Why True Power Looks Like a Shepherd : N.T. Wright

Full-Text Transcript

Jason Daye
Hello friends. We have an amazing episode for you once again this week. I’m super excited to be welcoming back to the show none other than Dr. N.T. Wright. N.T. Wright has been one of the favorite guests of FrontStage BackStage for the audience here, and we are excited to be welcoming him back. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week, I have the privilege of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader, and together we tackle a topic to help you and pastors and ministry leaders just like you really thrive in both your life and leadership. We are blessed to be a part of the PastorServe Ministry. And as I mentioned, Dr. N.T. Wright is joining us this week. Now, Tom does not really need an introduction. He’s been a gift to the church. He’s a former bishop of Durham, and he is currently a senior research fellow at Oxford University. He’s written a number of best-selling books. I’m sure you’ve read many of them, but his most recent book is entitled Into the Heart of Isaiah. And at this time, I would like to welcome Tom Wright back to FrontStage BackStage. Tom, welcome to the show, brother.

N.T. Wright
Thank you very much, and greetings to all who are watching. Thank you.

Jason Daye
Yes, it’s so good to have you back with us. Now, Tom, in your newest book, Into the Heart of Isaiah, you help us really see the passage of Isaiah, chapters 40 through 55, not simply as a collection of predictions as we often read it as, but it’s really this sweeping vision of the coming Messiah, a vision of God really returning to His people through Christ, the servant. We see the suffering, the restoration, this new creation, and what is so striking, Tom, is really how surprising Isaiah’s picture of victory really is. Because I think oftentimes, we expect power to look a certain way, and then Isaiah shows us this suffering servant. And, Tom, as I was reading through the book, I was reflecting on our life in ministry. Oftentimes, ministry leaders want their lives and ministries to really make an impact, as we should, but we can easily assume that power works through strength and visibility, influence, and sometimes through control. That’s kind of what the world sets power up to look like. But Isaiah gives us a Messiah whose power is revealed through servanthood and suffering, and you share this vividly in the book. How does the way that Isaiah shares this, how does that challenge the way that we understand power in leadership?

