connected to our growth and maturation in character, especially within a Christian context.
• In order to foster a thriving community of faith, we must prioritize relational elements such as joy and hesed, which cultivate an environment conducive to spiritual development.
• Our group identity plays a significant role in shaping our behavior and character, emphasizing the importance of belonging and attachment within our spiritual journeys.

It functions like the gas tank.

Again, if our joy is low, meaning I don't have many happy faces that are happy to be with me that I feel special around, if my joy is low, then my discipleship, even really good Christian practices aren't going to work very well because the brain is not in a state where it's maturing and growing character. When joy is low, when our joy is high, that doesn't mean we need nothing else. That's all we need. But that's the prerequisite.

It's watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollo's Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming, and I am your host. And today we're having another one of our.

Deep conversations.

Have you ever felt like your spiritual life is stalled out? Like the things that are supposed to help you grow as a Christian just aren't working for whatever reason? What about this?

What if you are a pastor of spiritual formation and you can't figure out why some people are growing and others aren't? Or why the stuff we do and teach works for some people, but not for others? That is Michael Hendricks story.

Today is part one of my conversation with Michael. He's an author, inventor, former pastor of spiritual formation, and the director of Life Model Consulting.

He is also co author of the Other Half of Church, written with our previous guest, Jim Wilder. Here at Apollos Watered, we talk a lot about watering your faith.

Michael and his teammates use a similar metaphor, nutrients in the soil that allow for growth.

Today we're going to talk about all three of Joy Hesed, which is the Hebrew word for love and group identity and how together, they actually set the stage for our growth in ways that we typically don't think about. Happy listening.

Michael Hendricks. Welcome to Apollos Watered.

Thank you, Travis. It's good to be here.

Are you ready for the fast five?

I don't know if anybody's ever ready for that, but I'm willing.

Here we go. Mountains or beach?

For me, beach, because I live in the mountains.

Oh, so you want the other. You want to be different?

I want the variety, yes.

Question number two.

Best food in Argentina is by far, it's their barbecue. The way they barbecue beef. They have the best beef I've ever had.

Really? How do they barbecue their beef? That's different than what we do in.

The U.S. well, for good beef, they only put salt and pepper on it. Anything more on A good kind of beef is like sacrilege.

And it's low and slow over coals, but they're not briquettes. They're actually hardened charcoal. So it looks like pieces of wood.

Did you grow up in Argentina?

No, but I lived there for a year.

Okay.

Okay. That's why I knew that you had an Argentinian background of some sort. I just didn't know what.

Yeah, my wife's from Argentina.

Oh, well, then here we go. This is going to be fun. So world football or American football?

I transitioned the last time the Broncos run the Super Bowl. I loved that when we won it. It was like five or six years ago.

And then I stopped caring about football, and now I'm all in the Argentine national team.

Here we go. The question number four.

Because you've lived in a different culture and your wife comes from a different culture, what is the funniest cross cultural experience that you have?

Oh, there's quite a few of them. But there's one time when I was learning Spanish and we were around a meal that I think they put fruit on the plate and the fruit looked kind of old.

And I tried to make a. I used a phrase in English. We would say, this fruit has seen better days.

But I said that literally in Spanish, and there was silence around the table for like five seconds. And then everybody just started laughing. They never explained. All I knew is what I said didn't make sense.

But they kind of got what I was trying to say. And it was funny the way I did it.

Fifth question is this. If you were an animal, okay. What animal would you be and why?

Wow, that's a hard one. I think it'd probably be a bald eagle. And the reason is I love to soar on the heights and to look at things from 1,000ft above.

But you knew that the bald eagle wasn't originally supposed to be the American bird.

I realized that it used to be supposed to be the turkey. Right. Or something like that.

That just doesn't go as well on the flag and with the red, white, and blue. That would have been kind of an odd picture. But let's hear about yourself. What is the Michael Hendrix story? Where'd you grow up?

And how did you get to where you're at today? I mean, you. You've been to Argentina, you live there, and you're working at life model works, helping people grow in their relationship with Jesus.

But what's the Michael Hendrix story?

I grew up in southwest Denver, you know, Colorado native. Not many of those these days anymore because so many people have come in and.

But didn't grow up in a Christian family, didn't really have any kind of Christian background at all. About the only time I ever went to church was when I would visit my grandmother in Nebraska and she would kind of drag us there. And so I really had.

I was kind of a blank slate a little bit.

But sometime around high school and especially my first year of college, I started having some existential struggles about what the meaning of life is.

