Welcome to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. I'm your host, Chris Denizing, Manager of Marketing and Business Development here at Vanderblumen. In today's podcast, I get to talk with Lynn Wilson, founder of Invite Resources. His passion and mission is to help ministries navigate obstacles and turn them into opportunities. In this podcast, Lynn talks about his heart behind the new book he co-wrote, Taylos, The Hope in Heaven Today. He shares how culture has changed in the last half decade and the theology behind it. He shares ways to practically rely on the hope we have in Christ. We hope you enjoy this conversation. Well, hey everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today. I'm so excited I get to introduce you to Lynn Wilson. Lynn, thanks for joining us today.
SPEAKER_00Krista, it's nice to be here. Thanks for having me.
SPEAKER_02Of course. We're glad that we get to hear all about your new book. Where um you've released it in December of 22. Now we're in 2023 and it's already doing really, really well. And so I'm so glad to hear that. Do you mind telling the listeners just about your book a little bit?
SPEAKER_00Sure. It's called Tell Us, The Hope of Heaven Today. And I co-authored it with uh my mentor, my longtime friend Leonard Sweet. Uh, here's the paperback edition of it. Uh, it's definitely the thickest book I have ever written. So I've got room to make the font big on the spine there. So it's it's exciting. This this book was really about five years in development. Uh, as I was going through my doctoral uh work with under Lynn at uh Portland Seminary, I was asking a lot of questions about what was happening in our culture at the time and just kind of the craziness of culture from the last half of this last decade to the present. And looking at that from a theological lens, I began to really kind of think that so much, so much what is happening and has been happening in our culture is based on bad theology about the future and bad theology about the end. And so this book was written in part to kind of say, hey, maybe we need to rethink what we really mean when we say the end and when we talk about the kingdom in our church, in church life.
SPEAKER_02That's great. And then also, I know we've had you on the podcast a couple times before, but would you mind just for anyone who's new listening, tell us a little bit about your background and invite resources?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Uh I'm publisher of Invite Press, president of Invite Resources. We're a almost three-year-old ministry startup based out of Plano, Texas. And uh we're we're looking at publishing, trying to do it a little differently. In fact, speaking of kingdom, we we said to ourselves when we started this, we started Invite on the first day of Shelter in Place in March of 20. And uh we had yeah, we had had the vision for it here at my church at St. Andrew, there's the steeple, uh, for uh several years. And when the pandemic started, we said, well, there's no better time to launch this. And so we did, but the the driving question was what does Christian publishing look like? What does publishing look like in the kingdom of heaven? Is really what we said. So we've been doing a lot of things differently. That my background is as a full-time ministry writing, uh, publishing, worked in Nashville for a period, uh, been on staff at large local churches. And so I have this experience with the kind of the world of writing and speaking and teaching to the larger church, and felt like there were a lot of things that that we could approve upon. And so Invite has been an effort to do that.
SPEAKER_02That's great. And we'll make sure to have an uh link in the show notes to invite, just if anyone wants to check that out, that's listening. Um, but the main reason we wanted you here is to talk more about your book and just kind of the heart behind it. I know there's a lot leading up to it, and I just am excited to hear more about it. You talk about culture and theology and just the end time. You were telling me earlier what telos actually means in the Greek, um, which is new to me. I didn't even know that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, it's it's one of the most underrepresented concepts because there is no direct English equivalent. So uh our translators, you know, have been doing the best they can when they convert the scriptures into English. Most of the time, when you see the phrase the end in the New Testament, it's a reference to telos. But there's actually several forms of telos. It's an extremely common word and it's a real critical concept to the early church that's kind of been lost. Uh so at a very basic level, it means the end. In fact, we were going to name it the end, but uh we we got some bad feedback early on. I thought that was probably not a good idea. So we decided just to go with the uh the actual Greek word instead. And uh because it's it's the book is thick because it takes a long time to really digest um what it means. And and what we've tried to do is to say what it doesn't mean. So we have it in the first half of the book, there's six chapters devoted to what we call these isms, and there's uh like apocalypticism, utopianism. We name all these kind of like visions of the future, and how they misrepresent the kingdom of God in some way or form. And so each one of those chapters ends with a statement to say the kingdom of God, like for example, utopianism. We say the kingdom of God is actually not something we build on our own, and and the modern church has been doing a lot of quote unquote kingdom building that really has not worked very well, and that's because the theology of it is is off.