N.T. Wright
Yeah, I mean one can approach this from either end. One could do it by starting with Isaiah 40 and showing how the sequence from 42 fits within that and develops it, but let me start the other end, which is in Mark 10, where James and John say to Jesus, We want to sit at your right and your left when you get to be king. And by the way, I think this was a preemptive strike in order to stop Peter and Andrew getting in first, but that’s a whole other story. But clearly they are thinking of power in the quite ordinary sense that Jesus is going to be rather like Herod, or even rather like Caesar, sitting on a throne, and he’s going to need, in British terms, a foreign secretary and a home secretary. Probably in American terms, what would that be? I don’t know, secretary of State and, I don’t know, somebody else. But that’s how they’re conceiving power. And Jesus has this devastating line. He says, Listen, that’s how the rulers of this age run things. They boss and bully and exercise power in any way they can. And then he says, We’re not going to do it like that. We’re going to do it the other way up. The one who’s going to be great will be the servant, and the one who wants to be first will be slave of all, because the Son of Man didn’t come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life as a ransom for many. Now, many of us grew up knowing that line because it’s a one-liner, which tells you Jesus died for my sins. Well, fine, yes, that’s great, but what we’ve often not noticed is that, as exactly as in Isaiah, that comes as part of the redefinition of power, and the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth as in heaven. Which many of us, growing up reading that line from Mark 10:45, we never thought about that at all. But this whole sweeping passage, 40 to 55, which, as I say in the book, by the way, I got a copy of the American edition of the book which just arrived. So it’s just out a few days ago now, maybe a week or so ago. But this whole passage is about this is what it looks like when God comes back to be king, and we are told in Isaiah 40:8-9, the Lord God comes with might, and His arm rules for Him. And we think, yeah, we know what that’s like. We want a strong ruler to come and do the business, and rescue us from Babylon, and all that. And then it switches completely and says, He will feed his flock like a shepherd and carry the lambs in his arms and close to his side, and he will gently lead the mother sheep. And we think, What’s that got to do with the strong arm tactics? And the answer is, the strength is there in the pastoral care and the way in which God then, in the servant figure, who’s introduced two chapters later, God comes strangely, and it’s not said straight out. The picture is developed slowly through this extraordinary poem that we call chapters 40 to 55, until finally, as you’ve been saying, we get the picture in 53 of the one who is bruised for our iniquities and suffers and dies for our sins, etc. But that, too, is in parallel with and is interpreting the extraordinary little passage just before in chapter 52:7-12, which is all about God coming back. The watchmen are going to lift up their voices and shout for joy because they’re going to see Yahweh returning to Zion. So everyone has to shout for joy, and this is going to be the kingdom of God at last. And we say, Yeah, Amen, bring it on. And then complete shift. Behold, my servant. Who would have thought that he was the arm of the Lord? This is what it looks like when God takes His power and reigns. And that’s still a shock, and it’s still a challenge. Even those of us who know it, have preached it, and love that message, when we step back and think, what exactly are we saying here? Is that the ultimate power by giving power away? And yet, as we know from the Gospels, this is how it worked out. So all of that I see displayed in this. And you were absolutely right when you said many of us have seen this book as simply a collection of oracles, and we take this one and applies here. Take that one; it applies there. The way I’ve seen it, and I spell this out in the book, it’s like a great poem, like T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, where you’ve got several quite different bits of poetry, one after the other, grouped into these different sort of movements. And it’s when you stand back from the whole thing that you see how the different styles and genres and so on all come together in this great narrative about Yahweh coming back, about the servant who turns out to be the embodiment of Yahweh coming back. And the results being not, therefore, we will be taken away to heaven or anything, but new creation, new creation in which the new shrubs will come out. The mulberry instead of the briar, and the cedar instead of the thorn, and so on. And this is the replanting of the garden, if you like, the renewal of creation. So anyway, I could talk about this all day. Obviously, that’s what I’ve done in the book. But that’s a way of saying yes. It’s the redefinition of power, which the Israelites in exile had to learn. They didn’t want to learn it. They wanted a powerful God You know, one of the sad things about this whole passage is that for most of the time, the people to whom the prophet is speaking don’t believe it. The prophet says, But you know you’re not getting the message, and God is going to have to do something different to make you understand and hear it. And by the end, the invitation: Hey, anyone who’s thirsty, come to the waters and have a drink. And by then, we have a sense maybe the people are ready. Okay, we get it. We’re coming.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s beautiful. So, how do we see Jesus stepping into this vision that Isaiah is painting of the suffering servant, and then what does that tell us about the reality of the kingdom of God?

N.T. Wright
Well, that is the point where he steps in because Jesus comes into Galilee saying it’s time for God to become king. Kingdom of God is at hand. In other words, this long expectation back to Zechariah, back to other prophets, but especially back to Isaiah 40 to 55, and people know what they want. They want God to come and sweep away Caesar and Herod and all those clowns, and for God to take charge. And the question then is: what would it look like if that actually happened? If God did come back in person to be king. And so Jesus comes right in there. Kingdom of God is at hand. And he goes around doing the things which show what that means, healing the blind and the lame, all and sundry, and feeding people and so on. And Jesus, at one point in Matthew 11, refers as well to a slightly earlier passage in Isaiah chapter 35, when John the Baptist sends messengers to say, Are you actually the one who was to come, or should we be waiting for someone else? And Jesus says, Go and tell John what you see and hear. The blind receive their sight, and so on and so on. And a blessing on you if you are not offended by me. In other words, God is coming, as it were, in disguise, but the way He’s doing what he’s doing is a ministry of healing, hope, and new creation. And then the story of the gospel going on through there takes us all the way to the cross. And the disciples still didn’t get it. I was reading just this morning in my own reading, Luke 19, where Jesus explains in graphic detail what’s about to happen to him when they get to Jerusalem. And Luke says they just couldn’t get him. They had no idea what it was. They assumed it must have been a metaphor or something, and it wasn’t. It was literally true. So that Isaiah is constantly playing at that interface between the expectation of a glorious big band redemption and then the arrival of this humble, suffering servant. And so Jesus, by launching his kingdom ministry, puts himself into that frame and challenges his hearers and followers gradually to come to terms with what he’s saying, and then, of course, ultimately, the time when they get it is after his resurrection, where, for instance, on the road to Emmaus in Luke chapter 24, then Jesus tells them the whole biblical story again. And then and only then, when they come into the house and he breaks the bread, of course it all makes sense, and this is the new thing that had been promised, but they’d been so looking in the wrong direction that they couldn’t see it until the whole story was complete.