And, you know, I remember being in our dorm floor freshman year late at night, sitting in a circle, and we're all talking about what the meaning of life is.

It seemed like everybody else had this idea or had some philosophy, but if I was honest, all I could say is I literally have no idea what this is all about, you know, looking around and seeing what this is. And so. But it was just like this nagging thing in the back of my head.

And the summer after my freshman year at college, I moved home to get a summer job for the summer to make some money. It was during that year where one night I couldn't fall asleep.

And about one in the morning I gave up and went upstairs and we have this big bookcase, my parents, from the floor to ceiling. And I was looking for a book that I could read that would help me fall asleep. And so I'm scanning it and I saw a Bible there.

Black Bible, typical black. Probably was from my grandmother. And I remembered how boring church was when I was dragged there in Nebraska.

And so I thought, that's probably a boring book. So I grabbed it and thought it was going to help me fall asleep. That's really what I was looking for. So I took it back to bed and I cracked.

Just kind of randomly cracked it open. And it said New Testament of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ.

And when I read that, I thought, I don't know what that means, first of all, and I don't know what's new about it. And so I just started reading and. But I thought, you know, I know it's probably going to be boring, so it'll help me fall asleep.

So I started reading, you know, that it'd be the first. The first chapter of Matthew, as you know. And it started with the genealogies.

This guy beget this other guy beget this person, these 12 sons begotten, you know, on and on and on. And I thought, wow, this is actually more boring than I thought it would be.

But thankfully, I didn't give up after the genealogies and I kept Reading. And I realized it was about Jesus. In his life, I had no idea that the New Testament existed.

And so I read maybe five chapters of the book of Matthew that night.

And it's kind of hard to explain in words, but what I heard without hearing a voice is essentially God saying, I see this existential struggle you're having. And the answer to that struggle you'll find in this person, Jesus Christ, who's my son. And I had never heard anything.

I'd never sensed anything like that before. I rolled over on my knees in bed and said, thank you for showing me the purpose of life. And then I fell asleep.

I woke up the next morning, and I had a job in downtown Denver delivering blueprints to oil companies on a bicycle.

So I kind of weaved in and out of the big buildings downtown, delivering blueprints, and I was, like, on a spiritual high, but I had no idea what the hell had just happened to me. And it's like, I share this in the other half of church. The book I wrote with Jim Wilder that I.

I rode past a light pole that had a sticker on it that said, Jesus loves you. And I'd ridden by that. That light pole every day for, you know, a month. I'd never seen it, but I saw that sticker that day.

And I remember shouting out, like, to the universe. Yeah, he does.

Jesus actually loves me, you know, And I had only been a Christian maybe seven hours at that point, you know, because that happened, like, one or two in the morning, and this is probably the next morning at, you know, nine or something. Who knows what time it was exactly.

And so that was the start of my spiritual experience, you know, from essentially not knowing a thing to meeting Jesus, but not really knowing anything else. And so the rest of my summer was just reading another chapter or two of Matthew before I fall asleep.

You know, I didn't go to church because nowhere in the Bible did it tell me I was supposed to. Yet, you know, I'd only had maybe seven chapters of Matthew by that time under the belt. And so that's basically how I came to know Jesus.

And I know that's unusual, but to me, it was just a beautiful thing to just. It was like this connection between me and Jesus before I ever told anybody.

About it, which is pretty incredible, actually. I love hearing the stories of how people have come to faith. And it's never in the way that you think. It's always messy, backwards.

You never experience it. So you didn't. You got into church, but when did you really Start to grow. I mean, it sounds like you were growing right away.

Well, you know, I kept working and just reading the Bible that summer. And then I returned to school. I planned to live with my roommate, Steve Lowe. He's from Pennsylvania.

You know, we kind of partied hard and everything our freshman year together, but we also got along well and we played tennis. And so we decided to live together that following year.

And so I showed up to our room, our apartment, and I'm unpacking my bags and everything, and he shows up and. And he puts. I remember him putting his two suitcases on the ground and saying to me, michael, I'm not sure I'm going to live with you this year.

And I was kind of shocked. I said, what's the deal, Steve? And he goes, well, last year we partied, and I'm a Christian, and over the summer, I've kind of rededicated my life.

I'm not going to party with you anymore. So I imagine you're not going to want to live with me this year.

And as soon as I heard him say, you know, I'm a Christian, but I basically stopped listening to anything else he was saying and just waited for him to stop talking. And as soon as he stopped talking, I said, I'm a Christian, too. And literally, that was the last.

