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Season 5 | EPISODE 1

Resurrection Hope and the Fullness of God’s Kingdom

1:08:38 · January 21, 2025

Welcome to Season 5 of Grace at the Fray! This season we will explore the transformative power of the gospel, both in individual lives and in the scope of global missions. Matt Allison has plenty of examples to share from his unique journey—growing up as a pastor’s kid, then teaching missionary kids in Uganda, and now serving as part of Serge’s leadership, where he’s dedicated to spreading Christ’s message of grace and renewal. Whether you’re closely connected to Serge or simply seeking some resurrection hope, pull up a chair to hear about the gospel at work as it brings forth the fullness of God’s Kingdom.

Welcome to Season 5 of Grace at the Fray! This season we will explore the transformative power of the gospel, both in individual lives and in the scope of global missions. Matt Allison has plenty of examples to share from his unique journey—growing up as a pastor’s kid, then teaching missionary kids in Uganda, and now serving as part of Serge’s leadership, where he’s dedicated to spreading Christ’s message of grace and renewal. Whether you’re closely connected to Serge or simply seeking some resurrection hope, pull up a chair to hear about the gospel at work as it brings forth the fullness of God’s Kingdom.

In this episode, they discuss...

  • Sonship’s transformative impact (7:34)
  • Teaching missionary kids (13:00)
  • Ministry from weakness (27:13)
  • Hope in the resurrection (39:09)
  • Empowering the next generation (47:08)
  • Polycentric mission (1:01:08)

Thank you for listening! If you found this conversation encouraging or helpful, please share this episode with your friends and loved ones. Or please leave us a review—it really helps!

Referenced in the episode...

Credits

Our guest for this episode was Matt Allison, Deputy Executive Director of Serge. Matt leads our efforts to mobilize the US church into global missions and support the work of Serge all around the world. This episode was hosted by Jim Lovelady. Production by Evan Mader, Anna Madsen, and Grace Chang. Music by Tommy L.

𝑮𝒓𝒂𝒄𝒆 𝒂𝒕 𝒕𝒉𝒆 𝑭𝒓𝒂𝒚 𝑷𝒐𝒅𝒄𝒂𝒔𝒕 is produced by SERGE, an international missions agency that sends and cares for missionaries and develops gospel-centered programs and resources for ongoing spiritual renewal. Learn more and get involved at serge.org.

Connect with us!

Get in touch:
Questions or comments? Feel free to reach out to Serge’s Renewal Team anytime at podcast@serge.org

 

[Music]

Welcome to Grace at the Fray, a podcast that explores the many dimensions of God’s grace that we find at the frayed edges of life. Come explore how God’s grace works to renew your life and send you on mission in His kingdom.

[music]

0:00:22.6 Jim Lovelady: Hello, beloved, welcome to season five of Grace at the Fray. You know, whenever God is about to take his people into a new and unfamiliar place, he reminds them of a few things. He reminds them of who he is, and he invites them to think about what he has done in the past. And then he always says, “Do not fear.” Well, this episode is a reflection on where Serge as a mission sending agency has been and where the Lord might be taking us. And it’s all based on who God is now and who he’s always been, the sovereign God of love. And what about your own self? What is it that God might be inviting you into? What hopes has he already placed in your heart, and what gifts and abilities has he placed in you that inspire you to something greater? My guest on today’s episode is Matt Allison.

He’s a member of Serge’s executive leadership team, and he reflects on his own story as it is intertwined with the company. And he sees how the Lord has used his story to give him all these hopes about what God could do in his life and in the life of our company as we participate in the work of God’s Kingdom all over the world. I think this is a really important episode for our company, but even if you aren’t affiliated or familiar with Serge as a mission sending agency, I think by the end of this episode, you’re going to want to hang out with us a bit more, especially if you’re looking for God’s grace at the frayed edges of life.

[music]

0:01:52.5 Jim Lovelady: Well, my friend, welcome.

0:01:53.8 Matt Allison: Thanks, Jim. It’s good to be here.

0:01:55.4 Jim Lovelady: I’ve wanted to actually sit down and have lunch with you and talk to you about some of your big picture ideas and thoughts about the state of global missions and where you see Serge in all of that. But I also want to hear your story, because you’ve been with the company for a long time, longer than you even worked for the company…

0:02:15.8 Matt Allison: Right.

0:02:16.2 Jim Lovelady: You were with the company. [chuckle]

0:02:16.9 Matt Allison: Yeah. Yeah.

0:02:17.3 Jim Lovelady: There’s all sorts of stuff that I want to hear you talk about. And kinda landing on your hopes for the company and how we stand poised to preach the gospel of grace in some really unique ways. And I just want to hear you talk about all that stuff.

0:02:34.6 Matt Allison: Okay.

0:02:35.7 Jim Lovelady: Ready? Set.

0:02:35.8 Matt Allison: Ready, set, go.

0:02:36.2 Jim Lovelady: Go. [chuckle]

0:02:37.2 Matt Allison: I do think you could connect parts of my own story, personally, to some of the history of Serge and then even where maybe my story becomes an official Serge story, meaning when I started working for the company versus that unofficial story, is actually a good jumping off point to talk about where we are today, I think. So I’m a pastor’s kid. My dad, I was born here in Philadelphia. My dad was an associate pastor at Tenth Pres at the time. Went to Westminster Seminary in a really kind of fertile and exciting…

0:03:14.5 Jim Lovelady: The James Boice days? 

0:03:16.2 Matt Allison: Oh, well, yeah. At Tenth, but even at Westminster in the ’70s, you know, there were a lot of great professors there. A lot of great people. There were far fewer kind of reform seminaries in the US at that time. And so it was just a lot of future leaders of the church and wonderful faculty and staff. So one of those people was Jack Miller, who was a professor of practical theology at the seminary, and had planted New Life Church, which would become New Life Glenside today. And my dad was one of many, many, many seminarians who went through the Westminster experience of Harvie Conn, and Van Til, and Jack Miller. And you could just rattle off more and more names. And had a great experience, really, received a call to ministry and decided to plant a church in 1984, when I was little, in suburban Baltimore. And so we went to Baltimore in ’84, and coming from Tenth, this resource church in the center of Philadelphia to a really kind of blue collar suburb of Baltimore that people… Nobody saw Glen Burnie, Maryland as a destination to aspire to. It was just a place you lived, maybe a place you loved, but I think fondly a lot of people call it burned out Burnie today.

0:04:41.3 Jim Lovelady: Oh, interesting.

0:04:42.5 Matt Allison: So it’s, you know, it is what it is. But my parents in the ’80s started to really experience a certain level of burnout as planters. And I was, as a kid, was experiencing that burnout.

0:04:56.8 Jim Lovelady: You felt it, you may not have been able to articulate it.

0:04:58.5 Matt Allison: Yeah.

0:05:00.6 Jim Lovelady: You could feel it.

