The Church Renewal Podcast
The Church Renewal Podcast
Jesus Still Writes Letters (And Your Church Should Read Them): A Conversation with Dr. Ken Quick (Part 1)
Dr. Ken Quick of Blessing Point Ministries joins us to discuss how Jesus speaks to churches corporately, not just to individuals, and how addressing a congregation's painful past can lead to healing and renewal.
The 8th Letter by Dr. Ken Quick
• Churches often don't realize Jesus has a corporate message for them as a community
• The letters to the seven churches in Revelation 2-3 provide a model for how Jesus continues to speak to congregations today
• The "Eighth Letter" model helps churches discern what Jesus would say to their congregation
• Corporate healing requires examining church history, identifying "hinge moments" where decisions created lasting impacts
• Blessing Point's three-month process includes historical examination, a retreat, and a solemn assembly
• Churches that take corporate responsibility for past failures experience remarkable healing
• Congregations must often "go back" to address unresolved histories before they can move forward effectively
• Spiritual gifts help believers understand God's perspective on various issues affecting the church
Books by Dr. Ken Quick
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Welcome to Season 3.5 of the Church Renewal Podcast from Florist Coaching. Why is this 3.5? Because we weren't quite done with Season 3.
Speaker 2:Anyway, I'm Jeremy. I'm Matt.
Speaker 1:Thanks for joining us. When we wrapped on Season 3, there were some conversations that we left on the table, which we're giving you now in this mini-season. Pull up a chair as we sit down with some of our colleagues. We're privileged to be partners in ministry with these leaders and together we serve your congregation, hear the Good Shepherd and navigate through seasons of change. We'll also hear from some local church leaders Flourish has been grateful to work with directly. We'll speak with them about their personal and corporate experience. Thanks again for joining us. Let's get to it. In this episode, matt and Jeremy were thrilled to sit down with Dr Ken Quick from Blessing Point Ministry. The full interview is about 40 minutes so out of respect for your time, we've split this into two parts. Here's the first half, and we'll bring you the rest next week. Enjoy.
Speaker 2:Matt, I don't believe anybody expected you and I to be back so soon.
Speaker 3:You think they were dreading it it or they were looking forward to it.
Speaker 2:I believe they were looking forward to it.
Speaker 3:Oh, I hope so.
Speaker 2:I know I was. We have a special guest with us today. We do so. I'll give you some of the history here, and we talked about this at dinner just before we came here. But I started working with a friend from seminary back around 2007. And in 2008, he came to me and said, hey, as he was working on his MDiv. He said I'm taking this class now with Dr Quick over at the seminary and I think you'd be really interested in the course he and I were both counseling students we were both doing. He was working on the counseling part of his MDiv, but he was, I believe, also planning to go on and complete his MDiv. And this course was called Exegesis of the Church and Culture, which piqued my interest, but I had no idea what it actually meant. And so, because my background is all in counseling, as we've talked about already this season, I was very interested to know what this was. And the more he told me this, I ended up auditing this class, even though I'd finished my degree a few months before, and that's where I met Dr Quick, our guest today. Dr Quick, welcome to the Churchill podcast. Good to be here, jeremy. Thank you for the invitation. I am thrilled that you're on this slate.
Speaker 2:I know to tell some of your story, matt, that you only came into contact with Dr Quick's work a short time ago. You were using one of his books, the Eighth Letter, which we referenced, and some of the work that you were doing with a particular church, and I have been secretly lobbying to see more connection here. So the conversation here today is just to lay the table. Dr Quick, you have been a part of an organization called Blessing Point Ministries. Is that correct? That's correct, and the work that you do dovetails nicely into the work that Flourish is doing. You work specifically with churches who are hurting, who are recovering from sin, pain, grief, loss, trying to understand who they are, where they are in their story, what God is doing with them and how to move forward. Is that a rough yeah?
Speaker 4:I would say the focus of our ministry what we come into a church to help them do is to hear what the Lord of the church is saying to their church. That's a corporate message, not an individual message. I think people are used to hearing coming to church and expecting Jesus to speak to them. As an individual, they don't know what it means to have Jesus speak to a church about what's going on.
Speaker 2:Is it fair to say that that's not just true for your average congregant, but that's also true for your average elder and pastor?
Speaker 3:Which is bizarre because, maybe as a fruit of our conversation earlier in the podcast season, I've been telling churches for a couple of months. I'm like, maybe as a fruit of our conversation earlier in the podcast season, I've been telling churches for a couple of months. I'm like you do realize that the entire New Testament, after the book of Acts until Revelation 4, all of it is Jesus talking corporately to churches. So the biggest bulk of the New Testament at least the epistles, all of that is this what you're talking about Exactly. So why would it be bizarre that Jesus would have a corporate message for a church now?
Speaker 4:I think that part of it comes with our concept of the closure of the canon, that Jesus stopped speaking, interesting, okay.
