Jason Daye 
Welcome to FrontStage BackStage. This week, we have a hand-picked highlight that we believe you will find valuable. If you do, we invite you to listen to the full conversation. You can find the link to the complete episode in the description. As always, please Like, Comment, Subscribe, and Share, so we can continue to bring you meaningful ministry content, helping you and pastors and ministry leaders, just like you, flourish in both life and leadership. Are you ready? Let's go. Let's go backstage now for our personal spiritual formation. And again, this aligns a lot more of your most recent book, analog Christian things that you, you share there. So what do we need to be paying to paying attention to ourselves as pastors, as ministry leaders, when it comes to our own spiritual development, spiritual formation in the digital age?

Jay Kim 
Yeah, you know the writer, James K Smith, Jamie Smith, he's got this fantastic book called you are what you love. And I'm sure lots of people listening or watching have read it. It's an incredible book, and he's got this line in the book where he says human beings live leaning forward. And what he means by that is that every human on the planet, every human in the history of humans, has always lived with a telos. And Telos is a word that essentially means like an end, that essentially your life is headed in a particular direction, and that you do not have a choice in the matter. Every human lives leaning forward, we live with a particular end in mind. The only choice we have is which direction, and if we are not aware, if we're not careful, if we're not intentional, then the telos or the end or the direction of our lives will be dictated to us by whatever, whatever mediums, whatever realities are most, most pervasive in our lives. And my concern has been for a very long time that in the digital age, in particular, because online realities and the internet and social media and news media, because those things are so pervasive in our lives. If we do not live with intention, then our lives will be formed. We have no choice in the matter. Our lives will be formed by those realities, by the digital age, by the Internet, by social media, by news media and the stories and the narratives that they tell us about what is true and not true, about the world and our lives and so for me, you know, as I think about pastors and church leaders, but as I also think about just people in our church, the men and women and the kids that I feel called to serve and to lead, that's one of my greatest concerns. So I often think about the work we're doing here at our church as work to not only form disciples, but actually maybe first and foremost, or at least initially, to unform disciples, unformed disciples of the digital age, so that they might then become disciples of Jesus, in the way of Jesus. And again, it's not black and white. It's not like, you know, the internet is diametrically opposed to the gospel. The internet is just a medium. It's just a tool. This is something I say in my first book in analog church tools are all moral. They're amoral. Basically, I don't think that they have a morality in and of themselves, necessarily, although you could make an argument that social media and the algorithms do kind of have an inherent morality. But if you take, like a hammer, for example, a hammer doesn't have a built-in morality. A hammer can be used, used to build up something really beautiful, and a hammer can be used to actually destroy stuff, you know, it just depends on intention. And so that's really, for me, maybe the most critical initial piece. How much intentionality are we living with? You know, are we aware of the things that are forming us, and if those things are not forming us into the likeness of Christ, how willing are we? How much courage, how much conviction, how much discipline are we willing to lean into in order to detach in a healthy way, and to unform ourselves from those formative powers and to attach ourselves to the way of Jesus in such a way that we grow more and more like him, you know, in our daily lives. So in a nutshell, that's kind of what analog Christian is about. And more specifically. See. What I have discovered is, you know, Paul's words near the end of his letter to the Galatians, where he talks about keeping in step with the Spirit and embodying and bearing, you know, the Spirit bearing fruit in our lives and those characteristics of the Spirit. Fruit. You know, love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, gentleness, faithfulness, self-control. What I've realized is that those, those characteristics of the Spirit's fruit are actually the antidotes to so much that ails us in the digital age. So I think essentially what it comes down to is, can we be the sort of people who live with such a deep hunger and desire for the things of God, and invite God by His Spirit to actually bear fruit in us, not just become Christians who get a golden ticket to heaven when we die, but to be the sorts of people here and now in the day to day who ask God by His Spirit to come alive in us and to bear fruit in us. And if we can do that, I think the natural byproduct will be that so much of that which again, ails us in the digital age, so many of the ill effects of social media and news media, and all of the intake of the internet, so much of that will come undone as the Spirit of God bears fruit in us. So that's my hope with the book. That's my hope with, you know, our people that we serve here.

Jason Daye 
Yeah, that's so solid. And I so appreciate Jay, how you kind of flesh that out and kind of lay that out. I know that you write a lot about, you know, ideas of like contentment and resiliency, yeah, and, and as I think of pastors, you know, shepherding a church, those two things, one contentment and the other resiliency are, are two things that have really come to the forefront in the last couple years, especially, I think, in our lives As ministry leaders. So can you speak just, just quickly to each of those areas and how they apply, you know, as pastor, to a pastor, you know, thinking through the idea of contentment and then also that idea of resiliency?