0:05:00.8 Matt Allison: I didn’t have the weighing the vocabulary for ministry burnout. But I was experiencing a dad who was a workaholic, nose to the grindstone. I was experiencing a mom who was angry at God for taking her from Yuppie town, Philadelphia Center City, Rittenhouse, to a really blue collar not exciting part of Baltimore. And angry at her husband who was working all the time. And this is not what she signed up for. And so my parents were heading in a direction classically in ministry that doesn’t end well, that can lead to closing churches, distressed marriages, broken families, loss of vocation, loss of calling, loss of faith. All sorts of bad stuff happen often in that trajectory.

0:05:53.8 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Happens all the time.

0:05:54.2 Matt Allison: Happens all the time. And so in the early ’80s, one of my dad’s buddies from seminary, Alan Lee, invited my dad and my mom to go to one of the first Sonship weeks on the Sandy Cove and Eastern Shore Maryland. And they, there, had a spiritually renewing experience. I mean, they, like so many folks of their generation in the church had had deeply internalized a kind of functional works righteousness. And it wasn’t working for them. They were not finding life in it. But they had a kind of epiphany about grace and what it meant to them as a believer, especially as professionals in ministry. And really fell in love with the gospel again, fell in love with Jesus again. And my dad began to be emotionally present to me in ways that he hadn’t been. My mom began to have insight on her anger in ways that she hadn’t and found a peace in the Lord that she hadn’t before. And so I from a very young age, even though I couldn’t articulate ministry burnout to you, I could say something happened in the lives of my parents. And as I grew as a young person and even in my faith as an adolescent, I really understood and internalized that the arc of my life would’ve been totally different if we had gone on that trajectory that we were going on. And that if it hadn’t been for World Harvest and Sonship, who knows where I would’ve ended up.

0:07:34.9 Jim Lovelady: The trajectory, what we said is something that happens all the time, was thwarted by them going through Sonship. And what I love about that is getting to be a Sonship mentor and having gone through Sonship and having my life turned around and just story after story. Well, that’s actually something that we get to hear all the time. Oh, another story of a burned out pastor, a burned out family, going through Sonship and having the gospel flip their life upside down for the better. And now, now look at it.

0:08:13.6 Matt Allison: Yeah. So those early Sonship weeks on the Eastern Shore of Maryland that Jack and Rose Marie and others did, struck a chord in the Presbyterian Church in America, the PCA, as well as other streams of evangelisism. Because I think in the 1980s and early ’90s and even into the early 2000s, there were so many people who are walking around with this burden of, now that I have received this gift of salvation, it’s really on me to not earn it, but to be worthy of it.

0:08:50.2 Jim Lovelady: Right. Yeah.

0:08:51.3 Matt Allison: And so I have to do these things. I have to live a certain kind of life of faith in order for God to be pleased with me because of this gift that he has given. And there are some parts of that paradigm that are not wrong.

0:09:10.2 Jim Lovelady: Right. That’s exactly right.

0:09:11.1 Matt Allison: But I think what Sonship did for people in the ’80s and ’90s, is offered a paradigm that was so life-giving and so true. And so, like, reading Paul’s letters there, [chuckle] but it just hadn’t been grasped or held onto. And so I, when I came to Serge in 2004, I came as a repayer. I came as somebody who said, even my own faith, the things I struggled with, with lust and other stuff as a teenager, when I came to grasp the Gospel of grace, the Sonship paradigm, even for my own self it was so life-giving, my family’s trajectory, so life-giving. I don’t know who I would be today without this organization, I want to give back. And we have folks who are repayers financially who support us, because of the impact that Sonship has had. I was a 21-year-old college student with a history and philosophy degree. So my form of repayment was not going to be financial…

[laughter] At all. Instead I said, “How could I be of use?” I have a heart for other people who maybe have had a life like my own as a ministry kid, or as someone who really was transformed by this way of understanding our faith in Jesus. And the people who were doing Mobilization at the time said, “Well, we really need missionary kid teachers in Uganda. Would you be interested in that?” And that actually sounds really random to invite a recent college graduate with a history and philosophy double major to be a missionary kid teacher. But it actually made so much sense to me. My dad, in response to what Sonship had done for him, began to lead some short-term trips to Uganda to help build some of the initial housing that our missionaries lived in. My dad went there with Jack, not long before he died, and sort of his long, slow decline health-wise in the ’90s. So there were several points in my own family’s life where Uganda was an important thing.

0:11:29.5 Jim Lovelady: It made sense.

0:11:30.7 Matt Allison: Yeah. But then I started to think about our missionary kids. And I thought, you know, for me as this kid growing up in suburban Baltimore, in a very blue collar neighborhood where like… I didn’t know any kids who went to church every week in my neighborhood. I mean, I knew kids at church and I knew a couple Catholic families, but just evangelicals were not just laying around in my neighborhood in Baltimore. [chuckle] And so I had this acute sense of otherness that I internalized as a kid of like, my dad’s job is not like all these other jobs. He’s not a plumber, he’s not a carpenter, he doesn’t work for the government. He doesn’t… Any of the other thing, doesn’t do anything like anybody else. And they’re, like, we’re not just christian, he’s a pastor. Everything we do is meetings at our house ’cause we don’t have a building ’cause we’re a church plant, or trips we’re making for church stuff, or always, once we actually got a building later on, being there all the time. I just had the sense of like, so much of my life is because of this calling my parents have, that I… It’s way more. I don’t see any of my neighborhood buddies whose dads are electricians and plumbers having everything about their life shaped by that vocational identity the way I do. But then I started thinking, well, how about these missionary kids living in Bundibugyo, Uganda…

0:12:58.8 Jim Lovelady: Same thing.

0:13:00.5 Matt Allison: Even more so. It’s like they’re living in another culture, they’re living at incredible distance from family.

0:13:10.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Talk about feeling other.

0:13:11.1 Matt Allison: Yeah. So much more otherness. For me it was like, I felt like an other when I tell my friends what my dad did, or I’d feel like an other when I said, “No, I can’t do that ’cause we have church.” or I feel like an other when I’m not cursing or looking at Playboys in the school parking lot. But these missionary kids living in a place where it’s a three-hour drive to the nearest paved road, there’s no electricity outside of what can be generated through solar panels, there are no other westerners living in this place besides them among 300 some thousand Ugandans. That’s a whole nother level of otherness. How much more is the trajectory of their life determined by their parents’ decisions. And so I was just like, if I can in some way be another piece of connection, another adult saying, “I see you, you’re loved, you are a wonderful child made in the image of God. And it’s going to be okay.” [chuckle] if I can do that for these 12 or 15 kids…

0:14:23.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. And if teaching Aristotle or whatever is an excuse to get there…

0:14:27.2 Matt Allison: Yeah. If I have to teach 5-year-olds their letters to get there. I’m willing to do that. If that’s what you need me to do, I will do that.

0:14:35.4 Jim Lovelady: That’s cool.

