Finding Solid Ground in a Shifting World : Glenn Packiam

Full-Text Transcript

In an age of confusion where many are questioning the credibility of the church, how can we get really rooted in what truly matters?

Jason Daye
In this episode, I’m joined by Glenn Packiam. Glenn is a pastor, author, and practical theologian who serves as the Lead Pastor at Rockharbor Church. He’s written a number of books, including his latest, What’s a Christian, Anyway? Together, Glenn and I assess the subversion of Christianity by cultural and personal agendas and how that impacts our witness. Glenn then highlights the mystery and beauty of God as an invitation to experience and extend the peace, love, and joy of Jesus to an uncertain world. Are you ready? Let’s go.

Jason Daye
Hello, friends, and welcome to another episode of FrontStage BackStage. I’m your host, Jason Daye. Each and every week I have the honor of sitting down with a trusted ministry leader and we dive into a topic all in an effort to help you and ministry leaders just like you embrace healthy, sustainable rhythms so you can thrive in both life and leadership. We’re proud to be a part of the Pastor Serve Network. Not only do we have a conversation every single week, but we also create an entire toolkit so that you can dig more deeply into the topic that we tackle. You can find that toolkit at PastorServe.org/network for this episode and for every episode. In that toolkit are a number of resources including a Ministry Leaders Growth Guide. Now you can use this to grow more deeply as you engage with this content, both insights pulled from this conversation and reflection questions to help you think more deeply. We also encourage you to use this with the ministry leaders at your local church to help them grow and see how this topic kind of meets the context in which you are currently ministering. So be sure to check that out at PastorServe.org/network. Now, at Pastor Serve, we love walking alongside ministry leaders, and if you’d like to learn more about how you can get a complimentary coaching session with one of our trusted ministry coaches, you can find that information at PastorServe.org/freesession. If you join us on YouTube, please give us a thumbs up and take a moment to drop your name and the name of your church in the comments below. We absolutely love getting to know our audience better and we’ll be praying for you and for your ministry. If any questions come up or comments, be sure to drop those down below as well, so that we can follow up with those. We will make this a meaningful resource. This conversation is something meaningful for you and for the ministry leaders at your church. Whether you’re joining us on YouTube or your favorite podcast platform, please take a moment to subscribe and follow so you do not miss out on these great conversations. We have a wonderful conversation for you this week. At this time, I’d like to welcome Glenn Packium to the show. Glenn, welcome.

Glenn Packiam
Hey, Jason. Great to be back. Great to talk to you as always, man.

Jason Daye
Yes, brother, always good. Love how God’s at work. Love seeing from afar. I’m on the other side of the country here in the US but love seeing from afar how God is using you, Holly, and your team there in Southern California, on the other side of the world. Hey, brother, really excited to kind of dive into the conversation that I know is heavy on a lot of pastors and ministry leaders’ hearts. That is this ongoing sense in reality, probably that within the church herself, there are different groups, different facets of the church, who are really struggling with one another, right? There seems to be a lot of finger-pointing, even some rock-throwing. Christ calls us to be united. Yet, in many ways, we sense division within the church itself. So, Glenn, I’d love to start our conversation off by just allowing you to speak. You’ve done a lot of research, you’ve done a lot of work with Barna, and then kind of microcosm in your own area where you’re serving as pastor in Southern California. So talk to us a little bit about, not only this sense but kind of the reality that we’re bumping up against with this division.

Glenn Packiam
You know, there are many reasons for division, and certainly many different divisions have occurred over the course of church history, right? I mean, we can think about doctrinal divisions. We could think about different divisions because of certain practices, maybe even divisions about how ordination occurred. I’m thinking of the various controversies in various centuries. But I think what’s happening right now is we have a division over sort of the political or ideological implications of Christian convictions, and this is unfortunately, I think really something sad because one of the things that has happened as a result of this is that we are tainting our own witness in the world. We’re presenting an image to the watching world that says that actually, Christianity is not primarily about the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but Christianity is primarily about what you think about the economy, or about immigration, or about whatever, whatever, whatever. Now those things matter. They absolutely matter. But there’s not a straight line from biblical principles to public policy. So then we start to caricature each other and we start to assume the worst about each other’s motives. Then we start to kind of put down each other. Now we’re no longer having substantive debates about theological differences or about things that really matter to the church. Instead, we’re having debates, or actually ad hominem attacks against people simply because they’re associated with the camps that we don’t like or with the tribes that we don’t like. I think all of this is hurting us and it’s leaving the world kind of asking, you know, hey, wait, man, what’s up with you Christians? I titled this book, What’s a Christian, Anyway? Because I feel like we’ve sort of given people this whole surprise, this surprising game of like, yeah, you could guess. This person says a Christian means all of these 20 things. Someone says it’s these 20 things. You go, Well, wait a minute. Is any of that true historically and globally, or is that only true culturally and ideologically with your particular tribe right now?

