Consumer or Create: Too Big to Fail with Pastor Clayton Tyner

Welcome to the MetaCurch Podcast.

My name's Clayton.

I'm the pastor here at MetaCurch.

And my hope is that today's podcast finds you at the perfect time in your life that God uses it to inspire and enlighten you.

I hope that you enjoy today's message.

I want to welcome you in.

If you're new with us, my name is Clayton.

I'm the lead pastor here at Meta.

Before we get in today's message, I uh and I want to thank our preachers from last Sunday.

Pastor Ryan and Noel were up here doing their thing, serving you guys so well.

And for the first time, preaching for us was our community coordinator, Nori Villarreal.

Absolutely killing it.

Don't make some noise for all of them.

Before we really get into the content, I kind of want to paint a little bit of a picture for you guys.

Those of you who are somewhere in your 30s and grew up in San Antonio, this might be like a scene from your childhood.

I want you to kind of try to get there with me.

The year is 1998.

You and your family have a full day plan.

You can't wait for all you're gonna see, all you're going to experience.

It's gonna be such an exciting day that maybe you even think, someday, I hope I can plan a day exactly like this for my own children.

After breakfast with the family, your first stop is Payless Shoes, where you're gonna get some new kicks.

You're so excited because you're gonna get to show these brand new kicks off that night with your friends at Pear Apple County Fair right off of 410 in Bandera Road.

After Payless, you guys are hungry, you go out to your favorite spot, you hit ponchos, you raise the flag.

There's a bunch of errands after ponchos, and it's gonna be cumbersome, but you're pretty excited about every stop.

First, you gotta get a new pair of headphones, you're gonna stop at Circuit City.

After that, you gotta swing by Blockbuster real quick so you don't get another late fee.

You head to River Center, you go to Sam Goody, pick up that new Outcast album, Outcast, they'll be together forever.

Finally, after picking up a birthday present at Toys R Us, you all pile into your mom's Saturn and head back home.

Now, of course, the problem with planning a day exactly like this for your kids today is not a single one of these businesses exists anymore.

They have all vanished.

And in 1998, it would be very difficult for us to imagine a world without many of these companies.

Some of them are local legends here in San Antonio, some of them are international, worldwide household names.

But as you know, every single one of these companies no longer exists.

Oh, how the mighty have fallen.

We announced just a couple of weeks ago that we're gonna be adding uh back our 115 service.

God is growing us.

You guys are doing your part, you're inviting, you're being the church out in the community, and God is growing us.

And you guys know this at MetaCurch, uh, we have a vision that goes far beyond the four walls of this building.

It goes out into our community and beyond that, and we are willing to do whatever it takes to get people to Jesus.

And along with the construction that we're gonna start for a brand new Medikids experience and a new service, it's created a very real need, and we talked about this need last week, and that is a need for volunteers to help staff and run these services.

And more than that, we just have a desperate need for those who have been coming and wrestling.

And you know, this metachurch is a safe space, it is a place you can belong before you believe, you can wrestle with life's biggest questions, but we need, and the call and invitation is for some of you to move from consumers of what MetaCurch is offering and to join us as creators of what MetaCurch is becoming.

That's the invitation to move from consumer to creator.

And last week, some of our team leaders, Ryan and Nori and Noel, they did a great job unpacking what that would mean to your life, that creators get to discover and use their gifts, that creators cultivate community, not just for yourself, but for other people coming into MetaCurch, that creators build bridges, that they help tear down barriers that keep people out of the church and away from Jesus.

Really engaging will not only benefit your life, not only benefit the community around you, but it will help build the church here locally and the church more broadly.

Today, what I want to do is I want to zoom out, really zoom out, and put this in a broader perspective.

My message today is too big to fail.

Too big to fail.

Would you pray with me?

Father, we come to you and we're just laying down our preconceived ideas, we're laying down our busyness, all of the distractions that we have carried in here.

I feel like this is an important message that you have laid on my heart.

It is a message that, to be honest, has a lot of challenging news and realities.

But God, I believe in the midst of that is an incredible, incredible opportunity for us.

And so we come to you and we give you this time and we pray it all in Jesus' name.

And if you're ready to get going, say amen.

Amen.

Too big to fail.

This is normally what you hear right when a business finds itself on a steep, steep slope into real, real trouble and chaos.

You know, at some point, Circuit City knew that its margins were no longer sustainable.

They knew this.

And leadership made the decision that, hey, we're Circuit City.

We have multiple stores in every major city, like across the entire United States and around the world.

