Travis and Michel Hendricks continue their discussion on the relational reformation that is taking place in the church. Far too often, our church models have been built on the best practices established by churches considered to be "successful" because they know how to attract a crowd. Many of these successful churches have more of a performance mentality that they have pursued in the worship service.

Many of these well-intentioned leaders have sought to get people to church thinking that they needed to have the service as a performance for people to come to and be part of so that they can hear the Word and come to know Jesus. But what if that model, while successful in the short term, is actually detrimental in the long term because it fails to take in a key part of our relational make-up?

The stats are out, that many are leaving the church and doing so for a variety of reasons. Some see it as a purification time, while others see it as a symptom of a larger problem-the church doesn't care about relationships the way that God does and doesn't understand how spiritual formation actually works.

Travis and Michel continue discussing his book, The Other Half of Church, which he co-authored with one of our previous guests, 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.

Sign up for the Apollos Watered newsletter.

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

Takeaways:

• The essence of the church lies fundamentally in its ability to love both one another and those outside its community, as exemplified by Jesus' teachings.
• A relational reformation within the church is imperative, focusing on nurturing genuine relationships rather than merely measuring attendance or other metrics.
• The integration of relational skills into church practices is crucial; teaching individuals how to love, including their enemies, is often overlooked.
• True discipleship involves more than just knowledge; it requires embodying love and relational maturity, encouraging individuals to practice these principles within their communities.
• Churches must shift from a performance-based model to one that emphasizes relational depth, fostering an environment where individuals feel valued and cherished.
• The church's effectiveness in embodying love is directly linked to its members' emotional and relational maturity, which must be cultivated intentionally.

You know, when people think of Christians, they should think, you know, I don't agree with any other theology, maybe, but man, do those people know how to love each other. And they know how to love me, too. I just feel so loved when I'm with him now. Love's not the only thing, too.

You know, there's other, you know, other churches were supposedly. We can assume that other churches were loving well, because Jesus doesn't mention that.

And he says, but you're doing these things, so correct this doctrine and correct this behavior and whatever, but if you've stopped loving, you've. You've stopped, essentially, you've stopped being a church.

It's watering time, everybody. It's time for Apollos 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 on our show, we're having another one of our.

Deep conversations.

Welcome back, everyone. This week's deep conversation is part two of my conversation with author Michael Hendricks.

If you haven't listened to the first part, you're going to want to go back and listen to that first, because the stuff we talk about today, today builds directly from that. We are wired for relationships. And as we talked about at the end of the last episode, we need to rewire the church when it comes to them.

And that's not an easy task. Too often, churches tend to focus solely on things that can be measured.

But what if the things that are easy to measure aren't the real business of the church? How do we practice these relational ideas?

How do we develop better relational skills so that we can love one another and our enemies, as Jesus taught? That's what we're going to be talking about today on Apollos Watered. Happy listening.

Well, there is measurables within scripture. They measured how many people came to Christ on Pentecost, how many widows we measured. There's a whole book called Numbers after all.

But.

And we would always try to say, I would try to balance that out. I said, you know, numbers are one indicator. We would call them hard facts and hard checks.

Hard facts for one wing of the plane where we could measure the buildings, bodies, budgets, baptisms, that kind of thing. And then on the other side, we would say, well, then there's this idea of holiness, surrender, relational unity.

That stuff doesn't fit on the stat sheet. And unfortunately, I think a lot of the performance aspect, churches have adopted the left wing and not the right. Wing.

And that's why people are falling away left and right, is because there's not a relational glue to keep them there. Wrong.

No, that's. You got it right. And numbers aren't bad enough themselves because they can show us, you know, what's working and what's not working.

Right.

The key is numbers should never motivate us. Oftentimes it's like you hear the numbers touted. Last night, we had 2,000 people in the men's retreat.

We're starting to, you know, tread on some kind of dangerous ground there when we start doing that.

Because the thing that motivates us, and this is a group identity statement where we are largely motivated by our love for each other, our love for God, and our desire to live out his kingdom on earth. Those are the things that motivate us, the desires God has placed into our heart for our true identity.

Those are the things that are almost impossible to measure. So we really need to be very intentional about separating numbers from motivation.