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s what sad, Glenn. We think back to Paul’s words. Neither Jew nor Gentile, thinking about this idea of unity. Yet, we sit and we struggle with the labels. I mean, you said, political labels are the big thing right now that we’re wrestling with as a church and just trying to process through that. It was kind of the question, and not that you have the answer, Glenn. But I’m going to toss this question out there, like, how did we get to this place where we’re so caught up in labels because there was a time when you could have political differences and yet worship together? Yet now we see and research shows that people are choosing churches, their local church families, more over political ideologies than doctrinal beliefs for the first time in history since that’s been surveyed and researched.

Glenn Packiam
Yeah, I think that’s true. I think there are a lot of reasons for this and some people have studied this from the sociological perspective. I think about Jonathan Haidt’s work on The Righteous Mind, a couple of books ago for him, where I mean this idea that you’re not just wrong, you’re wicked, and I’m not just right, I’m righteous. So we’ve attached moral weight to our perspectives and here’s the problem with that. When you do that, it means you’ve actually let something else become your gospel. You’ve let something else become your faith. So your gospel has become a particular view of economics, your particular view of immigration, or whatever the issue might be, a particular view of a democracy or of a nation, or how to organize a nation. All of those things are really, really significant, and they impact people, but they are not the gospel. The good news is that Jesus is King and what it looks like to live as His people, that’s the implications of the gospel. So you can only latch on to these things because you’ve let go of something else. I want to give an image here. Imagine an old wagon wheel or even a bicycle wheel with spokes. You know, there’s the center the hub, and then there’s these spokes that come away from it by necessity. That’s kind of how the spokes work, right? But when you move away from the center, the spokes get farther and farther apart from one another, and when you move closer to the center, the spokes move closer and closer to each other. I think something similar is happening here. It’s not that it’s wrong to have differences or different perspectives. That’s okay and partly because that’s part of being a finite human being. Our perspectives, we see in part, we know in part, the Bible says that. But one of the things we know in full is who God is. What he’s revealed himself to be, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. What do we know in full? We know in full what he has asked of us as His followers and what it means to be Christians. So I think that the more we move towards the center, which is those things. I don’t mean center as in center of left versus right, mushy middle center. I don’t mean that. I mean the core of Christianity. The core of our confession as Christians. The more you move toward that center, the closer you actually move toward one another. I think, as a pastor, my observation, as a theologian, as kind of someone who’s doing this work with Barna, my observations would be maybe less on the sociological side and maybe more on the practical or theological side of saying, what confession have we let go of in order to hold fast to a lesser creed and a lesser confession? And that’s resulted in our division.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s so good, brother. So that brings us to the question at hand. How can we regain some credibility? What is the rootedness? We talk about those spokes. I love the imagery. When we get to the core, what is it that can help hold us together and maybe overcome some of these gaps that we’ve created as we kind of chase other things?