We're just too big to fail.

Blockbuster, at one point, had the opportunity to buy this new young company called Netflix.

And the leaders at Blockbuster said, What is a Netflix?

Who wants their DVDs delivered to them in the mail?

We're Blockbuster, we're not going anywhere.

We're too big to fail.

One of my favorite business authors, his name is Jim Collins.

He wrote Good to Great, Great by Choice.

He also wrote a book called How the Mighty Fall.

And this is a deep study into the five attributes that behemoth companies have that lead to their ultimate demise.

And the very first thing that these companies exhibit is what he calls hubris.

Now that's not a term that we use a lot in everyday language, but hubris is dangerous pride.

It is outstanding arrogance, and not only that, hubris is a kind of pride that always hurts the people around you.

Hubris is a too big to fail mentality.

And what that kind of pride does is it causes you to ignore all of the alarms and all of the sirens, to ignore all of the data, to not confront reality, to dig in your heels, assume that everyone else is wrong and you are right.

And that kind of hubris is the first step, the first domino that falls that ultimately leads these giant companies to become insolvent and disappear all together.

And so I'm not gonna beat around the bush, I'm gonna get straight to the point.

Here's cutting to the chase the Western church and more specifically, the American church, the churches in America, we are right now Circuit City, blockbuster, toys are us in the late 1990s.

That is where we are.

If you look at every data point, if you look at all the statistics, if you look at all the research across all of the different, all of the different polls that go out, all of the church attendance numbers, and even if you're just willing to honestly evaluate your own intuition and your own view of how the world around us is viewing the church and interacting with the church, you will see that the American church is in serious, serious trouble.

And at the same time, most of the leaders in the Western church are digging in their heels.

They have taken on the same too big to fail hubris, and they're assuming that everyone outside of the church is wrong and misguided and lost and all going to hell anyway, and we have things right, so we will die before we change, and while that is supposed to be a metaphor, I'm here to tell you that's exactly what will happen.

There's all kinds of statistics.

One of the most striking, in 1970, 73% of Americans were practicing Christians.

This doesn't just mean that they identify as believing in Jesus, practicing Christians.

That means they regularly attend a church.

That means that they are involved at some level.

1970, 73% of Americans.

By the year 2000, that number was down to only 45%.

Less than half of Americans who were actively involved in their church, active Christians.

And by the year 2021, the percentage had dropped below 25%.

If you were running a business and your margins went from 73% to 45% to 25%, you would need to sound the alarm.

Something is desperately, dangerously wrong.

And yet, many people who are governing and guiding our churches in America today, they're aware of the statistics, they know all of the studies, and they've seen all of the research, and yet they are not willing to question whether or not their methods or structure or anything that they are doing that is not working is actually worth changing.

If we want to really kind of see a picture of where we could be headed in America, all we have to do is look at Europe.

When it comes to the degradation of religious and Christian norms, Europe is generally about 20 to 30 years ahead of us.

They're just a little further down the road.

And if you look in the European Union, there are many, many countries that you can go to in the European Union where it is near impossible for you to even find a church to attend.

Stephen Bullivant, a professor at St.

Mary's University, said this about the status of Christianity in Europe.

He said, Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone, and it is probably gone for good.

Twin years ago, it was 9-11, 2001, my family was living right outside of Washington, D.C.

Our house was just a couple of miles from the Pentagon, which, if you remember, was also hit by an airplane that day.

And that very next Sunday we went to church outside of DC, which by the way is not really the Bible belt like we live in here today, and it was standing room only.

And that wasn't unique.

Virtually all around the country, church attendance skyrocketed, Easter level attendance.

This was in 2001, remember, where only 45% of Americans are practicing Christians.

But in the social imagination of the culture, the church was still a place of hope.

It was still a place of answers, it was still a community where you could come when you were scared and uncertain about your future.

If we are honest.

God forbid, if a similar attack happened today, maybe for the majority of Americans, the local church would be one of the last places that they would go.

I really, really believed that as soon as quarantine was over, people would flock to their local churches.

People were so desperate for hope, and they couldn't find it in any of the things around them.

And depression was up, and mental health problems were through the roof, and suicide was up.

I just knew I was gonna see something like what I'd seen on 9-11, 2001.

And instead, it came out of the pandemic.

And across our country, church attendance is down about 68%.

And so we are 1998 blockbuster.

We're in trouble, and for most people, they don't even know it.

And the Western church is still large, like millions and millions and millions of people.

