[00:00:01] Speaker A: Welcome to the River Church podcast.
[00:00:03] Speaker B: We're all about bringing the life, hope and love of Jesus to everyone around us. For more information, check out our
[email protected] Amazing. And now I have the pleasure of inviting Ian to come share the word with us. Come on, Ian.
[00:00:19] Speaker A: Thank you, Vokey.
Great.
Good. Well, it's great to see so many people here and you know, I missed you all last Sunday.
It was great to be at Cassie's festival.
Yeah.
So next year we have the ambition to do a church weekend away if anyone is interested in that.
So watch this space. We have the ambition. We will see what we can manage, we can cook up. But then, yeah, the year after we cattle the festival. So, yeah, I'm going to continue our series in. We're talking about following Jesus together. So discipleship. But let me start somewhere else.
Let me start just with a story. Back in 20, 26 years ago, this prominent Christian speaker, he was described as an apologist, someone who gives a defense about Christianity. He talks about the reasons for God.
And he passed away after a long battle with cancer.
He was in his 70s at the time and he was known for writing so much, for speaking, widely praised and celebrated for everything he had done.
However, some months later, reports started coming out and an investigation was launched into the integrity of his life to see, you know, actually what was going on. Because things came to light and during this investigation, it uncovered several years of misconduct, sexual misconduct with women and evidence that he'd concealed lots of his behavior, hidden it away and tried using secret methods of communication.
This person who had done seemingly so much for God was now discredited and his work, you know, is no longer talked about.
Earlier this year, someone else widely respected Christian author who'd written many books, he'd sold tens of millions of copies of books, confessed to having an affair for eight years of his life. He's now in his 70s.
He had been married for 55 years, years.
And in his confession, he's broken not only the trust of his wife, but also, do you know, his ministry. He's broken his ministry.
He was widely respected as trustworthy as someone that you could look to and was a valued member.
And now his work has been discredited and he's retired from public life.
And I'm purposely not naming who these people are because I don't want to contribute to, you know, rumors and stories and things like that, but these things are true and they are shocking stories.
And they are just two stories.
Two stories. In the last six years, I'm sure. That you might have heard of other people that have been discredited, that have had falls from their ministry and what they are doing.
But these are, you know, you know, stories of prominent Christian leaders that you might have heard of.
And we might think, hey, this is just a problem with people who are in the spotlight.
But that's not true, is it?
It's a problem with you and me, with people that we know.
I had three good friends in my life, three good friends that I knew well, who input into my life, who helped me grow as a Christian, helped me see Jesus. They all had a passion for God.
They all participated in ministry at churches, including one who was a senior leader of a church. They all taught the Bible, read it, understood it, and helped other people in their faith.
All three experienced a really tough time in their life, you could say traumatic events which has led to marriage breakups, family breakups, leaving ministry, leaving church, and in some cases, leaving faith altogether.
And they, to a lesser or greater extent, hid their feelings, hid what they were going through, didn't talk about it even to the closest people around them. They processed their thoughts and emotions alone.
And I'm not going to be so bold as to say, hey, if they did X, Y and Z, it wouldn't have happened, right? Because things are complicated, situation in life is difficult.
But I do think if they had been more open, vulnerable, authentic, you know, speaking out about their challenges to those people closest to them, I do think it would have had an impact.
I do think it may have helped them from walking away. And do you know, these were close friends to mine, do you know?
And I look back with regret, really, to think, oh, what could I have done to help more?
How could I have input better in that?
And the challenge for all of us really is that thing of faithfulness. How do we stay faithful to God throughout our entire life?
How do we do that? I mean, we look through the New Testament and how it writes about it and see, hey, it's hard, isn't it? They say it's hard. Keep going, keep persevering.
It's a marathon, not a sprint. You know, you've got to keep putting that effort in.
And I'm not going to unpack the whole of the New Testament, you'll be glad to know.
But talking about how we follow Jesus together, that's the whole thing. And I want to talk about one, the last thing, the last circle. If you've been with us, I'll explain it later. And that is core, having a core set of people around you that can speak into your life.