Glenn Packiam
Whenever I feel perplexed about the current state of affairs, since we have no way of forecasting the future, despite our best efforts, the best thing to do, the thing that I really enjoy doing and appreciate doing, is to go backward in history. To look at other eras and go, man, were there eras of history that were sort of like this? There certainly were. There certainly have been. I wrote about the time in the late three hundreds, early four hundreds, about Cyprian and there was a controversy about people who had turned away from their faith, and the controversy of, or challenges that developed out of a pandemic. I wrote about this in The Resilient Pastor. But now I want to rewind the clock, actually, 150 years or so before that, and look at the state of the church in the early three hundreds. Christianity was multiplying. It was spreading into East Asia, North Africa, and even upwards into Europe. In that moment, there were many, many congregations that were holding fast to the teaching of the apostles, the first followers of Jesus. But there were a few teachers, Arius being one of them and there were some other names there who were gaining some traction. Maybe I put it this way, they were gaining popularity but lacking credibility, and they didn’t have the credibility of being connected to the faith of the apostles. So what happened was over 300 church leaders were convened in a city called Nicaea and they wrote down a confession of faith. Now that they weren’t making it up on the spot, they were actually just confirming what had been the normative Christian confession in all of their different congregations, and they were affirming it, confirming it. And evangelicals will appreciate this, I’m an evangelical. I believe in the authority of Scripture. I’m a biblical foundations kind of guy. They were using phrases from the New Testament letters. So they weren’t just coming up with their own wording or their own phrases. They pulled phrases from John 1, Colossians 1, and Hebrews 1 and they were putting these phrases together to say, Okay, this is what is true. That began to be this, not only unifying force, but purifying force, and I think that’s the power of it, even for us today, is returning to a confession about the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. It’s not just unifying. It’s purifying. It reminds us of all the things that we’ve added to our conviction list. They belong in the outer rings of our conviction and we’ve pushed them into the core.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s good. So as we lean into the Creed, as pastors and ministry leaders in our local church settings, what are some practical ways that we can approach this that invites people to really move to that core, that center place that gives this sense of root? Because, Glenn, we know a lot of people are feeling thrown about right now, right? There’s so much stuff moving. There’s so much stuff happening. People are not even sure what. Oftentimes, the thing I believe three years ago, I’m now really questioning today, right? There’s so much of that. So talk to us practically. How can we do this in our local churches in a way that gives our people that foundation?

Glenn Packiam
Well, this book came out of a sermon series that I did here at Rock Harbor in 2023 and one of the things I noticed was, and, I can speak to my context, I think it’s like this in many other places in the country. But there is just this tethering towards any connection to Christianity, Christian morality, or maybe a Christian way of seeing the world. It’s just non-existent. So people just feel like it is a free-for-all. It is kind of this, whatever anyone says, goes, and here’s this spiritualist teacher, someone’s advocating micro-dosing on hallucinogenics, someone’s advocating crystals, and someone’s saying a little bit of Jesus and a little bit of Buddha, and it’s all very, very confusing. I live in the land of Instagram influencers, Jason, and so everybody has a platform, but you just don’t know, again, who’s trustworthy. The metaphor that I used when I did this series was, in the old days in the Midwest, my father-in-law, and my in-laws are from Iowa. My wife’s from Iowa and my father-in-law just retired from 50 years of farming. In the old days in the Midwest, the blizzards could get so bad that you actually had to put up a rope between the House and the barn. The reason you did that was because you would have to go out to the barn, inevitably, because of the winds of the storm, you needed to close things up or whatever. But it would be so disorienting in the blizzard that you could lose your way just trying to come back home in that familiar distance of 50 yards, 100 yards, or whatever. So they’d put a rope up so that you could find your way home. When I was preaching the series, I literally put a rope up to the back of the room to illustrate it and to say, Do you ever feel like you’re wandering around in a blizzard and it’s a disorienting swirl of conflicting and confusing voices, and the felt need was people were like, yes, yes, yes. I said, Well, the good news is the early Christians put a rope up for us to help us find our way home and it is this confession. So the appeal for pastors out there, is it’s not we should teach our church theology, eat your vegetables kind of thing. I honestly believe there is a hunger and there’s a felt need because people resonated with that. Man, I feel confused. I mean, that’s not even touching the sort of rise of deconstruction and doubt. People have been disillusioned because of scandals and the way pastors have misused power. For all the good and faithful pastors that listen to your podcast, it’s like we’re catching strays, man. I mean, this isn’t us. We didn’t do that. Yet, there is this decline in institutional trust. Barna did a recent study about do you consider a pastor to be a trustworthy source of wisdom on spiritual things, and only about 45% of church-going Christians said yes. I mean, think about that. That means half the people in our churches are listening to you and listening to me and saying, Yeah, I don’t know. So it’s that swirl of the blizzard, and one of the things the Creed allows us to say is, don’t believe this because I’m saying it. Believe this because the church has said this and held on to this for 2000 years. Even Paul said that in 1 Corinthians 15. What I have received, I’m passing on to you.

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s good. That’s super helpful. So, Glenn, if you’re a pastor who has not really spent a lot of time talking about the Creed, right? Because there are a lot of churches that do not discuss it. Not every church has it emblazoned on the wall in the lobby, but some do, right? But not all do. So to introduce this, what recommendations would you give a local church pastor to introduce something that is calling people back to something that has consistently existed in the life of the church?