Jason Daye
Hey friends, just a quick reminder that we provide a free toolkit that complements today’s conversation. You can find this for this episode and every episode at PastorServe.org/network. In the toolkit, you’ll find a number of resources, including our Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. This growth guide includes insights pulled from today’s conversation, as well as reflection questions, so you and the ministry team at your local church can dig more deeply into this topic and see how it relates to your specific ministry context. Again, you can find it at PastorServe.org/network.

Jason Daye
Yeah, Tom, I’m curious, and this may sound like a silly question. It may have a simple answer, but I’d love for you to dig in a little bit with us on this. Why do you think it is that even though this has been spelled out throughout Scripture, we go all the way back to Isaiah? It’s reiterated through the life and ministry of Jesus. Jesus preaches on the kingdom, tries to make it clear. But why do we, today, 2000 years later, why do we continue as Christ-followers to be challenged to such a degree that we’re still so attracted to the idea of power in the form of empire and coercion? Why do we still get so caught up in that and still move toward that so readily?

N.T. Wright
Yeah, it’s a great question. I mean, I think there are two answers I want to give. One is that throughout the Middle Ages, the Western Church, particularly, I think actually all Christians, but the Western Church, particularly, developed a Platonic or Aristotelian framework, which was really about the soul going to heaven, and then the people who were still in power in this world used to take bits and pieces of Christian language to use in their power games. I mean, that’s when you get the Crusades. As we are rediscovering, the best way to avoid a conflict at home is to start a new war in the Middle East, dare I say. And the Crusaders did exactly that. And imagine going with the cross of Jesus on your breastplate or on your shield to go and kill Muslims. I mean, it makes no sense at all. How had they got to that point? And the answer was that the church had been teaching them that the name of the game was for your soul to go to heaven, and not to imagine the kingdom of God coming on earth as in heaven. Now that’s a huge story, which I’ve spelt out briefly in my book God’s Homecoming, which came out a few months ago, as to how the church lost its original vision. And the answer is that some people hung on to that original vision of a different way of doing things, and some of them went off and established monasteries and that sort of thing. People like Benedict and so on. But then others said, no, no, we’ve got to bring the kingdom of God on earth as in heaven, so we’re going to go and kill people, bully them, and make them do what we say, and wrong mistake, guys. And so, nevertheless, and I’m about to have a public discussion with the historian Tom Holland about this, God willing. He has argued that when we look at the modern world, even in the atheist reaction against Christianity, we can see signs of Christian influence that have come through Western culture. I mean, the whole idea of human rights would never have got a look in the ancient Roman Empire. But gradually, much of the world has started to say, No, we do have a responsibility to one another. We are part of a human community. We should be treating each other differently. The trouble is that the people who still run the show, in my country, your country, around the world, tend to say, Oh well, that’s religion. You can do your religion in private and cultivate your soul and say your prayers, but we are hard-headed realists. We’re going to run the world, and we’re going to make money, especially make money. And so, the markets and the force of war. I mean, the usual trio: Mars, Mammon, and Aphrodite. Money, war, and sex. They’re still ruling the world, guys. And so, I want to say to Tom Holland: Yes, Western mindset has changed in good directions, but we still haven’t begun to think properly about peace and to think properly about non-violence. But when you read the Gospels, it’s all over the place. Jesus is the Prince of Peace. Isaiah 9 says that, and he reiterates that in many ways. People weren’t wanting it then, and they’re not wanting it now. But until we’re prepared to say, okay, what might he have meant by blessed are the peacemakers? You know, we all laughed at Monty Python’s joke version of that Blessed are the cheesemakers, but actually the trouble is when you sort of laugh at it, then it somehow diffuses it. But where do we see people actually actively peacemaking now? The only one I can remember was Desmond Tutu in South Africa with the Committee for Truth and Reconciliation. But that is a central Christian imperative. It’s there on page after page after page of the Gospels. I’m reminded of G.K. Chesterton’s famous line that Christianity has not been tried and found wanting; it’s been found difficult and so not tried. You know, so we’ve had lots of good Christian kings and emperors and so on going to church, saying their prayers, being seen in public, and then going off to fight the First World War or whatever it was. And was that just a glitch, or is that revealing something deep in our as yet unformed Western Christian conscience? I think it’s the latter.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. When we look at Isaiah, and going back to this idea of the servant who will carry the lamb in his arms, and we think of this in terms of the shepherd, right? There’s actually been conversation here in the U.S. There have been some key pastors who even recently in the last few weeks, have been talking about the role of a pastor, and this got some publicity here in the U.S. Not even really being the role as a shepherd, but they’re more of the role of a leader, and actually were using some almost military language around it. I’m a general type of thing. I’m not really a shepherd, right? And this is how some pastors are approaching this idea of ministry because we are in times of war versus times of shepherding. How would you speak into that? How is Isaiah speaking into that? How is Jesus speaking into that? How are we missing?