We are big, but we are not too big to fail.

And so, where does this hubris come from?

Part of it is bad theology.

You guys know this is an important verse for us here, Matthew 16, verse 8.

Matthew 16:8

Jesus says, and I say to you that you are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hades will not overpower it.

We talk a lot about this verse at Meta because it was so instrumental in metachurch starting in the first place.

When we started Metachurch, we had a deep desire to understand what the church actually is and what Jesus' original intention was for it.

And here's what we found.

And you guys, long-term meta people, you know this.

You you can quote this in your sleep.

But that word church that was originally recorded for us in scripture, it's a Greek word ekklesia.

And ecclesia is a compound word, it means the called out.

It is not a word about place, it is a word about people.

And here's the problem is people take this promise from Jesus and they apply it inappropriately because they don't understand what church actually is.

And so it's easy for them to say, look, Jesus promised that nothing would overpower and nothing would overcome the church.

And so why are we gonna stress out about just absolutely plummeting attendance and waning influence and the entire next generation, seeing the church as absolutely obsolete?

Why worry about it?

Jesus has already told us that nothing will overcome and nothing will overpower the church.

Here's what you need to understand church is about place, it's not about people, it is the called-out people of God who are a part of Jesus' movement on the earth.

Jesus did not promise that the American local church organizations would never fail.

Jesus did not promise that the American local church organizations would never fail.

And for so many people, they hear the word church and they think about a Sunday service, or they think about a 501c3 not-for-profit organization, or they think about a staff full of pastors.

And that is not what Jesus meant when he said, I will build my church.

There is no guarantee.

And there are places, even in our country today, where there are church deserts.

There are places, see, we're in what they call the Bible belt.

And listen, I love Texas as much as the next guy, but you need to know that Texas is like the Bible belt buckle, you know?

We're right in the middle of it.

In San Antonio, you can close your eyes, spin in circles, throw a rock.

You'll probably hit a church building, okay?

There are places right now in our country where you can't find a church to attend.

There are entire countries over in Europe where, depending on where you live, there might not be a congregation to go to.

And if you think this is too big to fail, that the American church will be here forever, then you have put yourself in the position of the CEO of failing companies, convincing yourself in your hubris that we're simply too big to fail.

And that is exactly, exactly how the mighty fall.

You need to know, if the church in America dies, it does not mean the church has died.

The called out people of Jesus will not be overcome and will not be overpowered.

And let's be honest, as Americans, we tend to think of ourselves as the center of everything that happens in the world.

And you need to know that as Americans and in America, we are a very small part of the church at large.

A very small part.

And while our numbers are absolutely just falling off of a cliff, there are other parts in the world right now where the gospel, the good news of Jesus is exploding like never before.

In many parts of the world, Christianity is on the rise.

In Africa and Asia alone, the number of professing Christians has almost doubled since the year 2000.

Remember, in America, we went from 45% to 25% since 2000.

In Africa and Asia, the number of Christians have almost doubled.

It is growing.

So if the American church dies, it doesn't mean the church dies.

What it means is we are forfeiting our opportunity, and maybe more importantly, remember, we're zooming out.

Maybe more importantly, we are forfeiting our kids and our grandkids and our great-grandkids' opportunities to be a part of what God is doing right here.

There's a great parallel to what's going on in the Old Testament.

In the Old Testament of your Bible, God had called out a nation, a specific nation, the nation of Israel.

And they had a specific and significant purpose.

And through the nation of Israel, the Messiah, the Savior, was gonna come, Jesus Christ.

And that savior would open the door of God's movement to all people in all places.

And there's this pattern that Israel would continuously go through.

And the pattern looked like this God had promised that if they followed him, he would give them blessing and protection.

And so they would understand their identity as the chosen people of God, and they would live under God's precepts, God's way of life, and that would position them under the blessing and protection of God.

They would thrive as a nation.

And while they were under the blessing and protection of God, they would experience a level of affluence.

And in their affluence, they would begin to abdicate their responsibility as God's people.

Their eyes and hearts would wander to the other gods and cultures of the world around them.

They would leave the ways of God, forfeiting their identity as God's called out people.

And in that they would experience a natural consequence of life without God.

Pretty soon they would be living in a type of hell on earth.

And God would send a prophet or a judge or a king, and they would call the people of Israel back to the one true God.

And the people of Israel would repent, which means to change your mind.

They would pick back up their identity as the called-out people of God.

They would begin living in God's ways, they would come back under the protection and blessing of God.

They would thrive.

