There is something in the air recently at our church and others, regarding mentoring and discipleship. In this All Saints conversation, Brock Bingaman talks with Roc Bottomly, who has a lifetime’s worth of experience in the value of mentoring.

            Mentoring doesn’t have to be complex or difficult or intimidating. Lots of people have reservoirs of wisdom to share with others – wisdom gained through doing life with God, over time. You don’t have to be perfect or have had no struggles to be a good mentor. In fact, just the opposite: broken people who have walked through hard times make good mentors.

            How do you get started? We’ll give some practical help for

            • How to start a mentoring relationship

            • What to talk about during meetings

            • How often — and for how long— to meet

The process isn’t complicated, and the results can be life-changing—and life-bringing.

In this podcast, Brock and Connie explore some of the core elements of leadership, as Brock describes how he first encountered a series of leadership groups that changed an entire church. We’ll touch on the essence of leadership: empowering others — and we’ll talk about the value of humility, human limits, listening, and vulnerability.

When you open your Bible, we’d love to have you ask, “I wonder if there’s more than I’ve been getting from my normal reading.” Because there always is. In this podcast, Brock and Connie talk about some of the discoveries and questions that have been arising from the Biblical Studies course.

Sometimes we take the ancient view when we look at God's work in history. And sometimes we look at the Holy Spirit's activity in more recent events. In the 1970s in the U.S., God intervened to reach and rescue a generation. Today, we call them the Jesus People.

Through what lens do we look at Scripture? How we answer that question shapes not only how we see the Bible, but how we relate to God.

In this All Saints podcast, Connie and Brock talk with Brad Kilman, the worship pastor at Our Lord’s Community Church. Brad has been leading worship for more than 20 years, ever since he encountered God as a teenager. In the conversation together, we explore the risk and mystery of worship — and talk about what Brad would say to a roomful of young worship leaders.

In this podcast, we continue our conversation about the prophetic. As we talked about before, God’s communication is central to life with Him. But what is the actual process of hearing Him like? We’ll talk about what we can do to prepare ourselves to hear God and what it’s like to hear Him — and also how we can discern.

In this podcast, we talk about the spiritual gift of prophecy — the kind described in 1 Corinthians 14 where Christians “speak to other people for their upbuilding and encouragement and consolation” (verse 3). Prophecy is based on who God is: One who speaks and communicates, whose written word begins and ends with His speech. Because prophecy is based on who God is, pursuing it starts not with the gift itself, but with relationship and communion with God.

Because the celebration of Pentecost is coming soon, we wanted to take space to invite God to bring “Pentecost” into our lives.  When we pay attention to special days like Pentecost, not only do we remind ourselves of what God has done in sending His Spirit, we remind ourselves that the Spirit’s coming on Pentecost is not merely history, it is a practical and present reality in our daily lives.

As we saw in our previous podcast, Christian spirituality is quite different from a vague, generic spirituality. When we talk about spirituality, we mean “life in the Holy Spirit.” In this All Saints conversation, we’re going to learn about spirituality from two people from our Christian heritage: Jeanne Guyon and John Cassian. Though from different countries and different eras, they both have something to teach us about a life lived with the Holy Spirit.

Spirituality can be a fuzzy word — it’s used in all manner of ways in our culture today. But when we talk about spirituality in All Saints, we’re going to the heart of the term: the practices and experience of Christian life with the Holy Spirit.

If we don’t pay attention to where we’ve been in history, we lose the plot, and wander around disoriented. It happened at times in Scripture, and it can happen again today. As we study Church History, we keep our eyes on the plot of what God has done in the world, what He is doing, and what He will do.

History is not only human history or church history — it’s the story of God Himself.  If you’re going to study the work of God, you can’t avoid history, because God enters into human history, from start to finish. We also must know that there are going to be some glorious moments where we see what God is doing, but there will also be very disturbing moments. Church — and biblical — history is full of lots of ups and downs, potholes, and broken people. Even so, Ts study church history is more than to study groups of human beings who are doing it well or not doing it well. It is to study the works of God through human beings.

“There is something healthily dangerous about reading the Bible.” That’s what we’re going to talk about in this All Saints conversation as we explore how we approach Scripture.  We’ll deal with what Scripture is, what we can expect when we open the Bible, some pitfalls we can find ourselves in — and how an experience of God comes to us through His written Word.

The Bible isn’t merely a textbook to be studied or a useful life manual full of wise principles. Scripture is a sacrament — a conduit through which the presence of God comes to us, through which we encounter God. The point is not to read words and master them, but actually to encounter the one who gives us these Words.  A life-giving way to encounter God in Scripture is to pray a phrase or passage back to Him, and in this episode we’ll show you what that sounds like.

In this podcast, we're continuing to talk about watchfulness — paying attention to our thoughts — and we have two practical ways we've used to turn our thoughts to God: Focusing on who God is, and arrow prayers drawn from scripture.

In this All Saints conversation, Brock Bingaman and Connie Willems talk about theology, what it means to have fellowship with the Holy Spirit, and how we reflect on and experience the Holy Spirit.