Those were the last few words he ever imagined would be coming out of my mouth in that moment. So there was, like, this look of shock on his face. Of course, I had been reading the Bible for maybe a month and a half all on my own, so I was only.

I was probably understanding about half of what I read. The other half I wasn't. And he grew up going to church.

You know, he was a Chinese Americans had been going to a Chinese American Christian church in Pittsburgh, and he'd been going to Sunday school and youth group. So he knew way more than I did. And so I just fired questions at him. And we ended up talking, I'd say, for probably two hours.

And at the end of those two hours, he said, let's get involved in a Christian group on campus and meet some other Christians. And I had no idea there were Christian groups. I'd never heard of anything like that in my life.

But we got involved, and very quickly I was in a group of other people my age who are way farther down the road than me as Christians. And I was being helped and taught how to read the Bible and discipled and in small groups. And I just started. I would just say I grew like a weed.

And that really Became my first Christian community. Although it wasn't technically a church, it was my first deep Christian community.

And the relationships that I formed in those, I would say six years. I was involved six or seven years. To this day, they're all my closest friendships.

So you come to Christ when you're in college and then you're growing, it seems like you said growing like a weed. And then what happened after college?

Well, you know, as things happen, you know, people graduate and disperse and get married and do other things. And so this community gradually kind of scattered.

I still had some friendships from that community, but I started more being focused in church and going to church. But I also started seeing this kind of rapid weed like growth that I experienced. I started seeing it kind of slow down.

And I never felt like I stopped growing, but it was harder. And I found and ran into more areas of my life that seemed kind of resistant to change.

Where the usual Christian answers didn't really get traction, I would say, whereas earlier it seems they did. And you know, it was almost like there was stubbornness in my soul.

I was running up against things that I didn't know why I couldn't easily change them. And so I thought, you know, am I doing something wrong? Is there something wrong with me or is there something wrong with my church?

But I really didn't have answers. I just realized and I thought maybe this is just the way Christian life is. There's some low hanging fruit that happens real fast and that's fine.

And then after that it's just kind of this slow struggle versus really kind of creeping change.

Are you on staff?

No ball in a church at that time, working a normal corporate job. And I also started going to seminary.

I thought sermon might answer some of these questions about how do we grow and why do we not see more rapid transformation and what's actually going on in my own life. Why are there some areas of my life that don't seem to respond to the usual Christian practices? I went to seminary, got an MDiv degree over 11 years.

I was just taking a class or two a semester. I went to Denver Seminary, loved my degree there, loved every moment of it. But I didn't see that much growth in my character.

And so that kept getting back to the questions of how do we grow? Why don't we see more rapid transformation in the church? What is character and how does it actually grow?

And so I was at a spot in my Christian life where I had a lot more questions than I did answers.

What happened from that? I mean, you've got these questions. You're going to seminary. Are you getting the answers that you desire?

Not in seminary.

And I also, you know, eventually I'd become an elder of a church in the area that was, you know, growing very rapidly, similar to a church experience you shared before the podcast started.

And was an elder for quite a few years, almost 10 years before they asked me to come on staff and to be the essentially I could write my own, my own job description as the pastor. I would call myself the pastor of spiritual formation. And my job was to help the people in this rapidly growing church.

It was a church too, that had a lot of really, really young Christians that, you know, like me when I was 19 years old in college when I read the Bible at home, there was a lot of those kinds of people who didn't grow up in a church and just had come and heard the teaching and the things we're doing and said, I'm in, but I don't know anything, you know.

And so a lot of what I did in my job is how do we help those people start growing and get along in the path of discipleship into growing into the, and being more and more like Jesus, experiencing the depth of his love and feeling this kind of discipleship character stuff. At the same time I'm having the struggle like, do I really know how this works?

But as a job, as a pastor, disciples, I just kind of dived in and started doing a bunch of stuff. So I wrote a book for brand new Christians. It's called Basic Training for Walking with Jesus.

And we gave out over 20,000 copies of that book and had lots of really, really good results from people saying, wow, this I understood it for the first time and everything. I started a training on spiritual disciplines for five weeks. And again the results of that.

One person said, I think this training actually saved my marriage. Another person came up and said, I had no idea we even did this kind of stuff in the church.

And so I saw really good results, really encouraging results sometimes.

But if I was honest, there's other times where it seems these books and trainings and other things I did didn't seem to work at all for some people or didn't work for some problems.

They worked really well for certain kinds of issues and problems in life and didn't work at all for other kinds of problems and seemed to work for some people and didn't work for other people. So even though I saw lots of good results, I also saw some confusing results.