Then they would become affluent.

And in their affluence, the cycle would start all over again.

You can hear this in the book of Judges, chapter two.

It says the Lord raised up judges who saved them from the power of their marauders, but they did not listen to their judges.

Instead, they prostituted themselves with other gods, bowing down to them.

They quickly turned from the way of their fathers who had walked in obedience to the Lord's commands.

They did not do as their fathers did.

Whenever the Lord raised up a judge for the Israelites, the Lord was with him and saved the people from the power of their enemies while the judge was still alive.

The Lord was moved to pity whenever they groaned because of those who were oppressing and afflicting them.

And whenever the judge died, the Israelites would act even more corruptly than their fathers, following other gods to serve them and bow and worship to them.

They did not turn from their evil practices or from their obstinate ways.

And on and on and on the cycle would continue to go.

And this was ancient Judaism.

It was a temple-based system that also worked around the sacrificial system where they would sacrifice animals.

On and on this would go, and they would come back, and they'd come back to the temple, and they'd come back to their sacrifices, and they would stray, and they would come back and come back and come back.

And it finally came to a head.

When Jesus came to earth, God in human flesh and the people that he came to offering the kingdom of heaven right then and right there even rejected God.

You may not know this historically, but about 37 years after Jesus left the earth in 70 A.D., the Emperor Titus came into Jerusalem, dispersed the nation among the other nations, tore the temple down stone by stone until not even the foundation was left.

And in that moment, in 70 AD, he ended ancient Judaism, he ended temple worship, he ended the animal sacrificial system like it was over.

There is modern Judaism, but ancient Judaism does not exist anymore.

It was the end of it.

Circuit city, the end, does not exist any longer.

And we think that because we can find a church on every corner today, that we're too big to fail tomorrow.

See, the danger for the church in our generation is not oppression.

The danger for the church in our generation is affluence.

And I'm really tired of Christians getting on TikTok and talking about how oppressed we are in America because a skit made fun of us on Saturday Night Live.

We are not oppressed in America.

Nobody drove here scared for their life.

That's not how it works.

We're not under oppression.

We are the wealthiest, most set up for success, richest people who have ever walked the face of the earth in all of human history.

We're the most affluent people who've ever lived.

And the danger is not oppression of Christianity, not in the West.

The danger is our affluence.

You see, virtually all of the places that the gospel is exploding around the globe right now is in places that are under fire.

Christianity under fire grows like nothing else.

When it is put under pressure, it just expands.

That's the way that it's always worked.

But here in the West, we are affluent.

And the problem with affluence is that we begin to believe, really, in the core of who we are, that we have everything we need to meet our own needs by ourselves.

I was in Haiti years ago, and the pastor there was telling me some really pretty unbelievable stories about healings that they had seen in their church.

And I asked, you know, why do you think y'all see that and we don't see as much of it?

And he said, Well, it's simple.

When y'all get sick, you call an ambulance.

When we get sick, we pray.

There are no ambulances.

I'm not saying don't call an ambulance.

Please don't hear that.

God's given us good things and we should use them.

The problem is when we think the ambulance is our savior instead of just a system.

And so in our affluence, we become self-reliant.

Self-reliant to the point that instead of worshiping and leaning on God, we lean on ourselves, we glorify ourselves, we platform ourselves, we brand ourselves, we bow down to the image of ourself.

The little g gods that our culture is worshiping right now, they're not made out of metal and wood carvings like it was during the time of Israel.

The gods that we're worshiping right now, you can find in the mirror.

And so we're self-reliant.

Affluence is causing abdication.

And to abdicate means to give up your rightful responsibility.

We are in the age of consumerism.

Everything that is can be bought or sold, and that's how we live.

We're consumeristic Christians, our consumerism has crept its way even into our churches.

And so we're not worried about what we can give to the church, we're worried about what we can get out of it.

And we choose the church we're gonna go to based on our critique of what we're looking for inside of it.

And you get, you know, the word, and it gets inside of you from a broken vessel, albeit, but instead of going to lunch and talking about how the truths of scripture, meeting with the Holy Spirit inside of you, is gonna change you and challenge you and grow you and mature you and convict you and bring change, big change, incremental change instead.

We have church cultures that go sit at lunch and give their evaluation of everything they didn't like about the service.

And some people aren't coming to our church because we don't have a McDonald's play place in the kids' area.

They don't know we were in a bar slash saloon seven months ago.

I didn't like, I didn't like the, you know, it's too loud, it's too this, it's too that.

Fine.