0:14:36.0 Matt Allison: So I’ve spent two years living in very rural Uganda, running a one or two-room schoolhouse with another teacher or colleague or two, and then working in education in the larger community through Christ School, which is a school that we started in the late ’90s, early 2000s, in Bundibugyo boarding school for Ugandans. So I just had an amazing experience in those years. I mean, the way I describe it to folks a lot of the time, is I say it’s kind of like if you went to Boy Scout camp, but for two years, right? 

0:15:17.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

0:15:18.0 Matt Allison: Where there’s just this constant sense of adventure, a constant kinda new risk to be taken, new skill to learn, new story to make and then to tell. And so I loved being in that environment, but with this tight-knit community of people who are doing incredible things. The parents of the kids I was teaching were doctors or water engineers or people with education PhDs or public health experts, they were folks who could have been doing a lot of other things. But they chose, or really God chose them to do these things.

0:16:00.2 Jim Lovelady: So often you don’t think about those things being things that a missionary can and should be doing and is called to do. But when you get there you go, “Oh, this is what it looks like.” It’s actually, what it means to be a missionary is really, is vast.

0:16:15.0 Matt Allison: Yeah. I mean, we started in Bundibugyo in the ’80s, that initial housing that my dad was involved in building, with this idea of like, these are… the people in Bundibugyo are “unreached people group”. Meaning, the Ugandan church partners that we were working with, the Ugandan Presbyterian Church said, “Yeah, there are no churches there.” There’s no… Those people have never been shared with the gospel. When our folks arrived, we confirmed there were no Presbyterian churches there, there were other churches, there was a history of christianity there, but this is a very isolated remote region. So there are huge gaps. And so we were able to be involved in starting a church, a network of churches, a presbytery, all the things that you think of maybe as traditional missionary activity. But quickly it became very clear that the gospel is, the good news of Christ coming is not just a promise of his communities being gathered, aka the church being gathered in his name. It’s also a promise of all things being made new. And so in a place like Bundibugyo where there are 300,000 people with no access to running water, no access to electricity, a very limited health system, and sky-high infant mortality rates and sky-high malnutrition and sickle cell anemia rates. When you think about a place like that, the gospel as only proclaiming the coming of Jesus propositionally and not proclaiming the coming of Jesus holistically becomes a whole lot less satisfying.

0:17:51.9 Jim Lovelady: It’s not the fullness of the Kingdom.

0:17:53.4 Matt Allison: It’s not the fullness of the Kingdom. And so God was gracious in raising up a team of people who from, really out of college, said, “You know, we want to be part of that whole Kingdom proclamation, and we want a place to do that.” And so Scott and Jennifer Myhre, others who are with us or have been with us, went to Bundibugyo with that big vision. And that was really impactful for me to see, at that young age in my early 20s, to see, “Oh, there’s a church here. It has limitations, there’s brokenness here in the church. But it is growing and it is a thing.” There’s also a school that we’ve needed to start and a water infrastructure system that we’ve built, and training of medical professionals that we’ve facilitated. And all of these things are part of the promise of Christ’s coming back. This is the goodness that we’re inviting people to taste and see.

0:18:54.8 Jim Lovelady: That’s the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

0:18:56.9 Matt Allison: That is the fullness of the Kingdom of God.

0:18:58.0 Jim Lovelady: Let your Kingdom come and your will be done, just like it is in heaven, here in Bundibugyo.

0:19:03.6 Matt Allison: Yeah. When you think about the streams of christianity, the streams of American Protestantism even, the reformed stream doesn’t always get that right. I think we have both good and bad examples in our tradition of folks that have emphasized word over deed, or even deed over word, as priorities that are somehow pitted against each other.

0:19:32.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. They separated them with this false dichotomy.

0:19:35.3 Matt Allison: Yeah. And so it’s been so, it was so helpful for me at that early age, in my adulthood, to see these things pushed together, and insisted not just like in an abstract sense. Like, know we gotta hold it all together, but actually in an embodied way. These are the things we are doing in this place at this time.

0:19:54.4 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. You can’t see the Kingdom in all of its fullness begin to thrive if you’re leaving out some of these other things. Thankfully, that context really does, it just, it goes, “Hey, if you’re going to talk about this, we have to do that too. Let’s dig a well, let’s figure out how to make the plumbing where we have clean water.”

0:20:14.1 Matt Allison: I think that’s a priority for us even now, not just in Bundibugyo, but across the world and in all the 20 odd countries we live in and work in, and the dozens and dozens of teams that we do the work on is… We are never going to balance perfectly this holistic kind of work between word and deed or reaching, renewing and restoring, however you want to frame it, we’re never going to live in some perfect ideal balance. But we always need to be pushing to embody that fullness. And there’s always a risk for complacency, of we’re going to major on one thing and ignore everything else.

0:21:01.6 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. If you think of reach, renew, and restore as a three-spoke wheel, if the strongest emphasis is going to be a little bit longer than the weakest emphasis. And if you have a wheel that’s got one spoke longer than the other…

0:21:16.3 Matt Allison: That’s a bumpy ride, man.

0:21:17.4 Jim Lovelady: It’s a bumpy ride. And so our endeavor always… And we just know, like every day when we wake up and go to work, that it’s going to be a bumpy ride. But the endeavor is always like, reach, renew, and restore. Always happening, always happening at the same time. You’ve been on the executive leadership team for a long time, and so a lot of your work is looking at the entire scope of the organization. And you just kind of, rolls off your lips, we’re in 20 countries or… I can’t even, it just rolled off your lips. And it’s like that’s where your mind is always going. So talk to me about where you see… What is the state of global missions? And where do you see Serge in all of that as, I don’t know, there’s… Serge is a 40-year-old company and there’s plenty of room to grow and there’s plenty to… There’s a bright future. So what do you see as we’re kind of in this spot, you’re looking out at the full scope of things? 

0:22:22.3 Matt Allison: Right. I’m going to not answer that question exactly.

0:22:26.4 Jim Lovelady: Okay.

0:22:27.3 Matt Allison: ‘Cause I’m a history guy, so I like to give context. And then maybe with the right context we can jump into that.

0:22:32.5 Jim Lovelady: Absolutely. If you eventually get there…

0:22:33.9 Matt Allison: That’s fine.

0:22:34.8 Jim Lovelady: That’s part of what’s fun about these kinds of things.

0:22:36.0 Matt Allison: Yeah. When I joined Serge in 2004, we were an organization of under a hundred people. The total gifts from donors that sort of fueled our ministry was on the order of maybe $4.5- to $5 million. And today we’re about $30 million and over 300 missionaries, in, I think it’s 28 countries today. And so what’s happened over those 20 years is, I think a number of kind of interlocking factors. And I think some of that answers that question of where are we going? Which is kind of, where have we been? So we have grown I think in large part over the last 20 years for kind of the synergies of two or three different things. One would be, I think that over the last 20 years the American Church has swung towards a reformed theological tradition. When I joined Serge in 2004, there were some glimmers of this, but things like the Acts 29 church planting network.

