Why Church Feels Broken — and What to Do About It

Is it you, or is something deeper broken? We unpack the tension between loving the church and recognizing its gaps—and why the solution isn’t found in blame, but in shared responsibility.

The 2 or More Podcast is a conversation for lost balls and sleeping giants—followers of Jesus who are hungry for authenticity and to grow in their gifts and calling. Mike Bishop and Joel Henson explore what it looks like to plant sustainable microchurches, build spiritual family, and live out the kingdom of God in your whole life.

Instagram: 2ormore_podcast

Who is Everyday Mission? We are a people seeking transformation in our everyday lives and in the church. We are a people drawn into the harvest field by love. We are using our unique gifts, talents, and resources to influence the world with the Gospel of Jesus Christ and to help equip Everyday Missionaries.

Website: https://www.everydaymission.com/
Instagram & TikTok: @EverydayMissionFlorida

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

I feel like a lot of believers would say that they feel stuck. You know, followers of Jesus would just say that they feel like something's at least missing, if not maybe wrong. What what do you see in the church that may be contributing to that? And like, do you have any any wisdom for those people?

SPEAKER_00 0:18

Yeah. Um I think that that's something I've been noticing a lot more over the last few years. I think definitely since COVID, um, there was a lot of uh call it disruption, and and a word that we used to use, I say we, my my gener, sorry, I'm older than you. That's why we're here, man. My generation when I was a young buck, just coming into ministry and church planning, uh was around the time where uh the emerging church was emerging, and I won't get into all of what that meant, but the there was a word that started to come into play back then, deconstruction, right? And and now that's a lot more of a public word within the church. Uh it's it's actually been demonized, I think, to a point where it's actually unhelpful. Because what I've seen is that a lot of people that they're not even going to call it deconstruction, but what where they are is they just have questions, they just have things in their mind that they are struggling to resolve between not just what they see in the scripture, but what they know they've experienced in their life, and really struggling to connect that with a group of people seeing a disconnect together.

SPEAKER_01 1:53

Well, well, what does like when someone says the word deconstruction, what what do you associate that with? I think there may be a broad definition or varying definitions for that. What do you think of?

SPEAKER_00 2:05

Yeah, what is what it's become is I'm gonna just rip apart everything near and dear to the Orthodox faith and throw it to the side, and whatever I find at the bottom of that barrel, uh, I'm gonna pick up, and that's gonna be my expression of who I am with God. And that's just not what I experienced. Uh what I experienced was I had questions that either the authority figures in my life had not really answered well or even thought of, right? And I had other people around me who were my peers asking similar questions. And so at the time, this was the days before social media, we just started writing about those things. We posed those questions and we wrestled with those questions with God, with the scripture, with each other. And so the deconstruction part of it, and we we were products of the period of time that there's a lot of conversation about postmodernism and what that means, and and so there was a comfort level with okay, there might have to be a little bit of tearing down to build back up, but there never was a second guess that there was gonna be a building back up.

SPEAKER_01 3:24

Yeah, a church to resurrect out of that, exactly. And and also, I mean, the word deconstruction by nature means a meticulous process. Like deconstruct doesn't mean demolish.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

It's it's not throwing a hand grenade into the whole thing. Like I said, tearing everything down and whatever's at the bottom is is what you pick up. It's right, it's not that it's deconstructing and systematic.

SPEAKER_01 3:47

Yeah, it is. It's I imagine it is like pulling a few boards off the house that like the frame is still there, the core, the center message of Christ and his his church is still the same. But uh I place some boards up there under counsel of other leadership that probably needs to be torn down, actually. And and I think that that's a meticulous thing that is absolutely vital. Everyone has that that they walk through at certain periods of time, unless you're you're just an ideologue and you just you know do whatever anyone tells you. It's necessary to taking your faith out of your childhood and bringing it into its more mature place. You have to do that. And so deconstruction, I think, is a proper thing, but it's become this kind of yeah, I I want to reclaim the word.