N.T. Wright
It seems to me, and you know, my country’s been just as bad at this as anyone else’s country, including yours. You know, my father fought in the Second World War. My grandfather fought in the First World War. That’s just what you did. And I think both of them believed that they were doing so as good Christian British citizens, so I’m not pointing a finger at anyone else. We’re all in this together, but I do think that the message has simply not got through. As I say, particularly because of the whole Platonic dream of our souls going to heaven, and therefore, we don’t need to worry too much about getting it right here on Earth, we’re just going to clean it up a bit and do this and that, and we leave it to the politicians, the social workers, or maybe even the army. But no, as soon as you start using that militaristic language about leadership, you’re stepping a million miles away from the Christian vision of leadership, which you have in, obviously, Jesus himself, and then commissioning the disciples where they’re to go out without a second pair of sandals, without a proper bag, without this, that, and the other. They’re to go around healing people and saying God’s kingdom is coming near you. Anything less militaristic would be hard to imagine. And if somebody comes back and says, Ah, well, but at the Last Supper, Jesus did say, You better get a sword. Then I think they don’t realize that is a hugely ironic statement. And when in the Garden of Gethsemane, Peter or somebody does draw a sword, Jesus says, Hey, those who take the sword will perish by the sword. Now, until we’re prepared to hear that whole line of thought, which runs actually right through Scripture, I know the Old Testament has a lot of violence, and people like King David have a lot of blood on their hands. And the Old Testament itself recognizes that that’s a problem, but also is very much involved, for instance, in denouncing chariots and horses, which were basically the tanks and the superbombers of their day. Israel is not supposed to have that kind of equipment. Does that mean that the Egyptians and the Philistines can come and attack them? Well, yes, it does. But God will defend them. You know, they’ve got to work that out. And one of my favorite pieces of music is Handel’s Messiah, but in the passage where Handel sets Isaiah chapter nine about the light has shone, and he jumps straight to for unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given. He misses out the bit in the middle, which is about how all the military equipment and uniforms are going to be burnt as fuel for the fire, and that’s why we then celebrate unto us a child is born. And so, I think that in Britain and in America, many other places, we’ve allowed ourselves to drift back into basically idolatry of Mars, which is the god of war. Which means when something’s going on that we don’t like, what are we going to do? We’re going to go and drop bombs on it, and that’ll be all right, won’t it? Tony Blair did that, and Tony Blair was a practicing Christian, but he talked about we’ve discovered that there’s evil out there, so we’re going to go and deal with it, which meant dropping bombs from a great height. Some of us said in our sermons at the time, This will only make matters worse, and we’re looking back now, 25 years, and saying, And it did. So, I mean, are we going to learn that lesson? Maybe the book of Isaiah is a book for our generation.

Jason Daye
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Jason Daye
Absolutely. For pastors and ministry leaders, what do we learn from Isaiah? This passage in Isaiah about servant leadership. What is it sharing with us? What is it pointing us toward?