How do you do that? I mean, being in the church, we read the book Trellis and the vine, and we would talk about the vine can't go any more than the trellis.

And other people would say, you'll never go beyond your systems. But rarely did I ever hear people talk about. I don't think I ever have talk about love, relationships at all. It rarely ever existed.

I mean, we would talk about shepherding people and wanting to shepherd, but it came down to that wasn't enough. How do you change. Change? Such an ingrained mentality when.

Especially after what I heard from vanderblum, they said 50% of their placements now in these larger churches are not seminary or Bible college trained. Which means that they're coming from a business world. They're CEOs or they. They have charismatic personalities because it's.

It's running the business.

Right.

And how do we go from back to what the scripture says in this relational aspect? I mean, how do we do that?

Well, you know, you have to answer the question of what is the business of the church? And that's where we've gotten the answer wrong.

You know, you look at Jesus, you know, the one time we see Jesus intentionally and kind of slowing down, analyzing the progress of seven churches is in Revelation, right?

Yep, yep.

Most of those churches were screwing up in doctrine and behavior, and he corrected them. You know, don't commit idolatry. Don't do this, don't do that. One of the churches had lost its first love. Interesting that there's no Object for love.

So it didn't say love for me or love for each other, because we know from John's Gospels that those two are so intrinsically intertwined, you can't separate them. That's why I think Jesus just lays it at love. You lost your first love, and he didn't say, for me or for each other.

Now, the other churches maybe have doctrinal problems. He tells them to repent, don't do this.

But it's interesting, the Ephesian Church, who lost their love, he said, you know, repent of that, otherwise I'm taking your lampstand away. It never says that to any of the other churches. You know, one of the things Jesus said is, let your light shine, right?

One of the purposes of the church is to let your light shine. I believe if we tie that in to what Jesus says to the Ephesian Church in Revelation, that light is our love intrinsically.

It's the love of God shining into our culture.

You know, when people think of Christians, they should think, you know, I don't agree with any other theology, maybe, but man, do those people know how to love each other. And they know how to love me, too. I just feel so loved when I'm with them now. Love's not the only thing too. You know, there's other.

You know, other churches were supposedly. We can assume that other churches were loving well, because Jesus doesn't mention that.

And he says, but you're doing these things, so correct this doctrine and correct this behavior and whatever, but if you've stopped loving, you stop. Essentially, you've stopped being a church. And if you start.

And Jesus is basically saying, if you keep acting like you're not a church for a while, I'm pretty sure I'm going to. I'm going to. I'm going to assure that you're not a church because I'm going to take my lampstand away.

And, you know, and essentially he's saying, I don't want you shining my light. You know, the purpose of the church is to shine his light. But he says to this church, I don't want.

If you don't repent, I don't want you shining my light anymore. Because my light is love. If you're not shining love, nothing else matters.

So it's a rediscovery of love. We have to understand what it means to really love one another.

And I mean, love God, love one another, all these things that are connected because it's all built. It seems like these are all built on one Another, as you said, the relational soil. You've got the soil and that means a lot to me.

I come from farm country, so I know what it's like to exhaust something from the soil and things don't grow. So you're saying that we need to do that now.

Like we also talked about though, the performance aspect of many different churches, because they've really isolated it to the business of the church is to make disciples. But what that means for them is get them to basically pray the prayer, become a Christian, get baptized.

But when we're looking at what discipleship really is, which is this idea of apprenticeship, you follow me, your behavior starts to change. The church falls down way. It goes way down. I mean, we're good at getting people in the door in the west and that's even changing.

So how do we then create this relational soil to how do we recapture this in these larger churches? Or is it we just have to create new places? It's the whole new wineskin, old wineskin idea.

Well, you know, we're kind of at the head of the front edge of the wave on this thing since.

And I can't, I can't say God told me this, but since that there's almost a new reformation coming to the church, but it's a real, it's a relational reformation where the church again returns to its roots, where love is the center of everything we do and everything else we do a bunch of other things other than just love, but everything is saturated by love. And love is always the center of everything we do. We never do anything in our churches that would decrease or separate or diffuse our love.