0:24:02.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Like the Neo-Calvinism.

0:24:04.1 Matt Allison: The Neo-Calvinists, and even the multiplication of additional reformed sort of streams within other denominations like the Southern Baptist Convention or…

0:24:11.6 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Gospel Coalition.

0:24:14.5 Matt Allison: Yeah. Gospel Coalition. All of these sort of entities, really have been born and flourished over the last 20 years. So as a missions agency, we want to be about renewing the North American Church, but we also are in a receiving position for what’s happening in the North American Church. And so we have received, we’ve been on the receiving end of all that growth. And so that’s one factor. I think just a demographic reality that the reformed church has way more than doubled in size over the last 20 years. The second factor is, I think the things that we have said about the life of faith and the values that we articulate in sort of our own self understanding, those things, our mission, vision and values, and our theology. The North American church, whether it thinks about itself primarily as reformed or not, the North American church has started to be more attracted to our mission, vision, and values. The wholism that we were just talking about, this value of ministry from weakness. This, which is very biblical. Paul says, like, “In my weakness, Christ’s strength is made perfect.”

0:25:31.2 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. In post-colonial imperialism, people are tired of, “Hey, let me give you the answer…

0:25:37.9 Matt Allison: Yes.

0:25:38.7 Jim Lovelady: To the questions that you… ” whatever kind of…

0:25:39.9 Matt Allison: Absolutely.

0:25:40.4 Jim Lovelady: Imperialistic kind of posture that can be taken. People are getting tired of that. So here we come, we go, “Well, hey, I need this as much as anybody.”

0:25:49.0 Matt Allison: Yeah. So that’s attractive to folks and in a way that, I think the church, the American evangelical church in general has become less and less enamored with this kind of heroic, muscular sort of christianity that talks about christian missionaries as sort of the Navy Seals, the quasi-military elite of this christian army.

0:26:14.7 Jim Lovelady: Another stereotype I had when I was 10 years old.

0:26:17.1 Matt Allison: Yeah, yeah. Totally. I mean, if you grew up in evangelisism in the ’70s and ’80s and ’60s, you just imbibed this, it was just in the water, that the best christians were missionaries. They were winning souls for Christ through their heroic commitment to the cause of Christ. And so the locus of agency is the missionary and their excellence. And so what you instead see with how we talk about this calling is kind of the exact opposite. I mean, we’re saying, it’s not our competency that we’re expecting the kingdom to move forth. It’s where we feel least competent, least in control, least able, most uncertain, most incompetent, most anxious. Those spaces, when we take steps of faith because we believe Jesus is already there, that’s where we see the kingdom move forward.

0:27:13.6 Jim Lovelady: I love that. I was one of those that just had this expectation that super christians go become missionaries.

0:27:21.0 Matt Allison: Yep. Yeah.

0:27:22.1 Jim Lovelady: And it was going on the mission field that broke me. And I didn’t know what to do about it. Because it was, I experienced the exact opposite. So there were so many paradigm shifts that were so painful in my waking up to, “Hey, I’m going to go be amazing over there.” ‘Cause that’s what we do. We go somewhere else and we be amazing. And then I went over and I was the exact opposite of amazing. And it was, there was just this deconstructing, devastating kind of experience. And the image I have flying back to the States was that I was just kind of hanging on by a thread. My faith was just hanging on…

0:28:02.1 Matt Allison: Yeah. Your faith.

0:28:03.7 Jim Lovelady: By a thread, because I didn’t know what to think anymore. I didn’t know what to believe anymore. And two years later I took Sonship. And so many things just settled back into, “Hey, in all of that, God is not mad at you. In fact, He loves you.”

0:28:22.0 Matt Allison: Right. You found your secure attachment to Jesus.

0:28:26.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. [chuckle] instead of being amazing. Instead of being a super christian. Instead of having all the answers.

0:28:31.7 Matt Allison: Yeah. So if the growth of, demographic growth of the reformed stream and this cultural shift towards our values are two of the drivers, I think the third driver is the persistence of legalism. It’s not always in the same places in the church, but as long as there are streams in the American church that kind of embrace some sort of legalism, where the path of faith is one of earning God’s approval through some discreet or maybe not discrete list of behavioral things.

0:29:10.8 Jim Lovelady: Do’s and don’ts.

0:29:11.5 Matt Allison: Do’s and don’ts.

0:29:12.4 Jim Lovelady: All the shoulds.

0:29:12.5 Matt Allison: All the shoulds. As long as there are those streams within the church, I think there is room for kind of what we do with Sonship to be just like a breath of fresh air or even a oxygen tank. To keep you breathing in your faith. And so the bad news and the good news is, there’s still plenty of legalism in the American church. That’s the bad news, but the good news for us…

0:29:42.3 Jim Lovelady: How are you seeing that, stay big picture, you don’t have to get specific, but how are you seeing that in kind of general…

0:29:50.3 Matt Allison: Like, where… You want me to name names, like where is the legalism in the North American church today? [laughter] I don’t know if I’m ready for that on a podcast, Jim.

0:29:56.2 Jim Lovelady: No, no, no, no. Yeah. Probably not a good idea. Tendencies, name tendencies. Don’t name names.

0:30:03.7 Matt Allison: Tendencies. Okay. That’s good. I mean, I think that where we’ve seen it over the last 20 years has maybe been churches that are maybe more inward grown or monocultural in the representation. So imagine, maybe a safe example would be like a very conservative, fundamentalist church that would tend to send their kids to a super conservative Bible college. Where all along the way you’re meant to internalize a certain anxiety about the persistence of your own salvation. [chuckle] And internalize a need to do a certain kind of like spiritual piety around scripture reading and memorization in order to stay on the right side of God’s wrath. So that would be a more safe example, I guess. So, I think there’s a kind of legalism now in the prosperity gospel kind of churches. So seeing folks that grew up in a church where the boldness of their prayers or the degree of their confidence in God’s intervention on their behalf, or even as a reciprocal thing based on how much money they were giving. But that’s a kind of legalism that I think can be very disappointing and disorienting when you play it out over a lifetime.

0:31:40.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. I think that there are different kinds of legalism that manifest and the gospel speaks…

0:31:46.9 Matt Allison: To each of them.

0:31:47.7 Jim Lovelady: Differently…

0:31:48.4 Matt Allison: Yeah. Absolutely.

0:31:48.5 Jim Lovelady: To each of them.