N.T. Wright
Yeah. I mean, let me pan back and think about the whole of that book again, because it begins with God is coming back, and it ends with new creation, and then the ministry of the servant is set within that. So it isn’t just, oh, forget the big ideas, concentrate on this rather lowly task and the suffering which goes with it. That’s there, but it’s held within this robust framework. And so then, when in Isaiah 42 you have behold my servant, the main thing the servant is to do the work of God in putting things right. He will bring justice to the nations, and that goes with Isaiah 11. It goes with Psalm 72. It goes with several other messianic passages, which are about God wants to put the world right, and He’s choosing the servant as the means by which to do that. Turns out, in the end, God Himself is going to come as the servant. It doesn’t say that at the beginning. You’ve got these two strands. You’ve got God coming back, and you’ve got Behold my servant. It’s only gradually as the book develops that we reach 52 and 53, and we realize it’s the same story, and they are mutually interpretative. And so, in the middle of all of that, ministry is such an odd thing because it takes all of us ministers in different ways. We are all called to put our shoulder to the wheel, or whatever metaphor you want to use. And when we sign up, we are saying, I’m here, I’m ready, I’m a bit scared, but please show me how to go about this. And when I was a bishop and ordaining people, if anybody had come to me and said, Yes, bishop, you’re going to ordain me in three weeks’ time, and I want to tell you I’m going to get out there, and up and at them, and I’m going to be punching hard, and this and that. And I would say, don’t go about it that way. Say your prayers, love your people, get to know them, serve them, find out where they’re in pain, find out what you and your fellow Christians can do to meet them where they are. Jesus says, Cast your bread on the waters. Of course, is from Ecclesiastes. And I once worked with a colleague who said he was told as a young priest, cast your bread on the waters, and it’ll come back to you in ham sandwiches. Which sounds like a good idea. That the generosity of ministry, which looks as though it’s unrewarded at the time and often ineffectual at the time, actually, that will go much, much, much deeper than the bullying, do it my way, here we go kind of approach, and I think many, many young pastors make the mistake of thinking they’re God’s gift to the church, and they may be God’s gift to the church, but Isaiah 40 to 55 says God’s gift to the church looks like this servant from 49 to 53. So now, as Jesus Himself said, Go and you do likewise.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely. I love that. As we look at the kind of current state of the world, the place of the church in the world, what encouragement do you have for pastors and ministry leaders today, and this might dovetail with what you just shared there, in how we can best serve in ministry right now? There’s a lot of chaos in the world, right? There’s a lot of challenges. The church is being pulled in different directions. How do we best serve? How do we best lead?

N.T. Wright
I mean, I feel it keenly because I was born in 1948, and I’ve lived all my life with very little of wars and rumors of wars going on around me. And I have to say, the last few years have been the most disquieting. I was too young to know about the Cold War when that was going on. I just about remember the Cuban Missile Crisis in the early 60s, when I was quite young. But most of my life I’ve lived without this as a real threat. And now I open the newspapers and I see, you know, all that’s going on in terms of cyber warfare, in terms of wars and rumors of wars in different parts of the world, coming closer to home, actually. So I then stop and think, well, hang on, that has actually been normal in Europe and around the world for most of the time since the time of Jesus, and certainly the time of Jesus itself. That period was an intensely contested, dangerous, and scary time. I mean, the levels of violence and brutality in the first century were just horrible, and we sadly have degenerated in some ways back toward that. So I think we shouldn’t see our sudden crises now as meaning, oh dear, the whole thing’s gone horribly wrong. It just means we’re on the same page as the church has always been, basically. And if we thought we had, you know, 50 years of ease and comparative peace, well, okay, maybe in a sense we did, but let’s get back to the reality now, which is a suffering world, a hurting world, a world that needs precisely this message. I mean, the setting of Isaiah 40:55 within the Babylonian exile. I mean, the Babylonians – that was a huge, massive empire, very strong, and they have big statues of big gods, and many of the Israelites must have thought, well, their gods are obviously more powerful than ours because they’ve captured us, they’ve kept us here for 70 years. And to learn that actually Yahweh is a different kind of god, and that it’s just like that for him to overthrow Baal and Marduk and so on. And to reestablish or to establish his own kingdom in his own way. It seems to me every generation has to learn what that means in terms of confronting the idols of our time, not by setting up other great big bullying would-be Christian idols, but by this servant ministry which we see coming through so clearly, and praying and trusting that in and through that, the signs of God’s kingdom will be born among us, often in unexpected places, and that fresh things will happen. That chapters 54 and 55, the new covenant and new creation, will blossom forth in ways that we didn’t expect. That’s the hope.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s excellent. One of the things that you touched on there is the idolatry that we see in Isaiah, in this passage. How do you see that idolatry kind of bubbling up in our day today?