SPEAKER_00 4:31

I'm just gonna say that right now on this podcast. Um, but we're gonna have a conversation about words and what they mean and why they matter. I think that's that's one I want to just reclaim. So the for the purposes of this podcast, we're gonna say deconstruction is the meticulous process of looking at your life, your theology, your understanding of God, your understanding of yourself, and being critical of those. When I say critical, not you know, like hating on them, but more just working through with the Holy Spirit to say what are the aspects of these beliefs and practices are in line with who God is and his kingdom and what truth is or not, right? And so I want to recapture that word because it you know the the reality is that the people that I've been seeing going through this process over the last couple years, they don't start with a meticulous process, they start with something is wrong in my heart or something is wrong in my mind, right? And and how that manifests is there's conflict that comes into place, there's you know, a personal struggle, there's a theological question, there's a scandal in a church, bad leadership, somebody gets hurt, you know, and and all of those things, or or a couple other things that I think are important to say. They're let's say they're ministering at a body and there's a glass ceiling, and there's a there's a place where they just can't go any higher unless they go into full-time ministry on staff, paid, whatever. So they get to this place, and usually what happens is they leave, right? They leave church, right? They leave that community, and they usually end up on their own, right? And so what happens in the 21st century when you're we you just had this experience, you you left church, you're alone. Who do you turn to? Who do you turn to, Joel?

SPEAKER_01 7:02

Anyone else, anyone and everyone.

SPEAKER_00 7:05

Well, usually that who is not a who, it's an it. You turn to the internet, you turn to social media, you start watching TikToks. Yeah, you still I'm just being honest. This is what is discipling a nation, a world right now with these kinds of things. And there's plenty of people on TikTok that will give you an ear full about deconstruction, good, bad, or indifferent, right?

SPEAKER_01 7:29

Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_00 7:30

Well, and then the pattern a lot of times repeats itself. So you might go to another church, now your head is full of everything that you just consumed on social media for that period of time when you were by yourself. You come back, and all of a sudden you're you it's it's like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

SPEAKER_01 7:52

I guess the only problem I see with that though is that I feel like that happens even with people who are dedicated church attendees. Like they they just fill their head with their own kind of like newsfeed. For sure. They bring that into the church, and then there's little accountability to actually address that type of like false belief and like self-belief about yourself and the world.

SPEAKER_00 8:12

And it it it and it doesn't even end with the word accountability, I think it goes deeper to the whole concept of creating space for people. Okay, so accountability really only has effectiveness in relationship. Yeah, with trust. Okay, if you come back after being uh uh in front of your screen and filling your head with those things, and you start challenging things that you're hearing from the pulpit or from that that you thought you knew about the Bible or whatever, or or just even your understanding of church and God and the Trinity and these kinds of things. Um, if there's no relationship, you're not gonna have there's there's no space for accountability there.

SPEAKER_01 9:04

Yeah, no, it's it I guess accountability is probably the wrong word. I really just mean discipleship. There's no like shepherding of, hey, like let me let me place my hands on top of yours and show you how to form this thing. Like, let me show you how to form your walk with Jesus. And so uh yeah, to me, it's oh it it almost seems like the deconstruction that you're talking about and the modern church attendee are facing the same conjunction, which is that or like the same juncture, which is that they're being pastored, they're being shepherded by the internet more than by a pastoral body of a church or a wiser wise people in their lives.

SPEAKER_00 9:43

Let me tell us a quick story. Uh my wife and I went to New York City last week to visit. Uh, my wife had had gotten tickets to Taylor Welsh uh and his podcast, The Deep End, to an event in the city, and we didn't really know what we were getting ourselves into. We thought it was just like a two-hour podcast. I had tickets that night and dinner reservations and all this stuff. So we show up to this event and he starts talking about the agenda, and the agenda went on into the evening. So immediately I'm just I've I've lost it, you know. Uh but anyway, there was there's probably four or five hundred people there, right? It was a well-attended event. I don't think he had really done much like that in the past. And at towards the end of the evening, I started to kind of come to terms a little bit with who was there and why they were there, right? Now, if if anybody listening to us doesn't know Taylor and what he does, he's a he's a very successful businessman, young man, but also his podcast really deals with really the the the deep end stuff of the spirit, of the spiritual realm, right? Deliverance, I mean, just a lot of things that that people in the church had the have either, again, not really talked about very much, have questions about, but they're not necessarily getting it from their their pastor in their community, right?