And I still, I would find myself in my office Scratching my head, looking at my dryer erase board, and thinking, I'm not even sure I know how to do my job anymore. Or at least I was honest enough to admit that there were big variables about how people grow in their character in Christ likeness.

There's a lot of variables there I must be missing, as this is not working the way I thought it would. And it was about that stage where I threw a fortunate providential, I would say, encounters with different people.

I came to know Jim Wilder, and it was through a meeting with a pastor of another church or an elder of another church who came and visited our church, who was a friend of Dallas Willard and saw some of the stuff I was doing and got together with me and said, you know, I see you're doing all this stuff that Dallas Willard writes about.

And he even kind of sometimes would complained to me that, you know, people are talking and reading books about discipleship, but I don't see very many churches actually doing it. And this person, his name's Bob, he said, michael, I see you're actually doing it. But that was in the middle of this kind of struggle.

Like, I'm not sure if it's working. So I said, yeah, Bob, but. And I kind of vomited my frustrations and my questions on him. You know, how do people grow?

Why does it seem to work sometimes and not other times? Why do we sometimes see Christians who treat people better than some non Christians who treat some people better than Christians? I know.

Why do we sometimes see Christian, even leaders and pastors and ministry heads that act in ways that don't look like Jesus at all? And how do I help my people grow? How do I grow? You know, And I just kind of, like, dumped all these on him.

And we started meeting and just kind of looking into this discipleship question.

And he's the one who said, you know, Michael, I think it might help us too, to take a look at how God designed the human brain and how to change character. And I kind of ignored him.

He's, you know, Bob was kind of always in his 80s, and I thought maybe he had a senior moment because what he said made no sense to me at all.

Okay.

But thankfully, he was persistent, because a month later, we were meeting once a month for lunch and doing this, and I pulled a couple other friends in and stuff. But a month later, he said, you know, I still think we're. We're ignoring the neuroscience angle, angle of discipleship.

And I said, bob, I have no idea what you're talking about. What do you mean? The neuroscience angle.

And he got this kind of wry smile, and he said, well, why don't I invite my friend Jim Wilder to our lunch next month? I think he can probably explain it better than I can. So a month later, we sat down with Bob and me and another pastor friend, and then Jim Wilder.

And Jim turned to me and he said, so, Michael, what would you like out of this time together? And I said. I kind of vomited my questions on him, my frustration as a pastor.

And I said, you know, I don't think I really understand how people change or I don't know how to do my job. And then Jim said something that I've never forgotten.

He said, michael, I think it will help you a little bit to understand how God designed the human brain. Right?

Because we agree that God designed the human brain, how he designed the human brain to grow our character and to mature us as citizens of this new family we call the Kingdom of heaven. And then Jim reached down into his briefcase and pulled out a plastic brain. He unhinged the brain for the two.

Hours carrying around a plastic brain, just.

Happened to be carrying around. Maybe he does that all the time. I have no idea.

Okay?

And he starts saying, basically, you know, Michael, every way that we are, every way we can sense our environment, you know, from taste and touch and hearing and all the senses in any ways, we can sense our surroundings and relational surroundings. They end up going into our.

The back, right side of our brain stem on the right half of our brain, and there's a control processor that process these, and it sends all this data and all the sensors in our bodies and everything, and it goes from the back of our brain on the right side to the front of the brain on the right side. And then behind our right eye, it crosses over and then goes from the front into the back on the left side of the ring.

And it is analyzing our experiences, and it's this control process that is in charge of the experience of growing our character and maturing us. And then he explained some things about that.

And I said, well, what's an example, then of some spiritual disciplines or practices or things we do that help us grow and mature, but that maybe we wouldn't know in the typical Christian answers of how we. How we grow as disciples.

And he said, well, Michael, the brain was really designed to desire first and foremost in looking and scanning, even six times a second, for one thing more than any other thing at the beginning. And that thing we call joy. And even the scientist and researcher, his name's Dr.

Alan Shore from UCLA, he's a researcher and psychiatrist and he actually found kind of interpreted this control processor and he called joy the twinkle in our eye. That non verbally without words, doesn't need words.

At least that communicates to me that I can tell from the twinkle in your eye that I'm special to you and that you're happy to be with me. He said the brain uses joy almost like a car needs fuel.

It fuels any kind of growth in discipleship that we may want to do, meaning our environments, our churches, our surroundings need to be high joy. High joy, again is that I am glad to be with you. It doesn't mean I am happy. It means I am happy to be with you.