N.T. Wright
It’s never gone away. It’s never gone away. I mean, who is really running the world at the moment? It’s “the markets”. And I don’t know much about economics, but I do know that for many people the bottom line of a financial equation is the bottom line. That’s what they’re working to and from, and that’s the be-all and end-all. And that, for many other people, all problems are solved by military means, by sending in the tanks or the troops, or by more subtle espionage, cutting people’s cables, disrupting people’s Facebook streams, or whatever it is. I don’t know very much about that, but I know it’s going on. And in the middle of all of that, as always, Aphrodite, the goddess of erotic love, is very present. I mean, one of the things that’s happened with the internet is the explosion of pornography. I mean, unbelievable, really, except that sadly it isn’t unbelievable, because left to themselves, many people will say, Oh, here’s a way to make money. And so the three kind of join up because war is a way to make money. Lots of people get rich when there’s a war on. Sex is a way to make money, not only for the people whose bodies are exploited in that way, but for lots of shadowy figures standing behind. And so war, money, and sex all kind of come together, and we haven’t in the church been good at naming and shaming these idols. We haven’t really known how to do that because it’s not enough to shout from the pulpit and say you’re all wicked sinners and you must stop doing this and that and the other. We need to understand where that comes from, and we need to understand that there is a proper use of force. It’s there in Romans 13 and so on. There is, of course, a proper use of sex. That’s how we propagate the species. There is a proper use of money, mainly to give it away. And those are all fine, and there they are in the New Testament. But we just haven’t taught in that sort of detail. I’ve got another book coming out, God willing, next May, on the whole question of what would Jesus say to the present phenomenon of so-called Christian nationalism. And I think one of the main things is if you look at the Sermon on the Mount, and if you look at the Nazareth Manifesto, Jesus is putting his finger on all sorts of things which were idols at the time and which are still idols. You know, how is God going to become king? Well, Jesus says, Blessed are the peacemakers, blessed are those who are hungry and thirsty for justice, blessed are those who are meek and merciful, and so on. That’s not the way we tend to go about it. We say no. Blessed are the people who fight their way to the top and push others out of the way. And we’ve made the message of Jesus so intimate and personal, just to me and just to you, sitting next to me, that we’ve failed to say no, this is actually something which has to be modeled on a larger scale, and we have to challenge ourselves as if we want to be Christian societies. You know, of course, if you want to go and bomb your enemies to smithereens, I probably can’t stop you. But please don’t call yourself a Christian nationalist while you’re doing it. I mean, this is the message that needs to come out.

Jason Daye
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Thank you, Tom. As we close down our conversation, it’s been absolutely wonderful. What words of encouragement do you have for pastors and ministry leaders? What would you like to leave with them?

N.T. Wright
I have somewhere on my desk. It’s just been obscured by something else. A card from my father’s older sister, who was an Anglican nun, and when I was confirmed at the age of 15, she sent me a card which said in Greek, since she knew I was studying New Testament Greek, and it says, Pistos ho kalōn, the one who calls you is faithful. The one who calls you is faithful. And that’s kind of a sigh of relief moment. Okay, I have no idea how today is going to go. Next week, how the new job is going to go. Whether I’m going to be in a good or a bad place, but the one who has called me is faithful. And you know, I sometimes realize I’m nearer 80 than 70 now, and I’ve been doing this stuff for a long time, and I want to say I have messed up in a thousand different ways, but the one who has called me is faithful, again and again and again, and I’ve seen that and proved it. And again, the sigh of relief. So cling on to that. Pistos ho kalōn.

Jason Daye
Amen. Good word, brother. Tom, it’s always a joy to have you with us. For those of you who are watching, listening along, really encourage you to grab Tom’s newest book, Into the Heart of Isaiah. We’ve just scratched the surface of it. Absolutely wonderful book. Had the pleasure of reading it myself, and you can find links to that as well as our toolkit for this episode at PastorServe.org/network. In that toolkit, you’ll find a ton of resources, including a Ministry Leader’s Growth Guide, which has insights and questions pulled from the conversation that Tom and I just had that you can go through yourself or with the ministry team at your local church or ministry. So we encourage you to find that at PastorServe.org/network. Tom, it’s always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you for all you do, and you are a gift to the church, my friend. I appreciate you.

N.T. Wright
Thank you, Jason. It’s good to see you again. We’re all very blessed to see you and yours.

Jason Daye
God bless you. Thank you so much.

Jason Daye
Here at PastorServe, we hope you’re truly finding value through these episodes of FrontStage BackStage. If so, please consider leaving a review for us on your favorite podcast platform. These reviews help other ministry leaders and pastors just like you find the show, so they can benefit as well. Also, consider sharing this episode with a colleague or other ministry friend, and don’t forget our free toolkit, which is available at PastorServe.org/network. This is Jason Daye, encouraging you to love well, live well, and lead well.