SPEAKER_02That's great, and that's where we see ministries, you know, fall because of that a lot of the times. Um, yeah, I think it's really interesting. You kind of do these six false endings, and they all lead to, I believe you say tragedy and despair. Um supposed to be, which is really interesting.
SPEAKER_00And this is out of my own history, Krista, because I had I was full on part of what we now call the church growth era, the church growth movement, you know. Like when I first came up in ministry, we didn't know this was a moment in time, we just thought it was the way it was supposed to be, that we were out there building churches and building the kingdom. But, you know, for anyone who kind of knows that, and if you've listened to the Mars Hill podcast, perhaps you have some glimpse of it, you know, kind of the dark underbelly of the church growth era. And a lot of people began to ask, you know, 10 years ago or so, this isn't working. How do we do it better? And uh, and that's a real disturbing question because if your whole orientation is around we build it, then um then that's that became very challenging and very hard for uh church leaders to get their minds around. But but Jesus is clear that we don't build the kingdom, he builds the kingdom, we receive the kingdom, and that's a subtle nuance. But when we put it in our own minds that we're the ones doing the building, then we adopt this kind of works theology, which ultimately it puts it on us. We're not capable spiritually of handling that. So it ends in despair because we despair the fact that we can't achieve the kingdom that we think that Jesus is tasking us to do. But in fact, Jesus is not asking us to build the kingdom. So it's it's it's very grace-filled, it's very liberating to realize this is the case.
SPEAKER_02It feels like a very freeing book, I feel like. For culturally, you look around, you turn the news on, you hear this, you hear that. And I just feel like there's a lot of relief in knowing it's not what we build, it's not what we're doing, because clearly we can't do that well. We need someone better to do it for us.
SPEAKER_00Right, exactly. Yeah, in fact, uh Lynn Sweet called me out. It was like the first month of the program, and I said a phrase that I had been saying. I just, it was just an off-handed phrase I threw out. I said something about advancing the kingdom, and it's a phrase I had used so many times before. And he just stopped me in my tracks, just called me out, said we don't advance the kingdom. What are you talking about? And so we just kind of got into this theological discussion, but that was like it was that kind of process what he was saying. I was like, oh my gosh, like I've been I've been putting all this weight on myself, and we all have all of us in the church growth movement, we're doing that.
SPEAKER_02And it's such a shift of mind and of culture because we do. We we, I mean, I think growing up in so many areas of ministry, we make it about ourselves. It's me. What do I get out of this? What are we doing? How am I gonna be better? And it's not God, you know, we lose sight of that. And I think there's a lot more pressure when we put it so much on ourselves. I think even in serving and leading certain areas of ministry, there's a lot of pressure we put on ourselves instead of reliance on God. I had a mentor one time tell me um I was leading something at the time, and I think I was a little stressed out or carrying a burden of it. And she looked at me and she's like, Krista, I'm gonna say something really loving, but also really mean, and tell you that it's not about you here, you know. And there was just a lot of weight lifted with that. If you're right, this is not about Krista, this is about God. And she told me, she said, God's gonna move with or without you. So don't think it's so much on yourself.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think absolutely. I've been through that experience too. And I think it's just something that we all at ministry have to learn at some point. Uh now, what's interesting to me also is that um so much of the culture is still tied into this idea that we're building it, which is really a utopian idea. It's it's rooted in the Enlightenment idea of progress, that we're somehow going to progress our way to the kingdom, you know, in the end. And you see that a lot in more secular approaches to political ideas right now. But the flip side to that is this kind of dark version that's apocalyptic that says, oh, the world's not getting better, the world's getting worse, and it's gonna you know go down and down and down until there's a big special effects explosion, then Jesus arrives. And and we're like, that's not scripture either. And so that's one of the that's also one of the six isms, is to say the apocalypticism. Now, the apocalyptic, the word technically by itself means something different. That means revealing. But the way the world interprets it is you know a Michael Bay movie or something, and so you have kind of this this adjustment that we're trying to uh name. So that those are two of these six isms in the book.