SPEAKER_01 11:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 11:16

And even before the event started, I was hearing in the audience people say, guy in front of me, young guy, said, I've been a Christian 20 years. Uh, what I've learned in the past year has changed my life. I'm I'm so much closer to God. I've I've grown as a disciple, all of these things. And heard that theme over and over again, right? But I was as I was leaving that night, it I was reminded of when Jesus was looking at the people in Jerusalem and and and weeping over Jerusalem and saying they're like a sheep without a shepherd. And this is nothing against Taylor. I think what he's doing is amazing. And there's a lot of Taylor Welshes out there that are doing amazing things, creating a venue for people to ask questions and space for them to learn and grow, right? Through social media, through podcasts, you know, those types of things.

SPEAKER_01 12:09

Yeah, it's not an indictment on Taylor, it's just a shame that there are so many hungry people who only can get it remotely. Exactly. That's part of the broken paradigm that I think we're trying to address.

SPEAKER_00 12:21

Exactly. And at the end of the day, and this is again nothing against Taylor, but at the end of the day, those people, what they need are going to need to endure. Okay, you can get your question answered. You can have a period of time in your life where you grow from certain amount of information, but you don't just grow from information, you grow from experience, right? You grow from community, from running up against one another, being challenged by your brothers and sisters, uh and and that's the aspect that comes back to as a leader, as someone who's interested maybe in and creating space for people to grow in this way, like you have to be able to answer that question. How can I how can I actually help someone who is growing in their faith and is hungry in that way, untangle things that need to be untangled, but also find the the you know the established and rich foundation of authentic spiritual community that the church is supposed to be.

SPEAKER_01 13:37

In your book, you call those people lost balls and sleeping giants. Yeah. What does that mean? Uh I'll I'll I'll condense stories here.

SPEAKER_00 13:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 13:47

You wrote a whole book on it, so uh yeah, give me the give me the one paragraph.

SPEAKER_00 13:51

The day I was ordained, um, I was ordained through the vineyard church, and uh an elder when they laid hands on me had a vision. And and in the vision, I was playing golf. I'm a golfer, it's South Florida. Sorry, this is what we do. I grew up doing it. It's easy, yeah. Did it yesterday? But um, I was golfing and Amber was there, my wife, and Jesus was our caddy. And there was this group of people that came around on the first T. And Jesus had a golf bag, and the only three things in it were a driver, a putter, and one of those ball catcher things. And everybody wanted me to get the driver and hit the ball 300 yards down the fairway, you know. 300? Come on, man. Yeah, I don't, I don't, but but really as an analogy of to see where our ministry would go, like do the big thing, right? Yeah. And instead, Jesus gave me the putter and he said, putt it. And I'm like, I have no idea what's going on now. This is in the vision, though. So I did, I was obedient. I hit the little putt, and the ball went down the fairway under the power of the spirit, right? And everybody was applauding and excited, and they start moving down the fairway with Jesus or with the ball. But we leave the T-box, and instead of going to where the ball was going, Jesus took us to the side where the swamp was. If you ever played golf in Florida, there's a lot of swamps, right? A lot of gators, right? And when balls end up into those swamps, they they're basically unusable.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

Yeah, they're gone, gone for good, usually.