Love is always a center, but we go and do all sorts of stuff that God calls us to do while always making sure we're centrally and fundamentally shining the light of Jesus love in whatever we do. What that means though is we need to teach people how to do this.

The problem is most churches have been preaching regular sermons that we're supposed to love each other, we're supposed to love God, even that we're supposed to love our enemies. But I have never been taught. Until the last five years, I'd never met anyone who said we need to train ourselves to love our enemies.

So they never said how. And it's almost cruel. It's like if I take my 9 year old daughter out into the garage and say, hey, you know that car has a bad carburetor.

Here's all my tools, go fix that carburetor and don't come back in until it's done. You know, that's kind of what we're doing to our people. We're saying you need to love your enemies.

Okay, let's close in prayer and have another music song and then you go home and nobody was ever told nobody. And not just trained how, but actually given a chance to practice. Okay.

For the next 14 weeks, I was in a training with 25 people in my basement where for 14 weeks we trained through hypothetical situations to love our enemies.

So is this then going back to another thing that you guys talk about in the book? This idea of mirror neurons. You have to have it displayed and modeled in front of you before you can actually grasp what it is. Right?

Is that what I'm talking. Is that what we're talking about here is in order to. We can't just tell people what to do. You have to show them what to do.

Especially in behavior and character and maturity that we need to be shown doctrine. We don't need to be necessarily shown, we need to be explained. That's a left brain thing and that's very important.

But we don't need always the example on doctrine for character how to love someone. Well, in this complicated circumstance, this other complicated. We actually need an example.

We need a more mature man or a more mature woman who shows us how to do it or can tell us stories of how they stayed connected to Jesus and kept loving even when their child did this crazy thing or whatever the situation happens to be.

So this is the Paul saying, follow me as I follow Christ.

Exactly. Look at me, look at my life. Look at my doctrine too. And he said, he tells Timothy, pay close attention to your life and your doctrine. You do both.

We're not saying jettison doctrine, but we've done the doctrine thing pretty well. We haven't done the love thing, but we haven't taught our people how to love like Jesus.

Well, you know, it's interesting.

We're going to have as a guest on the show hopefully in the fall, Kevin Vanhuser, who's a theologian from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School and he talks about the gospel being a performance script. That's what really the Bible is. He says it's doctrine, but not just for knowledge sake.

It's an idea of it shows us how to live out this in the middle of the world. And so really it's kind of bridging that other part of it.

Because sometimes I think as you mentioned, the doctrine we think of just as a knowledge aspect, but it's a knowledge in the aspect of living out, embodying and that's what we're seeing people come back to, relational reformation, because we're now hearing more people talk about embodiment and purpose and interaction and church in this. This idea of living and engaging and embodying what God has in front of us.

You guys are showing brain science behind it, which is actually formulated, and it gives kind of a. A boldness, perhaps, to it. I keep thinking of a text on a.

On a screen, a Word document, and you're embolding it, saying, this is already there and we just need to pay attention to it, and the scripture is already talking about it, and here's why. This is actually what occurs in your brain as we go about this. Is that. Would that be a right assessment?

Yeah, exactly. You know, the author of our brain was also the author of Scripture, and we should expect them to agree with each other. Right?

We're surprised sometimes when it does. But now, I've seen it so many times with all of these things, with the importance of joy and the centrality of love for any kind of change.

How the church is supposed to act like a family and function as a family. All these things we see now is like, okay, now I see why.

Because if we're not functioning like a family, a preacher can get up there and preach a really good sermon to me. But if I have no attachment to that preacher because I'm one of 4,000 people in the audience, I've never actually had a meal with him.

I've never shared hard things and heard him share hard things, then his. My brain is going to not accept what he says. Into the character area.

I'm going to get lots of knowledge, but it's not going to change how I act when, you know, someone cuts me off in traffic. Now, if, on the other hand, I know a person who's more mature than I am and I'm bonded to and. And he.

I actually see someone cut him off in traffic, and I see him act or she act in a way that's very different, maybe within what my default reaction would have been from my childhood, et cetera. My brain just starts rewiring itself and I start seeing spontaneous changes in my character.

Not with me trying to act better, but spontaneous changes into my character when someone cuts me off in traffic.