SPEAKER_02Your organization is unique, therefore, the way you find your next staff members should be unique too. Whether you're a school, nonprofit, family office, or values-based business, we are ready to help serve you. Contact us today to get started. I'm just curious, and there may or may not be an answer to this, but with studying this and looking at the culture and the theology, have you noticed any trends that have changed with different generations or times of the world? Now we're in kind of more of a technology culture. Like have I was just curious if y'all have noticed any of those.
SPEAKER_00I think one of the big trends is that if you if you trace back the kind of the history of the philosophy of what I'm talking about, which is very rooted in uh the Enlightenment, it goes back to the late 1600s. The Enlightenment peaked before World War I. Like that basically the whole world thought we were all gonna drive our way to perfection. And in fact, the entire social gospel movement, I think this is fascinating, the entire social gospel movement uh started by Walter Rauschenbusch, who was a pastor in New York in the 19 teens, um that was kind of blown up by World War I philosophically, because everybody said, Oh, wow, we're not improving. This is all, you know, going to hell. It's terrible what's happening. Um, and in fact, Raushon Bush himself tried to refute the social gospel movement that came out of his writings before he died. Um, and and that's carried forward in the church. And so you kind of have this split that was named by Raush and Bush. And so you're kind of you're it whether you're on the political left or the political right is largely a function of your understanding of that theology. Whether or not you've studied him or not, then you have an opinion about that that issue. Um, and that's played out over the generations, and and um on the right side, you kind of had church growth as a response to social justice on the left side. Um, and I think what's happening with the with the newer generations is we're finally starting to get past some of this stuff a little bit. It's still there, but I see millennials and I see also some Gen Zers. My oldest is 21, and she's active in ministry and is asking great questions right now. And and I I see a desire to get past some of that split, that 100-year-old split that was started before the last the first world war.
SPEAKER_02That's great. No, that's really interesting. And to think of it that way, a hundred-year-old split, and just kind of the um ways that we're kind of slowly starting to mend things or get past that is kind of cool. It brings a lot of hope to me. Um, I want to talk a little bit more because you mentioned earlier kind of the culture trends and then just like bad theology. Um I know that's a much deeper and longer conversation, but let's just dive into that. I want to hear kind of you explaining and opening that up a little bit deeper.
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, the when when Jesus says all authority on heaven and earth has been given to me, then that's the statement that drives ultimately these isms are questions of authority, is where where we are putting our authority. And um the church over its 2,000-year history has been guilty over and over of syncretizing true Christology and true orthodox understanding with whatever philosophical fad, because philosophical fads are like mega trends, they they can last decades or generations, and so Christianity gets kind of gets blended into them, you know, and but then the trends change gradually. Um, and so it's really a question of authority because we we have to go back and say, where is our true authority lie? Is it lying, for example, in our current situation, does it lie in the four principles of the Enlightenment, which are science, uh, reason, humanism, and progress? Or are there ways in which Christianity is different than that? And even ask that question, it's kind of mind-blowing for people. Like, you know, uh, because if you really believe in science or reason, then you say, or empiricism, then you say, well, maybe that's not always the case. Maybe there is mystery. Um, which so helping to understand that authority is in Jesus and in no other philosophy uh is really the theological foundation of the book.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, that's great. And then we mentioned briefly earlier, but I know Lynn Sweet helped you with this book as well. The two of you really wrote this. What was that relationship between you two? And then that kind of led you and him to create this.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, that's a great question. Um, I I've known Lynn since uh I got into ministry. I met him in 1993 when I went to get my MDiv. And if your listeners don't know Lynn Sweet, he's um he's one of our greatest living theologians, in my opinion. He's written 70-something books. He's um just really, really powerful in his leadership uh for many decades in the church. And so I've been with him in my master's level work and uh had known him in in ministry settings professionally for a while, but then I wanted to go back and get my doctorate. He was really the only person that I wanted to go back and study with. I wanted to kind of learn what he had been looking at. Uh so the program, he was kind of the lead, it's called the lead mentor. So he's the mentor over all the students. So you have some interaction, but limited interactions. We were talking throughout the program, and but but whenever I'd have a question like this idea of advancing the kingdom, then I would shoot him a text or something, and he would, you know, kind of throw some nugget back at me. And so we were doing this for a while, and I'm writing and writing, but I'm also hitting walls because I think bigger than my capacity to understand what's happening. And so I'm like, okay, I went down a rabbit hole here and I have no idea what I'm doing, you know, and so but he would save me from that. So I would say that the majority of the manuscript is mine, but many of the critical points are his because he would kind of come in and say, wait a minute, you you know, you're kind of like off on this ditch over here. Let me pull you back in. Uh so um he was his he's critical of the success in that way as well.