Glenn Packiam
Well, again, I think pointing out the felt need is super important. Jason, you’re alluding to the church I was at previously in Colorado, New Life Church. So the first time we did a series on the Creed was actually 11 years ago in 2014 and it was a different felt need then. So I just named the felt need for us here in California at Rock Harbor a couple of years ago. But 11 years ago, when we did this at New Life, it was because the church had been trying to heal after a scandal with the founding senior pastor. So I think sometimes it is a particular lack of trust that is fueling this hunger, or this need for something bigger than an individual, bigger than the name of a church. Other times, it’s the swirl of competing and confusing voices. But again, I think framing it as saying this is not primarily, hey, learn, learn your doctrine, memorize the rules of algebra, or whatever this is. This is the answer you’ve been looking for. This is the guide that you’ve been looking for. So actually, to help pastors with this book, I’m giving away all of my sermon outlines for this series, What’s a Christian, Anyway? I’m giving away seven weeks of sermon outlines. We’re putting up links to the videos of it so people could even watch me do it in a mediocre way, or whatever, and then they can do better than that. Then we’re giving away small group discussion questions because, again, whether someone has doubt or questions, or if they’re they’re disillusioned, there’s such a felt need here and the Creed is not something to be afraid of. It came from the same council that confirmed what books belong in the New Testament. So they never intended for it to replace the Bible. They intended it for it to be a guide as you read the Bible and I think that’s what can help pastors. I sometimes refer to the Creed as bumper lanes when you’re bowling. It’s like if those bumpers come up, you can’t end up in the gutter. The Creed makes sure that when you’re reading the Bible, you can’t walk away with a conclusion that says, I don’t know that Jesus rose from the dead. Or I don’t know that the Holy Spirit is God. No, no, you’ve got to read the Bible with these bumper lanes, your bumper lanes that keep you in check. But I wrote the book not just as an explainer of what this means, but actually as a pastoral reflection. To say, what would it look like to live like these words are true? That’s the thing that’s come out of 25 years of pastoral ministry, now, two different rounds of doing this as a sermon series, most recently here on the West Coast in California, the questions are different. So instead of just what does this mean to say these words, it’s, what does it look like to believe like these words are true?

Jason Daye
Yeah, that’s good. In What’s a Christian, Anyway? Your book, you lean into this idea around believing, right? Unpack that a bit for us because there is a difference between knowing something and believing something. I think this kind of ties in back to the beginning of our conversation with some of the challenges that ministry leaders are having when it comes to differing perspectives becoming bigger than those things that should be holding us together. So let’s talk about belief a little bit.

Glenn Packiam
You know, I sometimes have joked that if the Council of Nicaea was not in Nicea, but in New York, it wouldn’t have been, we believe. It would have been, I know. There would have been some certainty, maybe some bravado. I know. Or if it was in LA or Orange County, it would be, I feel, I feel like, you know? So somewhere here between certainty and subjectivity is faith. So on the one error is certainty, and we go, no, no, I know this. I can prove this. Well, no, there are a lot of reasons to believe, and I love and appreciate the work of apologetics and all of that. But it’s still not certainty but neither is it subjectivity, where it’s like, well, your truth, my truth, or whatever. I think somewhere in the middle here is this idea of mystery. I don’t mean mystery like, Oh, we don’t know. You know, it just somehow. I mean mystery as in, we’ve come up against something larger than us. It’s like that moment when Job finally hears from God, and God says, Job, were you there when I marked out the oceans? Were you there when I numbered the stars? Job’s like, Oh, my. No, no, no. I have come up against the transcendent one, the Holy One, and that’s what faith is. Faith leads us to the limits of our finiteness. Faith leads us to the edges of our mortality and our creatureliness and faith causes us to bow in humility and lift our eyes in worship and say, I’m confessing a great mystery here. The mystery of the creator, the Redeemer, and the giver of life, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Then when you think of it that way, faith is never something that you can really hold from a distance. Certainty you can hold from a distance. You go, Oh, I know this is true, but it doesn’t demand anything of your life. You can hold that at a distance. Subjectivity. You could change your mind so it doesn’t demand anything of you, right? But this mystery of faith requires proximity. It requires us to come closer. Again, this is what Job says to God. He says, Ah, now I have it all firsthand. I have heard with my ears, but now I see with my eyes. There’s something here about the mystery of faith that actually brings us into proximity with God and that’s what we’re after as pastors. That’s what we want for the people in our churches, not to just know, nor just to feel, but to actually enter into the mystery of knowing God, personally.