Speaker 4:And so anybody that's going to say that Jesus spoke to me we usually think, hmm, you haven't picked this in the Bible.
Speaker 4:Yeah, there's a problem here. But we think that when Jesus, especially in the book of Revelation Revelation 2 and 3, blessing point is really built on the foundation of those letters, the seven letters that Jesus spoke to the seven churches, because he comes to the end of every one of those letters and he says he who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says. And it's interesting present tense, what the Spirit says to the churches. And we have come to believe that that's a model that he was presenting, that in the last book of the scriptures, to give the churches a model to let them know how he would communicate with them from that point onward. And so that's really what we help a church to do. If you've been working in the eighth letter that's the principle of the eighth letter is that you're now struggling to hear what Jesus is saying, what the letter would be that he would write to your church in the model of Revelation 2 and 3.
Speaker 3:It's interesting. I've been very influenced in my leadership of Flourish by a ministry called Vital Church. I ran into Vital Church in maybe 2012, 2013, 2013 for the first time and it was as a volunteer working with the church, helping to do interviews related to a church diagnostic, or what we call a church health assessment. And you're trained as one of these volunteers that you know. They have a standard note-taking sheet that they want you to follow. It's a structured interview for a church. And the last question I don't remember what the exact form of their question is. I know what the form of the question is that we use now, which is you're asking a congregant, hey, you know. So you know Revelation 2 and 3, like Jesus' message to the churches, and we'll give a couple of features. Like out of the eighth letter. We'll say you know, jesus reintroduces himself, he commends them, he critiques them, he corrects them and, you know, tries to encourage them and, you know, keep them a kick in the butt. You know a lot of the time right roughly and I'm like.
Speaker 2:so what that's?
Speaker 3:King James Version. That's the bad version. You know. What would you say? What do you think if Jesus came here and was going to speak to this church? What do you think he would say? And I've done this hundreds of times now and almost every time people are like their posture changes, their thought process changes, they get out of their own maybe pain or gripe or preference or desire, and it puts them in a completely different mind. So to me, having seen this out in the field at work, I'm kind of like this is a formalization of what we've done informally and it's great, it is, yeah, and I don't know. But what fruit have you seen, as you've seen churches wrestle with that question?
Speaker 4:Well, when we come into a church we usually let them know that it's about a three-month process. We do a seminar to kind of shift the paradigm of the church, to stop thinking just as individuals and start to think corporately what that would mean as a church, and then we set them on the task of kind of going through their history. So it depends on how long the church has been in existence. You know kind of how deep the challenge is of that. But churches usually will go through board minutes and if they're a congregational form of government they'll go through church business meeting minutes and they'll highlight them along the lines of Revelation 2 and 3, where Jesus commends the church for good things that are happening. He will articulate challenges that the church may be facing I know where you live, where Satan's throne is, and then he'll critique them. But I have this against you and five of the seven churches in Revelation 2 and 3 got critiques. So this is not an uncommon or a surprising should be a surprising thing that Jesus would have issues with things that may have happened historically and then the final thing is he will give them advice or wisdom. I advise you to and give them input, and so they will do that for about six weeks and then we will come in and do what we call a historical retreat and we will walk that church through its history and our focus is really at that point on.
Speaker 4:Again, part of the way we get people out of their individualistic Western kind of culture thinking is really emphasize spiritual gifts. That's when Jesus says he who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says. So what we understand is that every believer has been given a gift or gifts of the Holy Spirit and that those gifts enable us to get in touch with kind of the heart and the feelings of God on various issues. Sometimes those things are in tension with each other. So when we're going through a history we may come to a church that has experienced a moral issue that was very, very painful to. The church broke trust, the pastor had an immoral relationship or something like that, and that broke trust with pastors and for 40 years after the church struggled to get over that, they didn't trust pastors when they came in.
Speaker 4:The church I was in in Toronto had an elder board that precipitated a split and so I came in 10 years after that split took place and every time we would have a church business meeting. I noticed that the church I think the way most pastors think is the way I thought is that when I came in, that was then. This is now. That was them, this is me, everything's new. But a boom, it's perfect. The board is blank and I can start to write whatever I want on it. And, you know, with God's leadership, I can, you know, we can create ministry here, not knowing that the history was now corrupting our ability to lead, corrupting my and the board's ability to lead the church. And it wasn't just what was going on within the church. This was, I think, an experience of the discipline of God at a corporate level.
Speaker 3:It was in the psyche of the church, but God was also wanting to do something Right. How did how did they begin to grab a hold of? Oh, god might be wanting to do something among us.