SPEAKER_00 15:36

So he gave me the ball catcher. I pop out the ball, and it's all dirty and nasty and gross. And he says, Give it to me. And he takes his towel and washes it off and gives it back to me. And what the elder heard and relayed to me was that what God was saying is this is a picture of our ministry. You know, the ball's gonna go down the fairway under the power of the spirit, but your ministry is to go to the side, to find the lost balls, to hand them back to Jesus, have him clean them off, and then hand it back to you to steward them and put them back into play. So that's what it means to be a lost ball. And there's a lot of people that have that story, right? For whatever reason, they're they're in the ditch, they're in the swamp, and they're they're really just crying out to the Lord, would you would you send someone to help me get out of this swamp and get back into the field of play and get cleaned off?

SPEAKER_01 16:38

How would you kind of uh personify that person? Like who is a lost ball?

SPEAKER_00 16:43

So it's really some somebody that that kind of doesn't fit anymore. Okay. So I I always like to to think of there's a a friend of mine named Aaron, who's a lifeguard, and Aaron um we met him like 20 years ago. We were doing a church event at the beach, and he heard us singing, and he stopped by and he said, I just heard the word righteousness in the song that you just sang. So are you guys Christians? You know, it's just a very Aaron thing to say. And um, but Aaron is a musician, he's a lifeguard, he's a single man, and he just for whatever reason, he he also has a history within recovery movement and and AA. And he just always struggled with fitting in. So he would go to a church and he'd be like, I want to, I want to join the worship team. And then it was like, Oh, well, you're not a professional, or uh, we don't sing the kind of music you like, or whatever. There would be some reason why that wouldn't fit. And then he would have questions about why aren't there more opportunities for us to ask questions, like in AA? You you sit around in a room and you right, you you you process through together your recovery, right? Your your relationship with God, how you're incorporating the principles of AA as a discipleship tool, right? And he could never understand that. And so eventually he just kind of gave up. And when he found us, he had given up, he wasn't gonna try church anymore. AA was his church, and so for somebody like Aaron, the environment, creating an environment again, not not to try to please his idiosyncrasies or anything like that, or to cater to them, but really create an environment where he gets the opportunity to come in to have Jesus clean him up, and then really ask the question well, what really is in your heart? So you're a musician, like what if it's not worship, what gets you going? Like, what gets you wakes you up in the morning passionate about music and wanting to do it for the Lord? And how can we help you do that?

SPEAKER_01 19:04

An awesome question. Yeah. And then what about the the sleeping giants?

SPEAKER_00 19:10

So the sleeping giants come from a time, this was right before COVID. Uh, we had started Everyday Mission, which is our network of missions and microchurches here in South Florida, and we weren't we just weren't seeing much growth yet. And at the time, I had a lot of these stories and and a lot of these experiences that God had given us, my wife and I both. And I had come to this place, I was actually, I remember I was in our Jeep, I was driving with the top down down A1A uh with my dog, and just but kind of frustrated and frustrated with God. And I remember praying, God, would you just give me a tenth of what you promised? Because he had given us all these prophetic promises about what he wanted to do in this area and this network of leaders and really birthing a movement of the kingdom in this area, right? But we just weren't seeing any fruit yet, and I just felt like I had all this stuff inside that God had given me and no one to give it to. You know what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 20:24

Yeah, I think a lot of people feel that way.