This is fascinating to me. I'm hearing in a service we have, the sermon is going on, but you said now we have to have opportunity to practice this.

How do we do that when we just show up, listen, go home and shut the doors.

I remember taking a course Years ago where we had to learn how to exegete our community, where we had to understand the belief systems of our community. And I know just in where I'm living right now, let's say we're in a suburb, you see the garage, very small front porch.

You pull in, shut the garage door and people are in their own little oasis separated from everyone else. How do we get our people outside to engage with people and practice this stuff?

Well, that's kind of like I said before, it's almost like a basic rewiring of how we do church. Like what we're doing now is not even designed to do that. Right, right.

It's not. That's why it's failing.

And so you know the typical answers, the template answers, oh, we have small groups and we get people in small groups, but small groups don't necessarily become high joy and high hesed love and then build our group identity unless we're intentionally doing that.

And most people who are writing the curriculums for small groups do they actually, have they been doing this for a year or two and understand it like is the whole substructure there where we all are agreement that we're doing things as a family now, not as an organization. And so again, I don't have good answers. What I'm saying is let's start trying stuff out and see what works and what doesn't work.

But let's not keep doing what we're doing because we know this is not working.

We're going to take a quick break.

And hear a word from our sponsors and we'll be right back. The most important Bible translation is the one you read at Apollos Watered.

We use several different translations when we're studying, preaching or teaching. But again and again we keep coming back to the new living translation, the nlt. That's why we are excited to partner together.

We are united in the belief that understanding the Bible changes everything. Because if you can't understand it, then you won't read it.

We want you to know the God of the Bible to water your faith so that you will water your world. That's why we recommend getting an nlt. It's the Bible in the language we speak. It's not foreign or complicated, but up close and personal.

To save some Money, go to Tyndale.com, use the promo code NLTBIBLES. It will give you 15% off. There's an NLT for everyone from kids to adults. Devotional Bibles, study Bibles and so much more.

Get one today because understanding The Bible changes everything. And the NLT is the Bible you can understand.

This is awesome. My brain, my motor neurons are firing right now, Michael, as we're walking through this, because I see this. I see this family atmosphere.

I see this relational dynamic. I see this growing desire for people that want that connection.

I see it, and I'm hearing of different people trying different things, whether it's house, church, whether it's small groups, as you said, D groups, whatever the term you want to use for it. But it's clear to people that what we're doing isn't really working and trying to cross that bridge and to see that formulation begin to occur.

So we see these group identities, this happening. But I have questions. First of all, when someone comes in to this group, they have this hesit relationship.

We don't operate from a hesit perspective, at least initially. I mean, we all are wired for joy. But I find it, it's, if you don't fit into my group, I have to shame you so that your behavior then fits mine.

We always judge the outward behavior first. So if it's a person coming into the service, let's say they're nearing a suburb like you are, of Denver, someone comes in who's Goth, let's say.

I mean, I'm just throwing out stuff. How do we help? We have to show them love before we can ever talk about the behavioral choice.

I mean, we have to introduce them to Jesus before anything else. But the obvious reaction that people have is they socially don't fit what we're doing.

My first reaction, and probably intuitively, unless I've corrected it through a lot of practices, is going to give a negative look to that person to let them know that that's perhaps not how we do things here. Is that an accurate thought that people do or practice that we have to correct?

If the first thing you feel when you go into a Christian group, and maybe you're not a Christian, is that you need to shape up and behave, then we probably have the cart in front of the horse.

The first thing they should feel is people's faces lighting up on them and a desire to know who they are and sit with them and enjoy them and be curious about maybe what is God doing in this person, the fact that he even showed up. And even when we. When you feel the sense of needing to fix another person or change their behavior, then we've.

We've gone back kind of to the example that Jesus uses of the Pharisees. You know, he uses the. The. The example of a Plate in a dish.

He said, you all wash the outside of the dish or the cup, but you leave the inside all alone. And that's kind of what we're doing. Let's wash the outside of this cup in this dish.

And he said, you know, you hypocrites, he says, you're, you know, you're doing that with other people. You haven't done it yourself. He says, if you focus on washing the inside of the cup, that's where all the grime is, right?