Fine.

But at some point, we got to decide if we're gonna be consumer Christians or if we're gonna pick up the invitation to be creators.

And the problem is we think everything should be packaged and given to us.

We are in the business of comfort and convenience.

And the call of Christ is to pick up your cross and follow after me.

It is a life of self-denial, it is a life of putting others before you, it is a life of radical love, it's a life of loving your enemies, it's something that actually makes a real difference.

And so we've laid down our responsibility because we don't understand what church is, and we think that church is the service.

And you, you are the church.

It's you, you are the movement.

And here's what we want we want our kids to care about church.

My son's going to college next year.

I want my kids to grow up and be involved in church.

I want it to matter to them.

And let me tell you right now, your kids do not care about how much you talk about how important church is to you.

And I actually think your kids don't really care how much you attend church because that doesn't really cost you much.

You want your kid to be a part of Jesus' movement on the earth, then you have to be a part of Jesus' movement on the earth.

Not a consumer of what it can offer you, but coming alongside, picking up your identity as the called-out people of God, and becoming a creator of what God is doing among us.

And here's why that matters.

It matters because the danger for the church in the next generations, the danger for the church in the coming generations is not a matter of resistance.

My kid doesn't want to go, it is a matter of existence.

Will there be somewhere for them to go?

And if you think that's up to somebody else to figure out, then you don't understand Jesus' call to come and be the church.

It's up to us.

How much does it matter to us?

Do we actually see our role in it?

Do we understand that I am the church?

This is my movement.

This chair, this is my chair.

I'm here, I'm invested.

This is my kids' program.

That's my lobby.

When I invite someone to come, I'm not inviting them to a TED talk, I'm not inviting them to a concert, I'm inviting them to my movement.

I'm not inviting you to meet the pastor.

I'm meeting, I'm inviting you to come and meet my movement to be a part of what we are doing to come and engage with what God has called us to do.

This is what God says about you.

He says, This, therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ.

He doesn't say you're invited to the buffet, grab your tray, pick what you like, put aside what you don't like, make sure to grab jello at the end.

He says you have a role to play.

He says, since God is making his appeal through us.

Therefore, we plead on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God.

This is scary.

God is making his appeal through you.

There's not another option, it's just us.

He put it in our hands.

It can't just be up to the preachers.

It's you.

You have the ability to reach exponentially more people than are gonna come and sit in these seats.

And if every single one of us would accept the invitation that Jesus is giving to come alongside and be a creator, to be all in, to change the way that we view this, to see it as our movement, our impact is immeasurable.

The difference we can make is immeasurable.

We are ambassadors of God on the earth, and that's scary because no one knows you like you know you.

That's scary because no one knows me like I know me.

Only you know how uniquely jacked up you are.

Only I know how uniquely my wife knows a lot of it, but only I know the depths.

And Jesus put it in our hands, and he's not waiting for perfect people.

If he was waiting for perfect people, he'd be waiting forever.

He's not waiting for qualified people.

We're not trying to fool anybody here.

I'm not qualified in the eyes of the world or the church culture to be a senior pastor.

Bro, I had to start my own church, no one would have hired me.

He's not waiting for qualified people, he's waiting for people who are done with consuming.

Consumers show up and they say, What can I get out of this?

Creators show up and say, What can I put into this?

We're starting a new service that's gonna take another small army of volunteers to hold kids and welcome people and get them signed up and bring them into the service and help them find their seats and all of the things it takes to run our Sunday service here.

And I know some of you are you're comfortable.

You've been serving at 11:30 forever, you've been serving at 945 forever, you're comfortable.

Consumers care first about comfort.

I'm not saying there's anything wrong with having your service.

What I am saying is that creator's first filter is not comfort, it is impact.

How big of a difference can I make?

It's it's not the church asking you to move.

This is your church.

It's you, you are the movement.

Everyone's talking about the church is dying, the church is dying.

Thousands of churches a year closing their doors.

It's happening.

And yet, throughout history, the called-out people of God, Jesus' movement on the earth for 2,000 years, it keeps showing up and it keeps surprising people.

And when a group of people realize that the invitation of Jesus is not the invitation of religion, come and consume, it is the invitation of movement, come and create.

And they separated families and it grew.

And nothing could stop it.

Even to this day, historians don't understand the success of the early church.

Karen Armstrong in her book Fields of Blood, a historian, says this against all odds, by the third century, Christianity had become a force to be reckoned with.

We still do not really understand how this came about.