SPEAKER_00 20:26

Yeah, yeah. And you begin to ask the question well, is it my problem? Like, is it something in me? And so that prayer really the prayer for the wake the sleeping giants came out of a process of that frustration, and it was New Year's Eve, and I was sitting on my front porch and I was watching the fireworks, and the Holy Spirit just hit me, and I had this really amazing encounter with the Lord, and at the end of it, those that phrase just popped into my head, wake the sleeping giants. And so the next day I sat down and I I wrote a crafted prayer. And if folks had have never been exposed to crafted prayer, it's it's not like you know, writing something that's gonna go in the book of common prayer or orthodoxy or something like that. It's it's literally sitting down with the Holy Spirit and and discerning what is the Holy Spirit praying, because it says the scripture says, right? The Holy Spirit's interceding on our behalf, right? So it's it's the process of of interpreting that, writing it down, and then turning it into your own words that are the same thing, things that the Holy Spirit is praying for. And there's a guy, Graham Cook, amazing teacher, prophetic guy that wrote a book just called Crafted Prayer, that I would highly recommend people using. But that prayer, which had The line wake the sleeping giants within a very short period of time. I mean, weeks, the next few months, people just started coming out of the woodwork. And I know the question that you're gonna ask, which is, well, what's a sleeping giant? Well, it's really someone who has been through that process, like we were talking about at the beginning of a few minutes ago. And they've come to the place where there's just this holy dissatisfaction with the way things are. And they are in a place where they're not mad at Jesus, they're not laying their faith down. Yeah, maybe there's some stuff that they are deconstructing in the way that we're talking about it. But more than anything else, they've just come to this place where it's it's just easier to go back to life as usual. It's just easier to lay down those desires for the kingdom and for really for ministry, right? For mission, for to see their unique part in the kingdom played out. It's just easier to focus on your family, your business, just just to do life, right? And again, still read your Bible, maybe still go to church, maybe still, you know, whatever.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

Yeah, but just kind of do the motions, just through the keep doing status quo. Yeah. Which, I mean, the invitation of Jesus is categorically antithetical to that. It's just like Jesus is inviting us into radical responsibility of kingdom building and disciple making and shepherding people and teaching the lost and healing the sick. And like even Hebrews 6 talks about like let it our job as mature believers is to progress past the bat basic message of Christ, radical Bible verse. When you read it, it's like literally progress past the basic message message of Christ on into various types of baptisms, healing of the sick, raising of the dead, and instructing of the lost. And I'm like, like, that's our call is like step out of the church pew and like let's let's do something really radical. And so for me, I think like the solution isn't isn't found in more volunteering service to the church, like you know, signing up for more responsibility. I think we're like, you know, I think we're already too busy. And and I think it comes with like slowing down, removing some of the religious burden and recognizing that God's inviting you into this open space of creativity because the Holy Spirit is incredibly just by nature the creative part of like who God is. The spirit of God is creative, and so like this reflects Jesus and his lightness, like his yoke on us is light, it's not this heavy thing. And so to the like sleeping giants and the lost balls of like people who have kind of been in this system and they feel stuck. It's like religion is just a list of rules that you need to do in order to be as pleasing as possible to God, right? But the gospel of Jesus is an invitation to a life lived with deep, deep meaning, both eternally and currently.

SPEAKER_00 25:20

Yeah, yeah. I I I want to say something very plainly. Um that I think it this comes from again years of being in in hidden spaces with people, with individuals, not being on stages, not being you know, in big public kind of meetings all the time and stuff. We've done we've done those things. Nothing against that. I'm just saying I've spent the majority of my 25-30 years of ministry just with folks in a living room, right? And I want to I want to just be be very explicit about this. If you're a lost ball or you're a sleeping giant, you heard those stories, and you say, Yeah, that's me. Or yeah, I can really identify with some of that. Um, but there's a lot of guilt and insecurity around feeling those things. Um there is, you know, the pastor's number one verse that they like to talk about from Hebrews, don't don't forsake meeting together, right? Come to come to church. Yeah, come to church. Um but if if the church failing to live up to God's intent for you and to provide you a space to grow and flourish in the way it even if you are deconstructing, even if you are a lost ball, even if you are a sleeping giant, that's an that's an us problem, right? That's something that we together as the body of Christ, instead of demonizing people, instead of saying, okay, well, you don't fit, or you've got the question that really you're not supposed to ask, or you know, all of the above, instead of putting people in those categories, we need to be figuring out how we can humble ourselves. Because guess what? All of us one day, or two two realities. One, regardless of your stature in the body of Christ, at one point you were lost. You were you were lost, right? You had no hope. And Jesus gave you hope. Jesus did for you what you can't do. Okay, that's one reality. Second reality is one day all of us will stand before him, right? Yeah, that's right. And we will have to give an account. People forget this second aspect of judgment. We will have to give an account, like in it says in 1 Corinthians 3, of what we have built on the foundation of Jesus. It is the the most scary passage of scripture in almost the entire New Testament. If you have any authority over anyone's life in the church, go read it. 1 Corinthians 3, I think 14 through 17, somewhere in that ballpark. We will all have to give an account for what we did. And if we're more interested in propping up our thing and separating ourselves from people that don't fit and not creating space for them to grow through their questions, through their issues, to get cleaned up if they're a a lost ball, to get woken up if they're a sleeping giant. And we're gonna have to give an account for that. And in my mind, this is where we can say, and I and I I again I want to say this very plainly there is a way. You just have to be willing to go there. You just have to be willing to humble yourself as a leader, whatever responsibility God's given you to say, I'm not just gonna be about my thing, I'm gonna be available for these people to find hope, to find a structure where they can grow in maturity and health and actually one day do the things like you were talking about before. Heal the sick, raise the dead, everything that Jesus promised, right? Yeah, because I I'm sure a lot of them hear that and they say, Heard it before. I don't yeah, I've heard it before. I don't want to hear that right now. I know that's the command.