So we get there, but let me unwind, let me go to a bit of sociology.
I've got a slide, but who can, I mean, who can see the slide? I mean, yeah, yeah, I mean, you get it. So 1993, Professor Robin Dunbar, he's a famous sociologist and he proposed that humanity, that humans can only maintain about 150 relationships, right? That's. That's how many you can possibly maintain. But not all at the same level, right? So he proposed that you've got around the total number 100 to 150. And that's called a network.
That's all the people you're connected to. And no, I don't mean on Instagram or Facebook or whatever. I mean all the people you're actually connected to. These are people. I would say that, hey, if you saw them in the street, you'd stop and you'd have a conversation. That kind of level. And then he said that there's a smaller circle of 40 to 50. These are social friends. His language.
A circle of people that you see fairly often. You've got common interest activities.
I think, hey, if you were throwing a notable birthday party, the people that you'd invite to that, if you see what I mean, depending on how social you are. And then a group of maybe 12 to 15, he said, your close friends, these are people your regular contact with, people that share meaningful parts of your life, people who know what's going on in your life, those kind of people. That's the number of people. So, you know, it's got some family in there as well. And then he said, there's three to five that he described as an inner core. And these are your most trusted relationships.
These are people who know you as a person, know your loves, your hates, your fears, your desires, that kind of thing. People that you'd call in a crisis, those people.
And just to say that this theory is well accepted across sociology, you know, but I'm sure, you know, the numbers are up for debate, should we say, and I'm sure you're looking at it and going, yes, I know more people than that, or no, I don't know any, you know, that many people. I'm sure it's different for you.
But Robin Dunbar, he's a sociologist, so he's looking at society. He's looking, doing surveys and research and looking and stating this is how it is, you know, this is what it looks like out there. This is what it looks like.
But the question is, this is what maybe society looks like, but the question is, do we need it?
Do we need friends?
And I'm sure everyone will say yes, but not only what we think. You know, sociologists and psychologists, they say yes, we need friends, we need friends to be healthy. Let me quote from an academic paper in 22 said there is broad based. I've got a slide, but who can read it? There is broad based agreements in public health literature.
So this is literature that's looking at the health of the population that social connectedness promotes, protects and promotes mental and physical health and decreases all cause mortality.
Suffice to say you are going to live longer, healthier if you have friends around you. And it went on to say study of 100,000 people in the UK, the frequency of confiding in others, interesting language and visits from friends and family emerged as the strongest predictor about depression. You are less likely than any other cause to experience depression if you have strong friends and family, essentially people that you can confide in.
I'm sure that you've heard of loneliness being described as an epidemic. Do you know, we don't need research to tell us that we need friends.
And loneliness isn't an epidemic, that people are alone by themselves. It's the fact that when you're alone by yourself, you have negative health outcomes from it.
You experience more signs of mental health problems and physical health problems.
And it's not only the fact that we need friends in general, but also we do need core set of friends for two reasons. I'm going to say this.
First is for the positive health benefits. Time and again it shows that friends, core set of friends, they not only provide practical help when we need it, but also critically, they provide emotional support when we are going through a hard time.
We need a shoulder to cry on.
We all know that, don't we?
We need someone to speak to, someone to talk about how that is what is going through our hearts, our minds.
We need people to rely on to unpack and work through stuff here.
And some of the research said we need regular, positive, meaningful interaction that has the potential for disclosure of private and sensitive feelings.
That's what we need, that's what we need.
But not only we need it for that, but, but core friends also.
We need for achieving goals, we need it for a positive thing.
So having friends at this level is strongly linked with achieving personal goals and moving forward in our lives because these are the inner set of people that we talk about, what we want to do in life, what are our goals and ambitions, what do we want out of it.
And what's seen throughout all of sort of sociology and looking at people is that when we share these things, we are much more likely to achieve them.