If you focus on the inside of the cup, the outside just naturally used. Most of the grime is not the outside of my coffee mug. It's on the inside.

And if I put it under water and soap and I start scrubbing the inside just from the splashing water and overflow, the outside usually is so clean, I don't even need to clean the outside. It just kind of takes care of itself. But I'm not really focusing on the outside. I'm going inside and doing the gunk.

And if this goth person comes into your group and he or she sees that you are actually going into the gunk of your own life, you're sharing it with the group, you're sharing how you're interacting with Jesus and your other people around this gunky thing in your life and trying to clean it up. One of the things that does to this goth person as well is all of a sudden they start trusting you.

Because you're being honest about who you are.

You're not trying to fix that. You have. You're not trying to fix them, you're trying to fix yourself, and you're sharing your crap with them and you're delighted to be with them.

That's a whole nother dynamic.

If I'm looking at people and I'm shared when I'm struggling with something or I'm dealing with an issue. But I also know, having been in ministry for a long period of time, there's the social acceptable sharing, and then there's the real issues.

You know, there's the stuff that people could talk about that I would hear a lot. And not to denigrate this, but there's. There's some that are, yes, they're incipient and they're evil. Like pride. Pride is incipient and evil.

We're all going to admit that.

But that is a whole lot more acceptable to people than someone saying who's coming in and maybe have, have same sex attraction goes, you know, I had some type of intimate relationship with this guy last night. You Know what I'm saying? This is where the real rubber meets the road here. So they'll say, oh, I'm proud, or I struggled with this.

And it's like, well, wait a minute. Where do we have type of real admission and safety? Like, I am really showing you what I'm dealing with right now.

And then this idea of most churches aren't going to respond that way. Some will. Some will because they've had these muscles built up. But more often than not, it's bad sinner, bad discipline.

And again, I'm not denying discipline. It's in scripture. But how do you bridge that gap with people?

To help people understand the safety of this hessed and love relationship, what has to be built up over time, it has to be modeled, it sounds like, from the leadership for the people to be able to get it.

But I'm looking at a leader going, a leader's only going to be able to give as much as the people will allow him to admit if he admits complete moral failure. I mean, hopefully that's not the case. I'm being an extreme example here, just seeing how this plays out.

How do you then help people work with that and then have accountability and understand consequences at the same time while still maintaining that relational chesed that's there.

Yeah. So there's a lot to unpack from what you just said.

And one of the things we say first is the brain has a very fairly organized definition of maturity. And the people that we want leading our groups, we want them to have earned maturity.

Earned maturity means I have a pretty good suite of emotional and relational skills, meaning I can handle big emotions, big problems, and I stay loving.

Maturity, that is defined by how one acts within a relational construct rather than understanding greater doctrine.

Oh, yeah. Doctrine has very little to do with relational maturity.

Just want to make sure. Just laying that out there.

So, for example, in the infant, the first four years, it's a maturity stage that we learned largely to receive the glowing face of our mothers and secondly, our fathers. And then secondly, during that period, we start to learn how to handle the big emotions of life, sadness.

And we learn that again by mirror neurons, by seeing my mother and seeing my father, attuned to my anger, attuned to my fear, return to my sadness and still be delighted to be with me, be in that sadness and show me what it looks like to be relational in that emotion. Those are the kinds of things we learn to give, to receive love.

And then our brain actually kind of rewires itself after the infant stage, around age Four. We go into the child stage and one of the main skills we learn in the child stage is how to do hard things.

This is where the father's influence often is more prominent than in the infant stage. The mother's influence is prominent in the infant stage.

In the child stage, we learn to do hard things, hard relational things as well as hard physical things. It starts out with little things like learning to brush my teeth and make my bed or whatever, and it gets progressively harder throughout life.

But we learn that right? And we learn how to start to take care of ourselves.

And then when we go and start into the like around age 12, 13, our brain rewires itself again for the adult stage. So adult stage starts at age 13. And the big thing we're meant to learn relationally, mature wise, is not to take care of both myself and others.

Like a child cannot do that, so we should never ask them to do that.