SPEAKER_01 30:03

Yeah. Yeah, the the good news to to those people though is like this isn't another program that they have to attend or books to buy, right? I love that you you really call out West Western Christianity often for our consumeristic kind of um business like approach to to things. Like, oh, if you buy this, like this will really turn your life around. It's like, man, that's that's such a shame.

SPEAKER_00 30:26

And don't take that as like this general uh generalizing criticism or we're better or we got it all figured out. That's not what I'm saying. I'm just like look around, people just look around, just use your eyes and your ears. Yeah, that's that's that's all I'm saying.

SPEAKER_01 30:43

Well, what uh yeah, and what I hear you saying is essentially you're speaking to two different people here. First is the church leaders who are currently in the position of shepherding people. It's like read 2 Corinthians 3, right? Is that what you said? 2 Corinthians 3. First First Corinthians 3. First Corinthians 3. And um and take ownership of the fact that like God has entrusted you with people and like the parable of the talents in Matthew 25, like we're gonna have to give account of like, hey, what was the return on the investment that was given to you? Uh and and we're gonna have to answer for that. And so the what I think that's gonna require of people like you and people like me, and and those who are shepherding people actively is it's going to have to be this unrushed, unanxious, interruptible presence that looks like Jesus. It is going to be a release of our understanding of what the status quo has to be. It has to be three songs and a 40-minute sermon once a week. Uh, maybe a Bible study here and there if you're really extra good, and uh maybe deconstruct some of our understanding of like what is church? Like, let's redefine, like let's read scripture. The guy in my church lady says, What if we read what was in the Bible and just did it? Yeah, I get that is terrifyingly specific, and I love it. Because the reality is, is we are really great at creating systems, but systems aren't always great at taking care of people. And then you're also saying to people who feel like a lost ball or a sleeping giant, is there may be an invitation of responsibility on you. I I personally believe, I don't know if you agree with this, that if you're someone who sees kind of the cracks in the system that we have right now, like the church structure that we have that's in place that no one really knows how to change, it's just too big of a ship to steer. You're like, I see these cracks, but I don't really know what to do about it. I believe firmly that the Lord has given you discernment that he isn't given to everybody. And he may be inviting you into being the one to start opening up your home. Yeah. Start cooking meals for people who can't pay for it, like start breaking bread with other believers and people who aren't believers. Like start exercising these disciplines that really are gonna start building the kingdom in super low, humble ways. Yeah. Like that's really exciting, but that may be the call for our sleeping giants, especially, right?

SPEAKER_00 32:58

Yeah. No, there's there's an invitation here, and we're gonna get more into that, what that entails. But again, there's the invitation and the promise is yeah, they'll there'll be some some tough things to work through, and there'll be some situations where people don't get cleaned up right away, and sleeping giants don't wake up right away and right. But the invitation is once you're in the game, once you're joined with God in this process, uh there's really a lot of hope for renewal. And there's joy that goes along with it. And that's what we get excited about.