So we can be joyful during a success or a good time of life, the birth of your child or your wedding, and we are happy or we are entering into your joy. We can also be very highly joyful with you. In deep loss.

We think of the horrible loss we have experienced in the last week or two in Buffalo and now down in Texas. We don't recommend people be happy about that, but we do recommend they be joyful, meaning we are with you.

Those churches and people down there coming around them saying, we will walk with you, but this is a joy that is very, very somber, but it's very joyful, meaning, I am with you in this. You are not alone. I will walk with you because you're special to me and I would never leave you alone in this.

And I'll do anything, including sitting in silence with you or giving you space or helping you out, but I'm with you. My brain is scanning.

Our brains are scanning the environment, even right now, are scanning our environment, looking for faces that are happy to be with us, that are deeply bonded and want to live life with us.

So I'm trying to understand this going, okay, I know that we're wired for joy. And it's interesting because I grew up in that period of time where John Piper really started to become well known.

And he talks about the Christian hedonism, he talks about the joy and Jesus, who for the joy set before him, even going back to CS Lewis, the joyful Christian, there's this idea of joy, which you guys are saying now, hey, they were right. It's just we now understand the brain science behind it. And it's not just this pursuit of joy.

It's a pursuit of joy that we're wired to have to be around people. Right?

Yeah.

They not only discovered it, but, you know, God discovered it when he taught Moses, the prayer for the blessing upon the Israelites, where he says, you know, pray this upon the people as a blessing. Yes, and the Lord bless you and keep you. And the Lord make his what face.

Shine upon you, which. You talk about that in the book. The face of God. The face of God. And, you know, you mentioned that.

I couldn't help but think, because I'm reading this in the pandemic, of course, and there's masks everywhere. And one of the members of our team, Kevin, is his son, is on the spectrum.

And they had a very hard time going out of public because he couldn't handle the masks and not seeing the face. And I thought, well, being on the spectrum means that the filter is not working. In essence, you can't take the environment.

And so when I look at that for us, I'm like, well, it's just the same with us. We need to see the face. And that's why some people struggle so much, is we can't read whether or not you want to be with us or not.

And we need that.

We need that connection. We are wired for that connection. So you guys are saying, first of all, we're wired for joy and to be with people first. Right?

That's what we're talking about. That's the starting point.

Correct. And it functions like the gas tank. Again, if our joy is low, meaning I don't have many happy faces that are happy to be with me that are.

That I feel special around.

If my joy is low, then my discipleship, even really good Christian practices aren't going to work very well because the brain is not in a state where it's maturing and growing character. When joy is low, when our joy is high, that doesn't mean we need nothing else. That's all we need. But that's the prerequisite.

Very much like if you had a brand new car, you bought a brand new car, and zero kilometers, as they would say in Spanish, you know, zero miles. And it's a perfect car, and yet it has nothing in the gas tank. How useful is that to you?

We have this beautiful brain God designed, but when joy is low, it doesn't work very well. Pretty much nothing really works well. And so kind of the overriding, overarching discipleship concept here or principle is that we start with joy.

When we're discipling new Christians, when we meet people and we're working on things in our life, when we're trying to bring healing as well, one of the first things we do is start with exercises of Building joy, which are two things, face and eyes. We learn to start giving our face and eyes to people.

Not in a weird, you know, staring people out and just looking at them where it gets uncomfortable, but giving a couple seconds and letting them just know, I am so glad you are here. Oftentimes, you know what we find, like in the supermarket, I actually stopped changing the way I waited in line at the supermarket.

A lot of times I pull my phone out and start flipping through things. I keep the phone in the pocket now, and I'm just looking for some people that I can let them know. They're beautiful people, they're valuable people.

Even if I don't know them well, I can let them know pretty easily that I see value in them. Very important with our kids.

As a matter of fact, the ideal and most key audience for all of what we're doing in this neuroscience is young mothers and young couples before they have children. You know, my wife and I like to go hiking and a lot of our hiking trails go through a park first.

Before we go onto the trails, often we'll go by this park and there's all these little play things and everything. And there's just these beautiful little creatures, you know, 2, 3 year olds, 4 year olds, 5 year olds, jumping and swinging and doing.

And it is so absolutely beautiful, gorgeous. It's almost like a taste of heaven.

And then I look over to the park bench where the mother or the father is and their heads down and they're buried in their phone.

They need to see our faces. So we're not burying our phones because they need to see. This is the. Are you watching, Daddy? Are you watching? Are you watching?