Maybe this is you. Maybe you've experienced this. Maybe it's a physical goal. Maybe it's a sporting one. Ever done couch to 5k or something like that?
Or an eating one? Done a diet with a friend or something like that?
Or maybe it's a career goal. You've shared it with someone.
Maybe it's a character goal. Hey, I'd like to be more patient.
Maybe it's a relationship goal. Hey, I'd like to be a better father or brother or sibling or something like that.
When we share these things with other people, what we do is we open ourselves up to accountability.
That thing that say, hey, I've shared it with you.
Now you have permission to come and ask me how I'm doing, that kind of relationship.
And that's what these things open us up to and help us with.
And it's not like, you know, everyone knows, isn't it, that it's not like we have this target and every day is smooth sailing. You know, we're just making progress little by little, all the way. No, we go through setbacks, we go through. We fall over, we don't make it.
We binge eat when we're supposed to be on our diet.
It's raining, so I'm not going out for a run. All of these things, we get angry and irritable. But it's. The thing is having core friends that we can open up to and say, hey, didn't work out for me this week.
We give them an opportunity to come and ask us about that and encourage us to input into our lives.
So I'm going to say so much studies have said we need friends, but we also need core friends.
Now, back to where I started, we're talking about following Jesus together.
That's our whole thing, discipleship, following Jesus. And there we go. We talked about circles, three circles, right? If you remember, if you've been with us, we talked about three circles about discipleship, church community, and core. And we've modeled them around the Gospels and around Jesus, interaction with his disciples. And Jesus had a big wider group of disciples. And it's named one place. It's named 70 or 72.
That's a big group. And then he had a smaller group, which is about. Which for him was 12. His 12 disciples. We know that those were the people that he shared more teaching with. He spent more time. And then in the Gospels, he also has a set of three, Peter, James and John, who are with him at his most glorious time, the transfiguration. When he's up the mountain and he displayed praises, glory and the Father says over him, says some words, but also his most difficult time in the garden of Gethsemane. He draws them, he invites them to come and support him in his time of need. And you'll probably realize that these circles, there's a somewhat mapping onto Dunois number and his circles, right?
It's no coincidence.
It's probably a whole thing of this is just how life is.
So why don't we see it in the Bible is kind of the obvious thing to say, isn't it?
But this is how we've modeled it because this is what we want to divide up our discipleship in church and bring attention to the different ways. And I'm just going to give a few things on what is meant by core.
What do we mean by core group?
We mean a group of maybe three or four people, maybe five. Let's not go there, let's not go litter, let's not go religious about this. But yeah, a small group of people to help each other to follow Jesus. And it's different from the others.
Church is all about the big picture. Do you know, we are all together so we talk a lot about mission together. We are on mission together as a whole church community.
It's more about building family.
It's more about that thing of being in each other's lives and knowing what's going on. And we will support and encourage one another through practices of doing things like reading, praying together, that sort of thing. But when we get to core, it zeros in on the personal what's going on in your life, what are you going through right in the moment. And so we get that zeroing in as we go through the circles and get smaller. And when we get together as a circle, that's as a, as a core, we're going to ask one another questions. We're going to ask really personal questions about one another to reveal what's going on, you know, and what you struggling with, what you loving, what do you need to move forward with what's going on with your physical, your emotional, your mental, your spiritual lives.
And so we're going to ask questions, things like, hey, what one thing could you do to improve your physical health right now?
Got you thinking, haven't I? When questions like when you're relaxing, is there activities you do simply distraction or is it life giving?
Things like what Keeps you up at night.
And I don't mean the kids.
Things like, hey, is there any prayer that you feel that God hasn't answered or didn't answer?
And those sort of questions, they really get to the core.
They really get to our inner being that we have to work through and process through.
And so there's two aspects, I think two aspects that are really important of this core group. I've kind of said them already, but I'm just going to call them out.
The first is being vulnerable.
And throughout the whole Bible, if you really want to know things about what is friendship, the book of Proverbs has a lot to say about friendship. Let me quote a couple of different things.