0:31:50.0 Matt Allison: If your legalism is one of about, what do I need to do to manage God as the judge. Sort of like, God is angry at me, so what are the things behaviorally I have to do to avoid his wrath? And you’re living under that sort of weight of God is angry or disappointed with me. That legalism is very much behavioral. It’s like, I have to… Well, then I have to not do these wrong things. I have to do these right things in terms of my overt actions. And that’s the path. But if your legalism is more like a, God will reward me for my faith…

0:32:29.6 Jim Lovelady: Right. I will serve the heck out of…

0:32:32.5 Matt Allison: Yeah. And so I am going to pray big prayers of intercession, and I am going to give my church a lot of money expecting that I’ll get even more back. That kind of legalism, the gospel actually says to that person, “Everything you already have in Jesus is enough. There’s no more thing you need to get through some greater act of faith than what you have already received.” So that’s a different, that’s a different gospel message to that legalism, than maybe the legalism around of more like behavioral kind of set. So, and there’s more legalisms out there too.

[music]

0:33:19.1 Jim Lovelady: I want to pause this conversation and invite you to join us in prayer for the Serge field workers that we at the headquarters here in Philadelphia are praying for each week. We meet on Tuesday and Friday mornings to pray, and this week we’re praying for our teams in Spain. Would you pray with me? Lord, we pray that you will bless these folks, give them joy in their work, in your Kingdom, and the pleasure of your joy as they follow you. Give them wisdom and let your grace abound in their relationships with one another, with family members, and children, and with the people that they serve. Heal all the sicknesses, liberate the enslaved, protect them from the powers and principalities of darkness, and restore to them the joy of your salvation. And let your kingdom come and your will be done in these places just as it is in heaven. We pray in your name. Amen. Now, back to the conversation.

0:34:18.7 Matt Allison: But I think work for us as an organization is how do we bring the good news of the gospel to people whose story isn’t necessarily the sort of God is angry at me unless I do all the right things. ‘Cause…

0:34:35.4 Jim Lovelady: Theirs is more the malaise of…

0:34:37.1 Matt Allison: Yeah. It could be a lot of things.

0:34:38.2 Jim Lovelady: My life is boring and blah, blah, blah.

0:34:43.8 Matt Allison: Right. There’s some of us grew up in churches where we heard the gospel as we would articulate it here at Serge through Sonship their whole lives. But they can’t answer the question of like, what does it matter that God’s love for me is to complete… [chuckle] is there’s this, so what question? And that’s a different, I don’t even know what the answer is to that actually. And I think we’re trying, we need to figure that out as an organization.

0:35:17.3 Jim Lovelady: What are some of your hunches? 

0:35:18.7 Matt Allison: I think we need to find a way to make the resurrection of Jesus seem as disruptively wonderful as we’ve figured out how to make Christ’s dying on the cross for us. We have a cross chart that has been used by more people than we can know, to proclaim something profoundly true about the gospel that is life giving and liberating and empowering and inspiring. We need like a stone…

0:35:56.0 Jim Lovelady: We need an empty tomb.

0:35:58.5 Matt Allison: We need a stone rolling out of the tomb…

0:36:00.2 Jim Lovelady: That’s right.

0:36:00.5 Matt Allison: Chart that has that same effect.

0:36:02.2 Jim Lovelady: That’s right.

0:36:03.2 Matt Allison: And it needs to say something different about our hope and our expectation of how to be in the world. There’s a way in which the cross chart gives us this freedom to be present, unashamed, and joyful.

0:36:27.2 Jim Lovelady: For people who don’t know what the cross chart is.

0:36:29.1 Matt Allison: Yeah. If you’re in season five of this podcast and you haven’t heard about the cross chart yet…

0:36:32.0 Jim Lovelady: [chuckle] just in case.

0:36:33.3 Matt Allison: Just in case. The cross chart is this chart that has three sections. One, it has a little cross on the front of it, and there’s a little man next to it, and that’s like Jim or Matt. And then there’s a spread happening of two, imagine two rays going out in a line, one down and one up. And those rays are capturing two things. One is, our awareness of God’s holiness, and the other is our awareness of our sinfulness or brokenness. And so the idea of the cross chart is sort of communicating three truths together. Those two things I just named that as we grow in our awareness of God’s holiness and grandeur, we grow in our awareness of our own brokenness, that those things tend to happen together.

0:37:23.3 Jim Lovelady: That’s the normal christian life.

0:37:24.9 Matt Allison: That’s the normal christian life. But what the cross chart says is, normally we try to pretend that that gap isn’t growing. But if instead we imagine that for every moment by moment as that gap grows, instead of trying to pretend the gap is not growing, we just realize that the cross is even bigger. That what Jesus died for is even greater than what we even could imagine a day ago, a moment ago, a year ago.

0:37:55.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah, yeah. Moments ago.

0:37:56.9 Matt Allison: Or when we first came to faith. And so what’s so great is instead of living in a cycle of sin and denial and effort which is kind of the legalist…

0:38:06.1 Jim Lovelady: Pretending or performing.

0:38:06.2 Matt Allison: The legalist kind of habit of neurosis. We can instead live in this cycle of celebration of repentance and belief that the cross is growing bigger as I’m growing in my faith.

0:38:21.3 Jim Lovelady: I gave you a pop quiz, that was a spectacular definition of the cross chart. That was wonderful.

0:38:27.7 Matt Allison: Yeah. So then if we…

0:38:28.5 Jim Lovelady: Now we need an empty tomb chart.

0:38:30.4 Matt Allison: If we think about… Yeah. We think about the empty tomb chart, what we have to populate is something where, what the empty tomb is promising is just getting bigger and bigger. So you could say the two rays are the world’s brokenness and my own limitations. And so in our life of faith, when we grow, we actually see what the resurrection is for, growing. Rather than the hope of resurrection being just like, oh, like this little bit of brokenness in the world is what’s being made new.

0:39:09.5 Jim Lovelady: My individual brokenness. Sure.

0:39:11.6 Matt Allison: Or even the brokenness of… Or I live in West Philadelphia, I see a lot of urban poverty, a lot of social inequality, a lot of crime. It is really good news to imagine that one day there will be a West Philly that is made new. But just imagine for a moment, if instead of getting to some breaking point of seeing the brokenness in my neighborhood that leads me to cynicism and despair, which is what normally happens. Instead, I got to feel in my gut, wow, I’m appreciating on a whole new level what Jesus is going to make new. In a way that I couldn’t even imagine yesterday. And instead of the brokenness of the world crushing me and leading me to hide, protect myself, make my own little kingdom over here that’s more comfortable and easy. What if instead I was growing in my expectation of how Jesus’ power would be poured out over the world.

0:40:09.7 Jim Lovelady: Right. It’s the victory of God.

0:40:11.8 Matt Allison: Yeah. The victory of God.

0:40:12.9 Jim Lovelady: It’s like we’re planting seeds of the victory of God. And the potential for this little acorn, it’s this massive oak tree, this massive victory of God in this little thing that I’m going to do because…

0:40:28.2 Matt Allison: Exactly.

0:40:28.3 Jim Lovelady: I know that Jesus wants me to do this. And I love Him because He loves me. So I’m going to plant this seed declaring the victory of God here. So the chart has to reflect the victory of God in some way.