Speaker 4:Well, I think the reality, this is where you now are confronted with. I have this against you, and I mean just to hear the Lord of the church say that. So, when we went through our history in Toronto and when we work with the church now, when they go through it and they come to those moments what we call hinge moments, the Kadesh Varnitas, moments of a church's experience where obviously a decision is made or a choice is made that has a corporate impact of pain on the church and people respond or react to that pain. At that point, have they dealt with it in a way that is pleasing to Christ, to the Lord of the church? And if the pain continues throughout, then it's the reality that they did not, and so they need to go back. They need to go back to that moment and figure out what it was that Jesus wanted them to do, take responsibility for what they did, and then sit and repent and then choose to do something different, and they often have to go back. The final step in our three-month process. So there's a historical retreat where we walk through the history, and the final step is a psalm assembly, which is usually four to six weeks after the retreat, where they invite people back who may have left the church wounded and the leadership will take responsibility for the specific things that Jesus told them about.
Speaker 4:And we have seen churches healed of stuff that you would not think. You just think somebody just throw a stick of dynamite in this place and it would be better than to keep enduring the pain that this church is generating and its members. But if they listen to Jesus and its members, but if they listen to Jesus, surprise, surprise, he is able to heal them. And I'm in a church right now doing an interim with a church that I worked, did a lead through a healing heart process 20 years ago and they had had five immoral pastors and each one worse than the one before. And the last, the second to the last one, had a stable of women, women from the church, 14 of them To that he was immoral with. He had a walking club that were all women he had affairs with from the church and you think how does the church feel from that?
Speaker 4:But that church did the hard, scary work of assessing what Jesus was saying to them about these events and why they took place and what it meant to elders who weren't protecting the congregation, didn't do their due diligence to kind of see what was going on. But they did that. They did it in a corporate solemn assembly kind of thing where they repented, took responsibility, asked for forgiveness, called people who had left the church. Many of them came back and that church was healed. And I'm back in the church now, 20 years later, and it's still a healthy place. That's incredible. So I mean now again, ken Quipp couldn't do anything like that. That is what the Lord of the Church does. He tells us that's what he'll do, so it shouldn't surprise us that he does it. But most people are just not used to kind of seeing that happen at a corporate level.
Speaker 2:This is why I wanted to get us together, because, matt, I'm going to quote you badly- what did I do? From earlier in the season. You said if we fail to wrestle with our past in the present, we're doomed to repeat our past in the future. Did I get that right? That's pretty close.
Speaker 3:That's pretty good. That's pretty close, yeah, and it's interesting. We have a church that we're working with right now as a client, my coach, the pastor. They were on the edge of calling the solemn assembly, they were working with a thoughtful transitional pastor and COVID hit and they got short-circuited and they're still kind of stuck. I did a strategic plan with them last year and here's a group of leaders committed to the church, committed to the new pastor, sharp young guy, and they're like you know what? One of the things we're going to have to do in order to go forward is we're going to have to go back. We can't not deal with it.
Speaker 3:And they had this terrible thing happen that they actually called the pastor disaster. They lost two pastors in like two weeks and yeah, it was, it was a really it was. It was super, super bad and and I think that that that sort of you know, we're recording this a little bit for Halloween, but sort of that ghost in their closet. It's like the new pastor is kind of like. His ideas are good, there's nothing wrong with what he wants to do, he's being patient and thoughtful and he's a good preacher and it's like there's like sand in the gears and the thing is, it's hard for people to go forward until they've gone backwards and kind of dealt with their grief and the loss that all of that represented. And so, yeah, it's in the middle of it, with a church that got stuck because they were trying to do it well, and then, you know, covid added a layer on top of it.
Speaker 4:So yeah, Christ doesn't let you go. Covid added a layer on top of it. So yeah, christ doesn't let you go. I mean, you know, just like we've experienced I think all of us in our personal lives. We may want to forget what just took place.
Speaker 1:You know, we may want to say that was then.
Speaker 4:This is now. You know, I'm forgetting what lies behind, I'm reaching forward to what lies ahead, and but Jesus doesn't.
Speaker 1:Let us do that. We're stopping our conversation here and we'll pick up in next week's episode. Thanks for listening to the Church Renewal Podcast from Flourish Coaching. Flourish exists to set ministry leaders free to be effective wherever God has called them. We believe that there's only one fully sufficient reason that this day dawned, jesus is still gathering his people and he's using his church to do it. When pastors or churches feel stuck, our team of coaches refresh their hope in the gospel and help them clarify their strategy.
Speaker 1:If you have questions or a need, we'd love to hear from you. For more information, go to our website, flourishcoachingorg, or send an email to info at flourishcoachingorg. You can also connect with us on Facebook X and YouTube. We appreciate when you like, subscribe, rate or review our show whenever you're listening. It can be hard for churches to ask for help, so when our clients tell us who referred them, we'll send a small gift to say thanks. A huge thank you to all our guests for making the time to share their stories with us. We are really blessed to have all these friends and partners, and a special thanks to Crosspoint Church in Arnold, maryland, for generously letting us use their space to make today's episode. All music for this show has been licensed and was composed and created by artists. The Church Renewal Podcast was directed and produced by Jeremy Seferati in association with Flourish Coaching, with the goal of equipping and encouraging your church to flourish wherever God has called you. Bye for now.