So like when a 10 year old kid has to take care of his drunk parent or something like that, we're actually doing some damage to their brain because they don't even have the circuitry to do that yet. That's circuitry we get after age 12 or 13 or start to learn.

But adults can take care of others and ourselves simultaneously without destroying myself and destroying the other person.

When we see a workaholic who just absolutely works crazy hours because they want to get ahead and they start ignoring their family, that's an example of someone who didn't learn this early. They're still stuck in child level maturity.

They haven't got into adult level maturity where they know how to balance two really important things like a job and a family and making both function simultaneously. That's an adult level skill. A lot of people, workaholics, never learned how to do that.

Some of the focus in this whole brain Christianity, we talk about the other half of church in our book.

The other half of church takes maturity very seriously and makes sure that part of our discipleship is going back into the infant and child and adult stages and filling in the skills we didn't get.

Those are the people that need to be leading our small groups or the people that have done the hard work so that when someone comes in who's goth or someone drops a big bomb of some behavior issues or something, a mature leader, a man and a woman, know how to handle these, maintain the relational integrity of the group, stay loving, not try to fix the person, but also be with them and get them true help.

I'm having a flashback to being in A small group one time and there was a man in the group, he was an older man, gentleman, and he had just come to the realization, he just admitted it publicly, that he had his sons being watched by a babysitter who ended up molesting those children. And he lived with this unbearable guilt. And he never shared this until the group. And he goes, I just can't forgive him.

And I thought, well, you know, first of all, it's huge that you've even admitted this. But another person in the group, well intentioned, they said, wait a minute, you have to forgive. The Bible says that we have to forgive.

It's like, well, hold on, let's. Yes, that's true, we are to forgive. But he is just acknowledging this, he's opening up about this right now.

And we need to be able to be there with our brother to walk through this, him dealing with his stage.

So while the truth is that we are to forgive, there's a process involved in this whole thing and we need to help make sure that we're walking people with, through the process as we hopefully lead them to that fact down the line as we learn how to process that pain. Is that a good example of something along that line or am I off?

It's a good example of the importance of group identity as well.

For example, we were in a group doing this kind of training to love our enemies and people would share weakness and there were a few people that would very regularly then offer a fix. So what your example is telling a person who's just bared their soul and you say you have to forgive that person.

Scripture says you have to forgive them. When I say that to you, that means I'm trying to fix you. And when I'm fixing you, my relational brain is turned off.

Your wife would say, your rcs are off because that's a non relational solution. Here's what we did in our group. After I saw that two or three times the next time we met, I said, we're going to have a family meeting today.

And I said, I've noticed sometimes when someone shares a problem or a weakness, we almost feel a compulsion to give them an answer or some advice. And so here's a ground rule we have is that we do not offer anyone advice in this group unless they ask for it.

Or in very rare cases when we sense maybe God saying that he's given us something to say to them, we ask them first for permission and say, are you, are you looking for some advice on this or some help or do you just want Us to sit with you in this hard situation. And you respect their answer when they say, no, I just want you to sit with me. If they don't want advice, I wish.

Job's friends would have asked Job that question. That would have. That would have taken. We wouldn't have a book, but it would have taken some time. How then do you share that?

Do you always ask permission before you share that type of advice?

Always. I don't ever give anybody advice without asking permission. Here's the thing, though.

Usually when people are sharing weakness, the thing they need and the thing their brain was designed to need first and foremost was compassion. Compassion is full of joy.

And Hess said, because you're in my face is telling you not only that I'm glad to be with you even when you shared this really painful thing that's going on between you and your child, for example. But I am feeling. I can feel that pain. I am with you in the pain. When I can see that you are with me in the pain.

You have just put my brain into a really healthy place even though I am in pain, even though this is a hard situation. You have actually just helped me and made me stronger in this very difficult thing.

On the other hand, if you kind of level advice at me, all of a sudden you have just put a backpack on my shoulders that has £20 worth of bricks in them. So you've just made my life harder when I'm already carrying a big load. You've added some bricks to that load.

And that's some relational intelligence that we haven't been teaching in the church. People actually need to be trained in this. How do you help a person when they're sharing some weakness in their life?

How do we actually help them and not make it worse? These are all things we need to.