It's the same as adults. It doesn't really change much, right?

And those kids are looking. Even if the parent doesn't realize that those kids are looking very quickly off and on. Their brains are actually scanning six times a second.

And due to that, their eyes are looking over and seeing is Mommy and Daddy. Are they delighted in me? The other word we use with joy is delight. Do I experience the delight of my parents?

And that really functions very much as much as important as giving your kids food. You start withholding food from your child, we start thinking you have mental problems and we need to get help for this.

But when we bury our heads in our phones or when we have the TV on during dinner with small kids or things that are taking our eyes away from them, it's almost like we're withholding nutrition from them. But it's emotional and relational nutrition.

They need for their brains to grow, for them to learn a really healthy suite of relational skills and for them to build emotional resilience, which is very, very important. At early age, in the first four years of life, they learn how to handle big emotions and stay relational.

And a lot of that is through eyes and face encounters around the big emotions of life that little toddlers run into like bumping their heads onto the table. And they get angry and the mother gets down with the kid and goes, oh, that hurts. I get angry when that happens too.

Well, let's see what we can do about this. And these kind of angry interactions face to face. That's actually mother being angry and joyful at the same time. Oh, that hurts when that does.

That makes me angry too. But you can see the anger on the mother's face, but also the mother saying it is non verbally communicating, I'm glad to be with you in this anger.

And let's see what we can do about it together. That child, 10 or 20 or 100 more of those interactions around anger and around shame and around fear, around sadness.

That young child will have incredible emotional resilience later in life. Most of us don't get that today. We are in a relational skills meltdown right now in our country. And it is something we have never seen before.

And it is dangerous territory.

Well, it is not even just in our country, I would say within the west and it is even happening in other countries. I remember being in Uganda and I was surprised where I saw, I had to hike up a dirt road that had been washed away.

It gets washed away every year in the rainy season.

Get up to a mud hut and they're at the top of, the top of this, this mountain is this mud hut and the mother sitting there and then outside of the window is a, it's a solar power charger for her cell phone. And she's on her cell phone there just looking at her phone while we're there. And I thought, well, what in the world?

I mean, this is just where we're at. And I know in Europe, in the UK and I think it was about two years ago, maybe three, where they had hired their first ever minister of loneliness.

Because of the isolated nature in which we find ourselves, we are more and more isolated. And of course social media doesn't help at all with that. It continues to promote that.

But you're saying, no, no, no, we're calling people back to kind of this embodiment of being there. This is how God has wired us. We're not Inventing anything new. We're just drawing attention to how we are created.

And God talks about this throughout his word that we need one another. We're in a body even when we come to saving faith, of course. But it starts even as we're children. We need to have this. So we're wired for joy.

We're wired for this connection. We're wired of seeing the face, which I loved how you guys brought that out because we are wired for blessing.

And this idea of seeing the face of God, withholding one's face, saving face, because we work with a lot of different cultures and what that means, I mean, it brings it all out in ways that I find phenomenal. So we have. Our brains are fueled with this joy. What's the next step? How do we understand that?

Yes. So, you know, this is really for churches now. If we're talking about churches, one of the goals is that we make our church as high joy as possible.

You know, high joy is that we see people's faces lighting up when we show up together at small groups or we show up together on Sunday or whatever we do. It's this living in our faces again. And then also it's lots of practices of gratitude.

Gratitude is another way we build joy both with God and with each other. So gratitude, when we express gratitude to God, I always thought of that just as Thanksgiving verbally.

Jim Wilder and some other people have come up with some practices that really target more the right brain part of the gratitude, which is coming up with a list of grateful memories, kind of golden memories we've had in life where we are grateful for them. There was some deep connection with God in it at some way or another. And we go back and relive those memories.

I do a five minute gratitude practice using my gratitude list where I go back in silent memory and almost like a Jacuzzi, I settle into a grateful memory and I just relive it and just feel the gratefulness, feel God's face shining on me. Sometimes I'll need a memory or two or three to get through the five minutes.

But that gives my brain five minutes of joy fuel, just fueling up for the day. And so those are some of the first things we do. But that's not all we need to do.

Are you saying then. And I'm just trying to translate this into ways that my brain, my. I don't know which side of my brain is comprehending this right now.

But gratitude is the spigot that I'm kind of turning to let the joy in I always talk about the discipline of remembrance because the Israelites would always forget what God had done and they'd have to set up tangible reminders to remember and reflect on again and again and again because the Israelites would always forget. They are, they became what have you done for me lately? Rather than stopping and reflecting.