SPEAKER_02That's really great. I love that. Um, and then kind of this is a I think this book for some is a big shift in perspective and changing the way we may even think or think about the world. What are some of the big takeaways you think readers will get from your book?
SPEAKER_00We we spend so the back half of the the first half of the chapter is much the first half of the book, excuse me, is is much denser because we're outlining kind of the the philosophy and the history and the theology, what's happening. Uh, but then the back half is is hopefully more hopeful. So my sister's uh one of my readers, she's she's awesome, she reads everything I I write. And so I sent this to her and she finished the first half and I said, What do you think? And she said, It's depressing. And I was like, I was like, Well, it kind of is because we're saying all these things that are wrong with the world, but then the back half we try to say, okay, here's the hope of heaven today. So then we we talk about Jesus, we talk about the kingdom, Jesus as the authority. So um, and by the way, part of that is to say authority is not in a proposition, but it's in a person. Uh, so you know, there's a difference there. So when you name that, then you say he has all authority on heaven and earth, and that leads to the kingdom, and then understanding the kingdom, then then you understand telos uh in relationship to the kingdom. Uh so we kind of walk through these things, but then talk about how it applies to our lives. Um, so it's it's it's both heady and also hopefully uh practical and encouraging at the same time.
SPEAKER_02What I'm doing is make it through the first half.
SPEAKER_00Don't or if you just skip the part two and you'll be fine.
SPEAKER_02And then you talked about, I like what you said about um not a proposition, but a person, the hope in Jesus. Would you explain what you mean by that?
SPEAKER_00Well, you know, there's this idea right now, there's this phrase actually that that Lynn Sweet and I both detest, this idea of your truth, my truth, uh, which is is based on this kind of experiential philosophy that says your experience defines your truth, and there is no objective reality outside of that. Um, and we're saying there is an objective reality, but in in the old understanding, fill philosophically, that was a proposition. You know, you could say truth is X, you know, reason defines truth, for example, or science defines truth. And we're saying we're now living in an age in which we realize there's limits to our understanding of science and reason, or or experience or tradition, or anything else you would look to to say this is truth. And the only way to really name that is to say Jesus is truth, which so happens to be what Jesus says, right? I am the way, the truth, and the life. And so you really break that down, then uh that means we're not dependent on saying that that reason or empiricism or tradition or all these other things that we all go through in the book are truth because each one of those is limited ultimately, and and you'll hit a dead end if you pursue any one of those to its end.
SPEAKER_02I love when that happens, when it's something so simple that we all memorized as kids, Jesus is truth, and then you it takes this whole long discovery just to come back to, well, we moved right past it, and we complicated it as we do.
SPEAKER_00Absolutely, it's a hundred percent it. Yeah, you kind of get back to the end where hopefully there's a simplicity on the on the dark side of complexity to quote all of Runder Holmes. You know, we we have a simple understanding as children, we go through school, we we adopt all these complex understandings, and maybe they take us down these paths, down these ditches, but faith leads us back to the same simple understanding in the end that that is it's all about Jesus.
SPEAKER_02It is. Um, and then you talked a little bit also of in the second half of the book. How does that shape kind of our day-to-day life when we walk in that hope and we walk in that true understanding?