Train our people, which I've never seen a class on relational development. I've seen some recently on spiritual friendship, which. Which is along that line.

But I have never seen a class, or even a membership class that talks about relational development and group identity statements. Never. How do we get engaged with this idea of. Not just idea, the truth of what full brain Christianity is?

Because the resistance that I hear from people most often is I love the concept, but I struggle in that it does take an entirely new language to understand.

Yep.

How do we help people walk through that and process that?

Well, one of the things is Jim and I wrote the other half of church to answer that very question. Like, what's the on ramp to this, this whole new kind of area of Love centered joy centered Christian discipleship.

And so I would even encourage you not only just to read the book, but actually do read it in a group, a chapter a week or every other week and actually do the exercises at the end of each chapter.

So there's a chapter on joy and then there's some good exercises on joy and on gratitude, there's a chapter on hesed and love and then there's some good exercises on typical things that can build our bonding to one another. We do the same for the chapter on group identity and the chapter on healthy correction. Do those together and get a taste of it.

And then the organization I work for, Life Model Works. You can go to life modelworks.org we even offer online study groups.

It's a six week group that kind of gives you a good introduction to more skills even than you see in the other half of church. And sign up with your small group or you can sign up as an individual and they're putting you in an online group for four, six meetings.

And then from there on there's a whole bunch.

And from that group they will show you a bunch of other trainings that we and our partner organizations offer to help you start working on your maturity and on your character and learning to love your enemies and building joy and building group identity, all this stuff.

There's a lot of resources out there, but the good place to start, I think is with the other half of church and do it with a group of people, you know, and then, you know, go check our website out and we love to help you. Send me, send me an email. I can give you my email. You can post it on the notes for the podcast if you want.

And I'll refer you if you need a hand for anything.

Well, that is awesome. And I am, I think people should get the book. I think this is something that is God is doing.

It's a relational reformation that is starting to occur where we are starting to see the power of relationship. And I am tremendously excited about this.

But Michael, I wanted to thank you for coming on the show and sharing and drawing our attention to the other half of church and Life Model Works. And Michael, thank you for coming on Apollo's Water.

Yeah, thank you, Travis. It's fun talking about the relational reformation with you and look forward to doing some more of the same.

What Michael and the team at Life Model Works are doing is fascinating to me. Their work on brain science is helping us to understand why the Bible teaches many of the things it does.

And as Michael says, we shouldn't be surprised when the science and the scriptures agree because God created them both. When the church builds healthy relationships with God, with others, and yes, even with ourselves, we become more like Jesus.

We become who we are made to be. Now I have to be honest, my wife was on me to read the Other Half of Church for over a year before I actually read it.

It was mind blowing to her and I have to admit I was a bit skeptical, but the more that I read, the more impressed I was. Yes, the vocabulary was new and it took a bit of effort, but it really was worth it and I can't recommend it enough.

I'm not going to tell you that this will solve all of your discipleship problems. However, I am convinced that it can help you as you pursue Christ.

At one point in the interview, Michael says he doesn't have all the answers that as the church, we need to start trying stuff so that we can put these principles into practice. So here's my question to you. What do you want help or training in to help develop your relational skills? To see them modeled?

Have you seen things that have worked? Let us know. Drop us a line at kevinpollowswater.org use the subject line Relational Development.

We look forward to hearing from you 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 really watering warriors for Jesus.

Please keep it up.

And for those who are ready to take the plunge, then you need to go to ApolloSwatered.org and click the Support Us button in the upper right hand corner. There you will find many suggested amounts.

Pick the one that is right for you or simply write in the amount and surprise us if you have been impacted while listening to this episode, screenshot it, text it to a friend, share it with other people, or share it directly from your podcast platform. Whatever you need to do. Subscribing and leaving a review also opens up that nozzle of God's fire hose to water more people.

And check out our content on Instagram, Facebook and our website. Together, let's open up that spigot of truth. Let the water flow and watch God make it grow.

And much thanks to the Apollo's Water team of Kevin, Melissa, Donovan, Eliana, Rebecca and Audrey. Water your faith, Water your world. This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollo's Water. Stay watered everybody.