Jay Kim 
Yeah, yeah, there's so much to say here. I think contentment again, going back to the characteristics of the fruit of the Spirit, I think that the, you know, the fruit of the Spirit, the way Paul writes it out, it's, there's, they're sort of set as a triad. So they come in threes, and you know the first three, love, joy, and peace. I think love, joy, and peace speak to the contentment we long for. I think one of the reasons why maybe we don't experience contentment the way we want is because we have a misunderstanding of what love, joy, and peace actually are. So often people think that love is sort of an emotional reaction or a feeling we have, because, you know, it's the butterflies in the stomach when you meet that girl you know for the first time or whatever. And actually, you know my argument is that love is actually a vocation. Love is a calling to live a particular way, and that you know, just as the human heart, it exists and keeps our bodies alive in a constant flow of receiving and giving. You know, it receives blood from one ventricle, and then it oxygenates, and then it gives blood through the other ventricle, and then it flows through the whole body, and then that same blood is received again by the heart, to be re-oxygenated and to once again be given away. So the body stays alive, like, literally, our physical bodies maintain life in a constant, never-ending flow of receiving and giving. Well, not never ending about 80 years, and then it ends. You know, that's, that's what keeps you alive. And I think love is the same exact way you most deeply experience love and receive love as you give it away. It's the work of giving it away that actually ends up giving you love, you know, and that leads to contentment. And the same with joy. I think Joy often is equated with, you know, happy feelings. And in fact, Joy is so much more than that. You know, Joy is the ability to find meaning in both the ups and downs of life. It's the sort of sustaining energy that undergirds both the mountain tops and the valleys and the long plateaus in between. And so once we tap into that, once we understand that joy is not predicated on circumstances or things working out or breaking our way, but rather, it is a gift from God that sustains us, that leads us to incredible contentment. And then peace, you know, peace is many of us know that. As peace is not just the absence of chaos or violence. Peace in the biblical literature is in the Hebrew. It's the word shalom, which is actually the rightness of all things, and the rightness and the putting right of relationships and systems, and, you know, in our own hearts and minds. And so if we can pursue the shalom of God, that too, I think, leads to contentment. And then, you know, when it comes to resilience, I mean, I think we could all use more resilience. And that second triad of the fruit of the Spirit, you know, the characteristics of patience and kindness and goodness. I think that leads to resilience. I think often we think of, you know, when we think of resilient people, we imagine people with clenched fists and, you know, teeth clenched, and fists clenched, and like, no matter what you do, I'm going to outlast you, sort of thing, you know. And that's not untrue, but actually, I think biblical resilience, you know, you think about the upside-down kingdom of God, and you think about the way Jesus did everything. I mean literally, spending time with the people he shouldn't have spent time with, going to parties he should not have gone to, winning victory over sin and death by dying. You know, just everything about it is backwards and upside down. And I think Christian resilience is the same way. Christian resilience is far less clenching our fists and standing in opposition to anybody who stands against us, but rather it's living with patience and it's exuding kindness and goodness in the face of utter hostility, you know, in our world, and especially in the digital age, where everyone is hostile, everyone is, you know, antagonistic, where on social media, everyone is shouting and screaming at one another, the most resilient thing you can do is to be patient and to be kind and to be good to those who are maybe not kind and good to you, patient with those who are impatient with you, you know. And that's resilience. That's actually true, resilience that gives you the strength to stand in for the long haul, and especially for pastors today, when I think about all of the data regarding how many pastors have left the ministry or are seriously considering leaving the ministry, I think resilience meaning Living with patience and kindness and goodness in our hearts and exuding those realities. I think it's one of the critical components of pastoral ministry in our day and age.

Jason Daye 
FrontStage BackStage is a ministry of PastorServe. Here at PastorServe, we love walking alongside of pastors and ministry leaders. If you'd like to learn details on how you might qualify for a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted ministry coaches. Please visit PastorServe.org/freesession now FrontStage BackStage is more than just another podcast. In fact, we create an entire toolkit that complements every single conversation. You can find this toolkit at PastorServe.org/network for this episode, and for every episode in the toolkit, you'll find a number of resources, including our ministry leaders' growth guide. In the growth guide, you'll find both questions and insights that are pulled from the conversation that you and the leaders at your local church or ministry can process together to consider how this content relates to your particular ministry context. Again, you can find the toolkit at PastorServe.org/network. Now we hope that you are finding this content valuable, and if so, we'd love for you to share, comment, like, follow, subscribe, that engagement is incredibly important, and also please take a moment to give us a review on your favorite podcast platform. Your engagement and your reviews help other pastors and ministry leaders help find this valuable content. I'm Jason Daye, and I'm encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well. Thank you, and God Bless You.