We still, 2,000 years later, with all of our technology and all of our access to information, we still cannot figure out how this Christian movement not only survived, but took over an entire empire.

The Roman Empire laid aside their pantheon of gods.

The Roman emperors, who were called the Son of God and worshipped as deity, instead bowed their knee to the King of Kings, Jesus Christ.

And no one can understand it.

We can look through history and understand the other religious uprisings.

We can understand Islam because they were a militant force.

They held people at the edge of a sword and said, convert or die.

It's gruesome, but effective.

That makes sense.

Christianity doesn't make sense.

And yet, if we believe what we believe about our God, it shouldn't make sense.

It's God taking not the religious elite, but the everyday broken, jacked-up people who are willing to raise a hand and come alongside and help create a movement, who are not worried about displaying all of their strengths, but instead allowing the world around them to see that in our weaknesses, God is shown to be strong.

And in the midst of that, calling people from every race, every background, every ethnicity, every gender, every class, calling them all in to be a part of leaving an impact on the world with the one movement that can actually change people's lives.

This is the invitation of a lifetime.

It's the invitation to move from a consumer to a creator.

And everyone says the church is dying, the church is dying, the church in America is dying.

Metachurch, understand this.

We decide if the church dies or if the church thrives.

The historians don't get to decide it, the sociologists don't get to decide it, other religious groups don't get to decide it.

We decide if the church dies or thrives because we are the church.

And people think that the church isn't growing.

Because the call to follow Jesus is too high of a calling, too heavy of a weight.

The call to pick up your cross and follow after him.

The call to die daily to yourself, to put others ahead of yourself.

People believe that the call to follow Jesus is too high of a bar, too lofty a standard.

The truth is, we live in a world that is desperate for a high calling.

The more convenient and connected and comfortable we become, the more lonelier and depressed, the more suicides, the more divorces.

People are desperate for a high calling.

Everyone at the core of who they are, they know at some level they were created with a purpose, that they were created on purpose.

They want to leave a dent on the universe when their time on earth is done.

The problem isn't that following Jesus is too high of a call.

The problem is that the call to consumer Christianity is simply unconvincing.

It is not unique and it is not significant.

The call to come and consume is what the rest of the world is calling them to, and we were created to be different.

And so look, we're calling for volunteers.

We need room.

We've got a city to reach.

But I hope you know this is so much deeper than volunteering.

This might not be your season.

That's cool.

This is a call to change your lenses, to change your view.

It is a call to a paradigm shift.

That this church would not be something you just come to and consume.

This would be a place that you understand you are creating.

You are joining with Jesus as an ambassador of God.

And so, what are some ways to do this?

Volunteering is an on-ramp, it's an easy first step, and it's needed to continue operating the way that we are.

You can volunteer, you can invite.

We always say this invite, invest.

The truth is, when we become creators of the movement, the way we build the church, we build it with bodies.

There are people in your life who need to be connected to a faithful, faith-filled community.

And they're not going to get here unless you invite them.

Come and sit with me.

Come and sit with me.

Come check this out.

Come and sit.

It's up to us to invite.

We volunteer, we invite, and we invest.

We invest our time, our energy, our resources, we invest financially, we fund this and we fuel this.

We put our gifts and talents to work.

We see what God can do through us.

And I promise you, if you start that journey, God will show you things you are capable of.

He will use you in ways that you cannot even imagine.

That's the call.

For some of you, you're beginning your faith journey.

You don't even know if you believe in God.

You don't know about any of this.

Just show up.

Keep consuming.

Keep wrestling.

But I believe if you hang in here, someday it will be your time to move from consumer to creator as well.

Let's pray.

Father, we love you, and I pray that even now you would begin just wrestling in our hearts, helping us to decide what we need to shift in our thinking, in our view, in our beliefs, even.

God, that we would not allow our insecurities, we would not allow our past, we would not allow our sin, our brokenness, we would not allow false narratives from the enemy to keep us from seeing ourselves as an essential part of your movement, of your church.

God, I pray we would not be content to just come and consume.

That we would be ready to contend for the faith, not just of this generation, but of the generations to come.

I pray that our children and our grandchildren would not just see us attending an event, but they would come to realize that we have involved ourselves in a movement.

God, that they would grow to do the same.

We love you, and we pray these things in Jesus' name.

Amen.tv.

There you can learn how to take next steps.

You can learn where our different venues are at if you ever wanted to visit, and you can also give financially to help push this movement forward.

Man, I love you guys, and I hope you have a great rest of your day.