Proverbs 27, thank you, says, wounds from a friend can be trusted, goes on a few verses later, say, perfume and incense bring joy to the heart. And the pleasantness of a friend springs from their heartfelt advice.
Do you know we need to be vulnerable and open to people speaking into our lives? I don't know about you, but I find vulnerability difficult, right?
Especially, I'm going to say, especially as a bloke, right, because there's a kind of like, you have to be strong, strong as a man, right? More stereotypical as a man. You have to be strong and showing any weakness.
I mean, that's just a sign of weakness, I guess, isn't it? And so there's a culture of like being strong and just sort of toughing it out, right? And then as English people, and just as English people in the room, we have a phrase, I'm sure, you know, keep calm and carry on, right?
I mean, it's just ridiculous, right?
It's just classic stiff upper lip kind of thing of a, of an English culture, right, that says, hey, if anything's going on, we're just going to bury our head in the sand and pretend like it, it doesn't matter. And hopefully it will just go all away by itself.
And that is just not true of our lives. I mean, it's good to think of, hey, global politics, let's just keep calm and carry on in that. But when it gets down to our lives, we can't just think, keep calm and carry. It's just going to go away.
We need to deal with it.
We don't just need to deal with it.
God wants us to deal with it.
God sent his holy spirit to us so that we would deal with it and we would move forward.
And so that vulnerability that's essential of talking about, hey, this really hurts at the moment. Can you Talk into my life.
You know what annoys you at the moment?
I find what annoys me reveals the pride in my heart.
And speaking to someone else about it, they go, hey, are you supposed to be annoyed about that?
Is there something you need to work on?
I don't know if you've ever fallen over and like cut yourself on the ground. Has anyone ever done that? You? Yes, everyone.
And you've all said, you know, people in the room with kids, you know, when you were kids, you ran around and you fell over and you cut yourself. And what, you know, as a kid, when you did that, when you got home, what did your parents do?
They went and cleaned the wounds, didn't they?
I had a friend, I cycle. I had a friend who fell off his bike and he had a.
Anyway, he fell off his bike and he scraped his face up and so they took him to hospital, right? And they numbed.
Maybe I should just be graphic. Anyway, they numbed all his face with injections. He's got this big old graze on his face, right? And then doctors in the room will tell me about this. They get out this big old abrasive pads, it's almost like sandpaper. And they just go to town on his face, scraping it all away. It's just like horrific, isn't it, to think about.
But they do that. Why?
Because there's grit and dirt in there and you can't leave it in, can you?
Because if you leave it in, you're just, it's going to fester, it's going to get disease in there and everything. You need to clean the wound for it to heal.
And there's plenty of times in our lives, isn't there, when I need some wounds to be cleaned of the sin and the corruption in my heart.
When, hey, I'm wounded and I'm blaming it on someone else.
I'm wounded and I'm striking out in behavior.
I'm wounded and I'm having a go or whatever and I need someone else to say, let's come and talk about that.
Let's deal with that.
Second thing, being vulnerable is being accountable. Proverbs 28 says, Whoever rebukes a person will in the end gain favor rather than the one who has a flattering tongue. And probably one of the most well known of all proverbs is, as iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.
Do you know if digging out the olds and rooting out the corruption in us is an essential part of vulnerability, then building new pathways, new behaviors is the second Part and it leads into accountability.
Do you know changing to be more like Jesus is hard? Anyone found that?
I mean, changing anything in life is hard anyway. But changing to be more like Jesus is hard. And so being accountable to someone else says, hey, you get permission to ask me how I'm doing on that.
Because the intention is this, not to say, you're naughty, don't do that again.
That's not good accountability.
The reason is so that someone else can go, hey, what can I do to help?
How can I pray for you in your walk?
What can we talk about that's going on? How can I talk about and give you advice about maybe something that I've learned that can change what you're doing?
And that's the whole thing about accountability. And then you're together as a group and you work through it over time.