0:40:40.8 Matt Allison: It does.

0:40:41.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

0:40:42.6 Matt Allison: But it, I think that chart would give us framework for disappointment. It would give us a framework for failure…

0:40:50.4 Jim Lovelady: Suffering.

0:40:51.6 Matt Allison: For suffering for things, not for… Instead of thinking like, “Oh, this is worse than I think, so I’m going to be crushed by it.” It actually gives us an expectation of it’s always going to be worse than I think. It’s always going to seem like a bigger mess the closer I get to it. But the good news, I mean, there’s… It’s almost like we need a new set of cheer ups. So Jack was famous for saying kind of in this justification sort of framework, like, “cheer up, you’re worse than you think, and cheer up you’re more loved than you imagined”. We almost need a second set of cheer ups. I don’t know how to frame it exactly, but there needs to be like, cheer up, the world is far worse than you think. And cheer up, God sees all of it and will make more than you can imagine whole again.

0:41:46.9 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. He rules in the midst of His enemies and He’s made them His footstool. And He’s allowing these things to culminate for His purposes, and we don’t need to know why. All we know is that He, Jesus was dead and now He’s alive.

0:42:04.8 Matt Allison: Yeah. Yep.

0:42:06.4 Jim Lovelady: And that changes everything.

0:42:07.7 Matt Allison: And that changes everything.

0:42:08.6 Jim Lovelady: I’m not afraid of death anymore.

0:42:09.5 Matt Allison: Yeah. And in choosing to reenter the world. So it’s not just that Jesus died, it’s not just that He lives again, God chose to return Jesus to the world after His resurrection, because He needed to say something to the church about His love for the world and… I mean, to put it one way you might say, even after the world murdered Him, God sent Himself back to the world to communicate His commitment to it, His love for it and His desire to make it new again. And so I think in our own cultural moment today, you do see this, at least in the spaces I’m most familiar with, and conservative evangelism, you do see a lot of people who are worshiping their comfort and their security. And I think as Serge, our renewal work needs to be to disrupt that. At the same time, I think even within our own company, and certainly in other parts of conservative evangelisism, there’s this tendency to make our righteousness our suffering.

0:43:31.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

0:43:33.4 Matt Allison: The burdens we are carrying. So whether it’s our doctors in East Africa who are walking up against a level of human suffering that I can’t imagine, or whether it’s folks working with immigrants or refugees, or folks working in deeply broken spaces even here in the US, or in pastoral ministry with people who are having a really tough go of it, all of us who are, who that… me living in West Philadelphia, it’s our tendency to make our righteousness what we are enduring.

0:44:01.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Our identity is wrapped in that. Yeah.

0:44:04.2 Matt Allison: Instead of the comfort we have secured it is the burdens that we are persisting under. And I think the hope of the resurrection is pretty disruptive to both of those things. Because comfort and security should pale in comparison to the hope of all things being made new. The resurrection chart asks you to consider like, what is so great about this comfort and security that you’ve managed to achieve right now that makes your life easy. Is it really just the amount of hours you’re spending on social media every day because of all the free time you have, is that really what you’re made for, what you’re living for? Isn’t it the hope of this God who has returned to the world that killed Him to actually fix it all? Isn’t that a better hope than just having enough time to spend on social media? Similarly though, if your righteousness is becoming all the brokenness that you are carrying, like I think the gospel message to me or to you or to that person is, it’s so much worse than you can imagine, the brokenness of the world.

0:45:17.1 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. If you really want to take it seriously.

0:45:19.2 Matt Allison: It would crush you. Whatever little sort of Dayton you’ve worked out with the brokenness of the world by carrying this little bit of it, it actually pales in comparison to the fullness of it. And God sees and knows intimately, in searing detail, that we as humans would be consumed by if we encountered all of that brokenness, all of that suffering, all of that tragedy. And God still loves that mess enough to give himself to it to the point of destruction and to go back to it and to promise to fix it all.

0:45:58.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. And to conquer it through his resurrection.

0:46:03.4 Matt Allison: Yeah. Yeah. That’s the sending back into it part. To me or to the other person who’s wanting to carry the brokenness of the world as their righteousness, instead living in hope of the things being made new and saying, “I don’t have to carry this. Jesus is carrying this.” It’s not the thing that I am going to find life through doing. That’s what we need to hear. So I think we need to find ways to communicate that kind of stuff to the church, in a way that will be deeply impactful and disruptive, but winsome and invitational, and actually getting people excited about doing new things.

0:46:45.7 Jim Lovelady: So you’ve been talking about this grand vision of how the resurrection changes everything. And so last question. Where do you see Serge as it’s poised to really bring this stuff to life? And it may not be coming up with an actual empty tomb chart, although…

0:47:08.3 Matt Allison: Empty tomb chart.

0:47:10.4 Jim Lovelady: Hey, challenge accepted.

0:47:12.1 Matt Allison: Tomb chart, let’s go.

0:47:12.2 Jim Lovelady: Tomb chart. Yeah. Where do you see, in the 28 countries that we’re and growing, and the potential for renewal in the American church, and how the American church can become a place that sends more missionaries, all empowered by the hope of the resurrection.

0:47:28.1 Matt Allison: Yeah. I want to be humble here because I think that I have no idea if God wants to use Serge to do his work in renewing the North American church like he has in the past. And so I have no idea. So these are hopes. I think as a company, if we can find ways to empower leaders in the church to live with a kind of resurrection hopefulness that is more than propositional and is felt in their bones, maybe that might have a renewing effect on the church in the same way that when we help people to feel free in Jesus in a way that they felt deep in their bones, it led them to lead their churches differently. And in a way that was contagious, and where grace kind of ran and caught fire. So I do have that hope that we will be able to do that. I have… I think there are parts of the North American church that are growing, and I think it is appropriate for us as a company to try to find ways to get closer to those churches. One group I think a lot about is the second and third generation immigrant church. When you look at our core denomination that most of us, at least were a part of at some time, the Presbyterian Church in America, that denomination, unlike many conservative denominations, is growing, but only slightly and only because of second gen Korean Americans.

0:49:00.8 Jim Lovelady: Interesting. Yeah.