But if you even go through the psalms, you have these examples of them telling the story again of what God had done, how he delivered. So really that's that practice. It's just they didn't have that name on it.

It's this discipline of remembrance, disciplining our minds to turn on the spigot, to release joy into our, our emotional tanks, if you will. Again, I'm using different language, but I'm trying to just make sure I grasp this. So we go then from joy, then to what?

So you know, we use the analogy of soil. There's nutrients we need to.

There's relational nutrients we need to put in our community that helps the soil actually grow the right thing, which is our maturity, our character. Joy is the first nutrient. It's really like, it's kind of like fertilizer on steroids. It makes everything grow, it makes everything better.

And joy is also paired with the other nutrient we put into the soil, which we call hesed, which is really the word. It's often translated unfailing love or loving kindness. It's the closest it comes to what psychologists call attachment, which is the way our brains.

Love really functions in the human brain more as a bond or an attachment. The interesting thing about the combination of joy and hesed, which is the Hebrew word agape. Agapao would be the Greek word for the New Testament.

Those words talk about an eternal family like bond, which is formed through many joyful interactions with each other. It's also formed as we eat meals with one another. It's formed when we share our weakness together.

When we don't just put on our strong faces and our successful faces, but when we share the good and the bad.

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You're seeing people leaving churches left and right. And part of it is, is that I've heard people say is I'm tired of the plop, pray, pay.

I know we were visiting a church as we moved to a new area and we went five or six weeks and not one person said hello. No one said anything to us. So why do you want to go there if that's the case?

But what you're saying here is no, we need to understand this relational part of it. We need to understand this love that people want to be with us.

You want to look at the belief before you belong, but really we're wired to belong before we believe. Is that correct there? Am I putting that right?

Very much so.

You know, Hess said, this attachment, it's the strongest driver in the human brain of forming our character more than any other thing, even more than our beliefs. Beliefs are very important. You know, in a sense.

We believe we need to redesign our churches with joy and chesed at the center and in mind for everything we do. A lot of times those are an afterthought. We actually design the way we do church with something else in mind.

Oftentimes it's packing the greatest number of people into a room over a period of time so that we can get the content out to them, you know, and then move on, get the sardines out and a new class of sardines back in the room. And so we're saying let's put our heads together.

We don't have answers to this yet, but let's put together what a hesed joy centered church might look like. And then we still do some of these other things.

We still absolutely preach the truth of God's word and other stuff, but that we, we put what's first as far as God's design in our brain as first in what we do at church.

We have to love one another. And if we don't actually love people, then people aren't going to see Jesus. I mean, it's the old hymn, right?

They'll know we are Christians by our love. And unfortunately, that's not been it. It's.

It's more of we isolate the message from a love aspect and love and relationship because it has to be embodied by the people so that others can come to know who Christ is. The problem is, is that it's become more about the performance and the personality of the person that's up there. It's just where we're at right now.

I love this because it's calling people back to the relational idea of what the scriptures already have talked about. And we've just got off of a different focus. And that's why people are falling away, because there's not a loving attachment that's kept them there.

And I also think that's part of the reason why, if you see everyone is obsessed with identity. I mean, that's no secret. Right now everybody's talking about identity. Who are my people? And I think sometimes my wife and I got into this discussion.

We had George Yancey on the show who wrote a book, One Faith no Longer, and he was talking about the difference between red and blue Christianity in America and what I have found that a lot of progressives have a tendency to.

A lot of them have a similar belief at times, not always, but they're so frustrated with the relational aspect and how the people around them have worked it out that they've shied away because they don't want to be associated with those people. And it seems it's more about the association of people than it is necessarily truth. Is that. Is that what I.

Would that be a wrong assessment on my part?

Yeah. The thing we look at and all this part of the brain is faster than our conscious thoughts.

So it's something that we just instantly know and instantly long for. This is kind of weird, but our right brain actually runs faster than conscious thought. It runs at the speed of joy. Left brain is more.

It's more conscious, more. It's a slower rate brain you walk into, let's say a typical church lobby.

You're visiting, maybe you're wondering if you're going to go there and your brain every sixth of a second is looking, are these people happy to be here? Do I see them at least happy to be with each other? Maybe they don't know me yet. Do I sense a bond during the service? Do I hear weakness?

Do strong people share weakness, so to speak? Or is it just, here's my success here's my great personality. Here's the polished thing. And then you go home.

And also, you know, those two things really, the joy and the love, are the things that just make stuff grow like crazy. Part of the problem though is those are not enough. They're absolutely necessary.