Jason Daye
Yeah, and it’s so cool, Glenn, because there’s such a beauty to that, right? Sometimes we forget the beauty and we forget the mystery. We’re so intent on getting our thoughts across and getting our certainties across, that we lose out on the mystery and the beauty that God invites us into. As you have written this book, What’s a Christian, Anyway? And as you went through this series in your local church there, what was the hope that people received from this?

Glenn Packiam
I mean, I think maybe above all that they would discover that Christianity is not just true, but that it is good, and not just good, but that it is beautiful. Sort of what you just said, Jason, that there’s a beauty to it. I think so much of the time when we think about confessions of faith, we go, Oh, yeah. We need to know that these things are true. Yeah, but actually, it’s also really good news. Why is it good news that we believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, the maker of heaven and earth, of all that is seen and unseen? That’s extraordinarily good news to say that God is the source of every good and perfect thing in this world and he’s not the author of evil. Why is it good news to say that Jesus came for us and for our salvation, and then not just that? How is it so beautiful? I’ll just give you one example of this. One of the most beautiful things tucked in that section there about Jesus. The Creed, by the way, is organized in three sections, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. The section on Jesus is the longest because the early Christians wanted to make sure we got this right. Tucked into that section about Jesus, there are two human names mentioned. They are the only two human names mentioned in the entire Creed. One is Mary. He’s born of the Virgin Mary. The other is Pilate. Crucified under Pontius Pilate. I can’t help but wonder, Jason, if the early Christians were trying to help us see the beauty of the good news by showing us Mary, the person that we associate with the highest level of moral virtue, and Pilate, the person that we associate with the most corrupt, and wicked, a religiously twisted politician. You’re like, yeah, that is the worst of the worst. Is it the early Christians’ way of saying Jesus came for all of us, in between the highest of the high, the lowest of the low, the best of us, and the worst of us? For us and for our salvation it says he came down from heaven. Now, when I hear that, I can get choked up. That is not just good news, that’s beautiful news.

Jason Daye
Yeah, I love that. Absolutely love that, brother. As we kind of wind down here, I want to give you an opportunity to share words of encouragement to brothers and sisters serving. As we’re kind of looking at the world around us, as we’re looking back to the beauty of the Christian tradition, what words of encouragement would you share with them?

Glenn Packiam
I hope you know that you are not alone, not only because of podcasts like this and ministries like this that remind you of the others who are in this with you but also you’re not alone because of the great company of saints that have gone before. Hebrews calls it the cloud of witnesses, and I think of it specifically even with those in pastoral ministry, there are so many who have been where you are, and by the grace of God, have been able to endure to the end, and that’s the prize. Maybe even just adding that as an exhortation. The prize is not to be the fastest growing or the largest and all of that. It’s great to celebrate those things when we can. But the prize, Scripture says, is for the one who endures to the end. The one who endures to the end shall be saved. So you gain the crown of life by faithfulness, by perseverance, and by Spirit-empowered resilience. So I just want to say to you, there are those who have gone before. They’re cheering you on. Christ himself is making intercession for you and the same spirit who raised Jesus from the dead lives in you.

Jason Daye
Love it, brother. Great word. What’s a Christian, Anyway? Glenn Packiam’s most recent book that we’ve been talking about here. Great opportunity for you and, Glenn, I didn’t realize that you were making your sermons, the study guides, and those types of things available. What a gift. Thank you so much for that. Pastors and ministry leaders, I encourage you to pick up the book What’s a Christian, Anyway? Also, pick up those other resources that Glenn’s making available. Glenn has worked through this. You can take them, and contextualize them to your local church ministry, and you can find links to the book and to those other resources in the toolkit for this episode, which you can find at PastorServe.org/network. Brother, as always, it is a blessing to hang out with you, to hear your heart, and just to see all that God’s doing in you and through you. Thank you for the contributions you’re making to the greater church, my friend.

Glenn Packiam
Thank you, Jason, the feeling is mutual, bro. So grateful for you.

Jason Daye
All right. God bless you.

Glenn Packiam
Take care.

Jason Daye
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