0:49:00.9 Matt Allison: So somewhere around 20% of our ordained teaching elders in the PCA are Korean American. So without that group we’d be another shrinking denomination like many others. So how do we walk alongside our Korean American brothers and sisters? We’ve welcomed in a ministry here in our office in Jenkintown called The Advanced Initiative, which exists, founded out of second gen Indian Americans, and exists for mobilizing that same group into God’s global mission. And I love those guys, love what they’re doing. So I think it’s up to us as a company to figure out how do we walk alongside and encourage the parts of the American church that are thriving, and position ourselves with the renewal missions paradigm that I think is real and needed. How we’re renewing the church may change and what mission we’re calling them into may change in the details, but I think looking for those areas of growth. And then thirdly, as a missions agency in terms of mobilizing, we’re a little bit downstream of the church. So we are receiving what formation and kind of health exists in the church when people are raising up their hands saying, “I feel called to go.” And so right now, if you look, like next week we have a group coming in here for assessment and orientation. And they are all folks between, they’re all millennials in this group, like entirely. So that generational cohort is folks, like, I’m an elder millennial, I’m 41. And it, that sort of bottom end of that generation is in their late 20s. So the average incoming Serge missionaries in their early 30s. So in a few years, that generation is going to be gone in terms of being most of the people coming to us. So the next generation, which is called Gen Z, which you hear more and more about kind of in the popular imagination, that generation is going to be our primary sending generation, or we’re not going to be growing. And so the question we have to answer is, how do we need to change to contextualize ourselves as a company towards this incoming generation? And what do we need to do to winsomely, but prophetically call them into God’s mission? Our value of ministry from weakness I think played really well for my generation. ‘Cause my, I graduated the class of 2000 from high school. People told us we were the future all along the way.

0:51:43.3 Jim Lovelady: Right, right. Yeah.

0:51:44.9 Matt Allison: My core memories are the fall of communism, the rise of the internet, kind of the ascendancy of America in the global space and its economic dominance. So I lived with not like a super reflected, but an implicit expectation that my generation was going to change the world for the better. And so ministry from weakness was a very prophetic and ultimately compelling message to my generation.

0:52:15.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Yeah. Liberating.

0:52:17.4 Matt Allison: It was liberating. ‘Cause we were like, “Oh, we long to change the world, but it’s not up to us and our competency to do it.” That’s really good news. We have to figure out that same sort of thing to this next generation. And there are real concerning markers. I mean, when you talk about sort of mental health or church participation, or even just basic socialization, the next generation that’s coming up into the mission space, Gen Z, is significantly more impacted by mental health emergencies, anxiety, depression, self harm. They’re significantly less likely to participate actively in a church than millennials. And they’re significantly less likely to have deep social attachments with a big group, with a lot of different kinds of people. And that’s for a variety of factors. And I don’t want to speak in those generalities in a way that is stereotypical, but I think as an organization we have to figure out, well, what is that ministry from weakness kind of message to this next generation that speaks to some of those core expectations or core preoccupations that actually is good news.

0:53:45.2 Jim Lovelady: Genuine good news. That’s right.

0:53:46.1 Matt Allison: Genuine good news.

0:53:47.2 Jim Lovelady: Liberating, empowering…

0:53:49.6 Matt Allison: Good news.

0:53:50.5 Jim Lovelady: Sigh of relief that you feel in your bones. Not just intellectually where you go, “Oh, yeah, I know God has forgiven me.”

0:53:57.5 Matt Allison: Yeah.

0:53:58.0 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Know what moves you at the core of your being because you’ve been liberated from the things that have been enslaving you. That’s where we’re going to go.

0:54:06.3 Matt Allison: Yeah, exactly. So I do think that our culture in the way that our parent, we’ve done parenting in the last 20 years, the way that we have done education and vocation, world events, all of these things have pushed safety as a paramount thing. Safety and security. What are the things, the world is a scary place. The economic crash, the great recession, the rise of all this global instability, the threat of global warming and climate disaster, the soaring cost of college, and the soaring selectivity of admissions at the same time. There’s all of these things that are pushing, what is the safest path with the least risk and the most reward. That is what so much in our culture pushes, I think, young people to today in a way that it didn’t for me when I was 20 years old. And there is so much more imagination for what that safety and security could bring for you. I don’t know you would say to this, but if you asked me when I was 20 years old when I was making that decision to go to Uganda, “Matt, what if instead of going to Uganda, you could have a job tomorrow that paid you $20,000 a month. What would you do with all that money?” I would’ve had no idea. I wouldn’t have had an imagination. I would’ve been like…

0:55:43.6 Jim Lovelady: I wanted to go on an adventure.

0:55:45.6 Matt Allison: Exactly.

0:55:45.7 Jim Lovelady: I want to go overseas.

0:55:45.7 Matt Allison: But this generation has been shown very clearly how to spend $20,000 a month.

0:55:51.4 Jim Lovelady: That’s right. That’s right.

0:55:53.7 Matt Allison: They… Unless they have been off social media and not really engaged in our popular culture on a deep level, they wouldn’t, they know exactly how to spend $20,000. And so we have elevated a kind of security in our culture to a degree that is, it’s really tantalizing and it is the path. So I think, we’ve been spending a year interviewing, listening to folks in college, folks who are squarely in Gen Z, who are, who do follow Jesus, who are… Who are active in a church or a campus ministry or doing something to really express commitment to discipleship, but not necessarily global missions. And just been asking them to talk about their life and the things that they think matter most, and the ways that they would even process an invitation to go. [chuckle] and just to listen and learn. And we’re still learning and we haven’t… I don’t know what the benchmark is for figuring it out. But what I kind of think on a hunch level is there’s some presentation of liberation that centered on longing to be in relationship and communion with Jesus. Longing for intimacy, longing for attachment, longing for security in a relationship with him. hat isn’t like a… When we hear a relationship with Jesus, we think about a Sunday school teacher in the ’80s talking about, praying the sinner’s prayer.

0:57:45.5 Jim Lovelady: That’s right.

0:57:46.8 Matt Allison: And I don’t mean that sense of relationship with Jesus, I mean more of a felt intimacy or a felt connectedness.

0:57:51.8 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. An experience of…

0:57:53.2 Matt Allison: An experience of Jesus. So that longing. And then presenting, if you really want to be with Jesus, then you have to go to Jesus. And Jesus is on mission. Jesus is, it’s like, you love a good CS Lewis reference, right? So Aslan doesn’t stay still, Aslan is on the move.

0:58:17.2 Jim Lovelady: Is on the move.

0:58:17.5 Matt Allison: And so if you want to be with Jesus, and that is the safest place to be, you have to go with him. You have to go to those scary places, you have to go to those broken places, you have to go to the places where things really need to be made new.

0:58:32.2 Jim Lovelady: Yeah.

0:58:32.9 Matt Allison: And so that’s the invitation. I think like, I want to hypothesize like the Gen Z Jesus story is, it’s the Gerasene Demoniac. It’s like, here’s this person that no one wanted to be around. He was an unsafe person.

0:58:50.9 Jim Lovelady: Someone who…

0:58:51.1 Matt Allison: Profoundly unsafe.

0:58:52.1 Jim Lovelady: Who lived in the tombs.

0:58:53.4 Matt Allison: He lived in the tombs. He was so violent that they tried to restrain him with chains and he broke the chains. He is an unsafe person, literally. Not just how he makes you feel, even though… ‘Cause he didn’t make you feel that way, but he’s also clearly an unsafe person. And so when Jesus casts the legion of demons out of him and into the pigs, one, all the people around him are freaked out, they’re like, “What is going on? This is scary.” But the demoniac, I don’t think even said anything at first. He just went up to Jesus, fell onto his knees and held on to him. And so to me, that is what I think this generation longs for. That kind of… If they’re following Jesus, they long for that kind of experience with Jesus.