Without joy or hesed, you don't even get into the circuits of your brain that change character. Right. There's almost like a firewall there.

If you don't have a chesed agape, a love, a bond, like a family level bonding with people around you, then your church or anybody else doesn't get access to your character, your brain will kind of dismiss it. Right, got it. But just because someone has access to your character doesn't mean you're going to grow good character. You can also grow back.

You can grow like a garden. You can grow tomatoes and lettuce and carrots, but you can also grow lots and lots of weeds. Right?

So the third nutrient of soil that we add after joy and hesed, after love, we call it group identity, but really answers the question in our brain as well as answering this question in the control processor of who are my people and what are they? How do they act? How do we act in this kind, this situation?

So any kind of situation, you find it, your brain is trying to draw from your group identity to know how we act in this situation.

How many group identities can we have?

Oh, millions, thousands, hundreds. We all have them. The question is, are they the group identity of our people and of the, of God's kingdom? They actually line up with God's family.

So it has to be, wow, that's a lot. It has to be then connected with the truth of what God says about himself and the people of God. And if it doesn't, it doesn't work.

An example of this, my example is probably easier, is Jesus said quite a few times in the New Testament that we're a people who love our enemies, right?

Yes.

So that's not just what we do, it's actually who we are. That's the. That we're actually identified. You know, he said people are not Christians. He called pagans. I'll love those who love them.

So, you know, that's great. We should love those who love us. But we are to love our enemies and actually exchange curses, blessings for curses. So this is who we are.

So my question is, are we saying that to each other? Like, are we reminding?

Like, when I start hating my enemy, do you walk up to me and say, you know, Michael, remember that we're a people who love our enemies and exchange curses for blessings. Because it seemed like you were wanting to curse back when someone cursed you. Right.

So now we're training ourselves, is that it? We're training ourselves, reminding ourselves who we are. It's the identity. The group keeps reinforcing that we're actually.

Building our group identity. We're building our identity as people. We're creating a people. The church was always meant to be a people.

Right?

Right. It's a people that has a shared value of who we are and how we act and what we do in the world. Right.

So those church relationships then, are to help reinforce and rebuild the character. So this is why I'm going to add a little tangent on here, but for our listening audience, we've had different people on the show.

Jay Kim, who wrote a book called Analog Church, and we're talking about how so many people now have gone to virtual church. You're having the truth, which is what people think church is for. But they're not getting the relational asp is what they need.

And you need to be with people in that regard. This is why we need to be in church with people, to reinforce that joy and chesed relationship. Correct?

Yeah. Another way to say that is the church needs to function much more like a family and much less like an organization.

Wow. Does not the Bible say all this stuff?

The problem is that is a hard change.

It is in our culture today.

It's like we're going back into the basic wiring of the church and having to pull the wires out and rewire it again.

You know, a big part of what we do at Apollo's Watered is expose you to new and different ways of thinking about our faith and how to live it out in a world that is increasingly chaotic and, truth be told, often downright scary. We are a well that waters you so you can sink roots down into Christ no matter where you are or who you are.

That's why we've been really encouraged by the work of folks like Jim Wilder and Michael Hendricks. Their work really does help us to be better disciples because it helps us to better understand how we are wired as human beings.

What they are talking about transcends our individual cultures and therefore can work in all of them. As Christians, as the church, we have to ask ourselves the question, are we people of joy?

Honestly, when I look around, I don't see joy all that much. Do we cultivate this hesed that divine attachment and loving kindness toward each other and yes, even our enemies?

As Michael said, loving our enemies is not what we do. It's who we are.

And finally, as the church do, we help one another to be like Christ, to reinforce that this is what we believe and this is how we live. In short, are we trying to act like a family or an institution? We need information.

Michael's own story of not knowing anything about Christianity shows that information is completely necessary, but as he said, it's not enough. I don't know about you, but the more that I hear this, the more I realize that this is exactly what Jesus taught us.

Next week I invite you to join me for part two of our conversation.

But until then, why don't you make it a point to spread a little joy this week, and if this episode has helped you, would you consider partnering with us? We're delighted and grateful for all of those who have already taken the plunge. You are our heroes and you are watering warriors for Jesus.

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Let's open up that spigot of truth, Let the water flow and watch God make it grow. Much thanks to the Apollos Watered team of Kevin, Melissa, Donovan, Eliana, Rebecca, and Audrey. Water your faith, Water your world.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollos Watered. Stay watered everybody.