SPEAKER_00One of the things that that helped me personally as I was writing it and processing what was coming out was this realization, just like with the advancing the kingdom idea, this kind of freeing idea that we can let go of worry, we can let go of worry about the future, worry about the church. You know, you see all these articles like, oh, the church is declining, people aren't going, and so ministry leaders are up in arms, like, what do we do? When you say, no, ultimately it's not up to us. Uh, and part of that is is we touch on this kind of crazy thing that this is one of those examples, Krista, where I get way over my skis because I'm talking about time, and uh and we talk and and Lynn brought this in this idea of Marinatha is three tenses in one, it's past, present, and future. And we tend to think of the kingdom as the future, and we're not yet at the kingdom, and so we have to do things in order for the kingdom to come. But we say, no, the kingdom is now. When Jesus said it is finished, he established the kingdom, he resurrected this. Is now the kingdom, so the kingdom is past, present, and future all at once. And when you realize that, it's both mind-blowing because you're like, How does that work? I don't really understand that. But at the same time, it's also freeing because you realize that again, it's not up to us. In fact, the the time nature of that is how we structure the book. So every chapter is like double time, out of time, in time. So all these uh time references throughout the book that to me ultimately are encouraging to get back to your question because I realize that hey, we're we're in the kingdom as believers. We're we're already here. If we just need to learn to relax, I think appreciating grace and relaxing in the rhythms of life is actually one of the hardest things that we have to learn to do as believers.
SPEAKER_02I think that's so good. I think that's something that probably isn't spoken out loud very often, but it's very true. I think we all do that. Um who let me see, because I know we only have so much time and I have so many questions. But if you had to tell someone who was slightly interested in the book to the listener, maybe this is interesting. Um, what is like one of the biggest pieces of it kind of takeaway from the book? What's the ideal goal for the reader to take away or get out of this read?
SPEAKER_00Uh I I heard two different questions there. Let me kind of respond to the No, it's good. Uh the first one there about kind of like the hooks or things that would interest uh people. The the last of the isms is messianism and it's the idea that we're gonna look for a messiah. And and I think history is somewhat cyclical. We go through these eras where we say, somebody save us. And so we look for these authoritarian figures to come in our life, and we have authoritarian figures all over the world. World right now that are emerging, not just in America, but in every culture. And to me, that's that's a natural consequence. We've gone through every the Jews did this, the Israelites. As they left uh Egypt, God says, I'll be your leader. And they were like, No, we actually want to have a leader we can see. And so they said, God said, Okay, well, here's Saul. And you have to understand, I'm giving you Saul, but you're not gonna like what happens when you have an earthly king. Uh, and and so that's what happens. And so if you're if people are trying to understand politically what's happening in our in our culture today, the theological answer to that to me is this messianic desire for someone to save us when nobody outside of Jesus can do that work. And so we look to people to do that work and we can't find it. So to me, the book is extremely practical in the sense that it helps you to understand some of the like groundshifting, crazy things that have been happening in our world these these last few years. And I and I forgot the second part of your question, but that was the the first part.
SPEAKER_02My second part was what do you want readers to take out of this book when they read it?
SPEAKER_00Um, another concept that we hit towards the end is the concept of jubilee. And um it it we're we're so wide-ranging, Chris. I'm sorry, there's just there's just so much to think about here, but but Jubilee is tied to Sabbath and it's tied to the restoration of the kingdom and of all people to the garden. And and when we talked about this idea that we don't have to earn it, but grace is present uh for us and the rhythm that comes with that, so the Sabbath is built into that, and and and learning the rhythms of that and being able to relax and to say, wow, Jesus came to to free us, to release us. Jesus came to fulfill Jubilee. And if we can just accept that, then then all the angst that we carry are all around us and all the the concern about mental health today and all the anxiety, we can just put that to the side.
SPEAKER_02That's so great. Lynn, thank you for hopping on this call with me today and being able to share with all of our listeners more about your book. Thank you for I know all of the hours and time that went into writing a book. Um, why don't you tell our listeners where they can get their hands on their very own copy of this?
SPEAKER_00Sure. Uh if you go to Amazon and search Telos, The Hope of Heaven Today by Leonard Sweet and Lynn Wilson, there it is. Uh we also have the book direct on our website at invite resources.com. And if you go to the invite website, then I'll I'll sign a copy uh for them as well.
SPEAKER_02So incentive. That's great. And I'll make sure that we have our team link all of this in the show notes so that you can easily find those links. Lynn, thank you again so much for joining us today.
SPEAKER_00Thanks, Krista.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for listening to the Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast. At Vanderblumen, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, compensation, and diversity consulting services. Visit our website, Vanderblumen.com, to learn more, and subscribe to our Vanderblumen Leadership Podcast wherever you listen to podcasts to keep up with our newest episodes. Thanks for listening.