0:59:41.7 Jim Lovelady: Yeah. I mean, I long for that kind of experience.

0:59:42.9 Matt Allison: Yeah. But I think it’s especially I think a deep felt need, whether it’s named or not, in this generation. But the second part of that story isn’t that Jesus says, “Well, just come with me, keep on holding on to my… “

0:59:58.0 Jim Lovelady: No. He sends them.

0:59:58.6 Matt Allison: He explicitly, like every other… Every other person that He heals, He tells to be silent up until this point. But with the Gerasene Demoniac, He says, “Go back to your people in the Decapolis.” this Hellenistic area, this Greco-Roman part of the Holy Land. “Go and tell everybody what I have done for you.” And so what He’s literally saying, the way I narrate that is, as I’ve made you well, I have given you everything you need, and whether you are holding on to me or not, I am with you, and so you are free to go and tell everyone because of those other three things. Because you got it all. My hope is that that kind of a message is compelling and powerful and winsome and prophetic to this generation in a way that won’t get people to move to rural Uganda for 40 years, but might get them to go somewhere for a week.

1:01:06.9 Jim Lovelady: Let’s start there.

1:01:08.2 Matt Allison: Yeah, let’s start there. Might get you to go talk to some Hindu Sikhs and Muslims in London about what they believe and what you believe. It might get you to go somewhere for a summer, because you long to experience Jesus more deeply, you’re willing to look for Him there, and you want to look for Him there.

1:01:32.7 Jim Lovelady: That’s fantastic. This really does set things up in a fantastic way for some of the things that I want to explore, and how Serge is poised to speak into those things. Not because we’re amazing, but because we’re like Dan Macha says, we’re just one beggar showing another beggar where we’re looking… Where we’re finding bread today.

1:01:53.7 Matt Allison: Yeah, yeah, that’s right. So I think if we do all those… If God uses us in all those ways, I think we will grow. I think we will be in more countries doing more things. But the other thing I really long for besides contextualizing the next generation and walking alongside an immigrant church, and providing a hopeful view of the resurrection that’s liberating and inspiring. I want to do all those things, and I hope that we’re able to do all those things, but what I also long for is that we not be… not look like we look today in 20 years. And so when you look at our current workforce, we have gotten more diverse racially in terms of who we’re sending, a little bit. More than 10% of our workforce does not identify as white, and that’s great, but we are still overwhelmingly American, and this last, it was on Congress, that just happened this year. One of the big ideas as a sort of poly-centricity in mission, this idea that we’re not talking about the West going to the world or…

1:03:22.8 Jim Lovelady: That’s right.

1:03:24.7 Matt Allison: Sending the US to everywhere. We’re really talking about all going to all. And I would love for our organization to find ways, even as a very small, relatively speaking, sending agency in the grand scheme of things, to be kind of a sending ministry that is polycentric in that way. If we can do that, I think that would be a really good thing. I think it would… There are limitations to our American-ness, and we don’t always even know what they are, because we’re overwhelmingly American. And there are ways in which even… I mean, you’ve done this in your journeys as our in-house podcaster. I mean, visiting all these other places in ways we contextualize Sonship and found ways to catalyze new gospel expressions in other cultures. I would love for that kind of renewal to lead to a global mission where we’re seeing folks who have had their lives turned upside down in a good way in some part of the world, go to another part of the world with us, on mission with us, because of the renewal stuff that God’s done in their lives.

1:04:46.2 Jim Lovelady: It is fascinating. The story, the demonic, is wonderful, because here’s just some random guy that Jesus sends to seemingly some random place. That’s where Jesus sent him. That’s where Jesus sent him. So do you just go wherever Jesus sends you? And everyone should just go wherever Jesus sends you. What I think is wonderful about this conversation is how there is this past, present and future of what Jesus has done, is doing and is going to do. And it’s all kind of settled into and based on, well, Jesus is alive. And so I’m going to wake up today and I’m going to do… I’m going to do life based on the fact that Jesus is alive, so…

1:05:31.3 Matt Allison: Yeah. Amen.

1:05:32.5 Jim Lovelady: You just need to come in some more.

1:05:34.2 Matt Allison: I’m ready. Let’s go.

1:05:35.8 Jim Lovelady: So thank you so much, man.

1:05:36.8 Matt Allison: Yeah. Absolutely.

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1:05:44.2 Jim Lovelady: What is it that the risen Savior might be inviting you into? In the midst of uncertainty, what hopes has He already placed in your heart? What gifts and abilities has He placed in you that beckon you to follow Him into something greater? There’s no shortage of uncertainty as we look to the future. And while we look ahead with hope, we look around for what the Lord is doing today, and in faith, in faithfulness, we follow the risen Christ today. So maybe faithfulness for you means following a lead about an opportunity you hear about. And I want to make you aware of some really great opportunities that we have here at Serge. First, we really need missionary kid teachers. If you resonate with Matt’s story of being a missionary kid teacher in Bundibugyo, look for the link in the show notes to see all the places around the world where we desperately need teachers. Who knows? The Lord may be calling you on mission. And here’s another mission opportunity to explore. Take a short-term trip. There’s still time to sign up for one to two-week trips in Europe, South America and Asia. And you’d be surprised, some of these trips are way outside the stereotypical short-term mission trip box. I’m talking to you auto repair folks, okay? [chuckle] Again, follow the link in the show notes to explore all the opportunities to follow Jesus on mission. But as your own mission, maybe neck deep in ministry, maybe faithfulness for you means the Lord calling you into a space of personal renewal. If so, I want to encourage you to sign up for Mentored Sonship. If you’ve already gone through Sonship, share this episode with a friend and go to the show notes to see more ways to explore renewal in the Gospel. Lots of ways to go deeper with the Gospel-centered life dynamic of mission leading to renewal, leading to mission. So as you follow Jesus on mission and experience the renewal of His presence, you go with the pleasure of His grace and the joy of His blessing. So may the Lord bless you and keep you. May the Lord make His face to smile down on you. May the Lord be gracious to you and turn His bright eyes to you and give you His peace. In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. One God, life everlasting. Amen.

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Matt Allison

Matt Allison serves as the Deputy Executive Director of Serge, leading our efforts to mobilize the US church into global missions and support the work of Serge all around the world. He lives in West Philadelphia where he is an elder in his local church.


THE HOST

Jim Lovelady

Jim Lovelady is a Texas-born pastor, musician, and liturgist, doing ministry in Philadelphia with his wife, Lori, and 3 kids, Lucia, Ephram, and Talitha. He is passionate about the ministry of liberating religious people from the anxieties of religion and liberating secular people from the anxieties of secularism through the story of the gospel.

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