So that's the kind of, the essential thing of what we think about core groups, what we want to do with core groups. Now the question is, how do you start?
Let me just do a few questions and then I'll sort of come in to land.
You might say, hey, that sounds great.
Where do I sign up?
We're not doing sign ups for core groups, right? We're organizing church. You're here, that's good.
We're going to be organizing community groups come September.
But the thing is, core groups for vulnerability and accountability to work well, you need people that you like.
You get on with that, you feel that you can spend time with, you can be open with them, and most critical, that you feel you can trust them.
Right?
So trust them with your inner secrets, okay?
And we can't organize groups like that, okay?
You know, that's not something we can do and you wouldn't want us to do it either. It just wouldn't work. Okay?
So we want to encourage you to do it to find people.
And you may be saying, hey, you may have some friends that you can ask and you can ask and start and explore things like that. You may say, hey, I don't have any friends in church that I feel like I can ask.
Let me just encourage you, reach out to other people that you have started making relationships with and think, how can I build a relationship with them? How can I build a friendship?
What do you do?
You know, do you like an activity? Do you want to invite someone to, hey, can we watch football game together or go for a walk or do some knitting together or whatever you like to do, or just go for a coffee and chat? Do you know, it's basics, it's back to basics. How do we make friends?
And we just got to get into that rhythm and think, hey, if I want to progress and get there, I need to reach out to someone and start making friends. And actually our community groups, when we start, they'll be a good place and start building some friendships that maybe you might want to explore further.
Everyone's always got the question, hey, what if I ask someone and they say no?
I just want to say, don't take it personally.
Right.
I think the majority of reasons that people will say no have nothing to do with you and more about what's going on in their life and things like that.
So let's just say we can ask and people can say no and that's fine. Okay. That's okay. Question. What if I start a group and it doesn't go well?
Two options. It may be a great thing to work through it. Hey, if you're open to sharing about how you're feeling and the conflict in a group, talk about it. It's a great thing to sort of expose where it's at. The other option is to say, hey, this isn't working. Let's stop.
That's fine as well.
Let's not have this thing that we all. Yeah. That we groups can't, you know, can't have moments. Paul and Barnabas famously do, you know, in the New Testament.
Sorry if I'm saying things that you haven't read before, but Paul and Barnabas were great friends who were on mission together and they had a disagreement and they went their separate ways for a time and came back.
If we don't get on within a little group, it doesn't mean we still can't be friends.
Okay, sorry if that rings other bells for you, but where they go, what should we do in a group?
Ask tough questions, things that I've said. And we're going to try and put. We are going to put a set of resources together. Marianne is helping me with some questions and put some resources together, help you in groups to work together.
Finally, you might add a question. Hey, I don't think I can commit to church, community and core right now.
I don't want to be unrealistic. I think realism is our lives are busy. And however much technology has helped, all it's done is made us more busy. Right. So AI saying we're going to be out of jobs, it's going to make you more busy. Don't think it's going to sit, you know, anyway, it's another. Yeah, let's not Go there.
So do you know, let's be realistic about it.
We can't all commit to church, community and core, but just doing one is probably not enough.
Okay. We need to be able to work together at a family level, church level, or core level.
Maybe you might be able to meet a core set of friends and some people that you've known for a long time and you think, hey, we're just going to get together every couple of months and just chat and see where things are. Maybe that's the kind of frequency you can do. But let's not just pretend that we're going to fit them all in our life. Maybe you won't be in a community group, but you'll do core and church for a time. Maybe it'll change over time.
But I just want to end with, you know, going back. I started with those stories. If the bank could come back up, please, it'd be great.
I started with those stories of those who had struggled in their walk with God, that they'd been doing.
Walking the walk.
They'd been doing the stuff.
Better say they'd been talking the talk, but not walking the walk. Right.
They've been talking, they've been doing ministry, they've been doing other things, but there's stuff that had taken root in their hearts and they hadn't shifted it, they hadn't dealt with it.
And I just want to encourage you to be purposeful about dealing with what's going on in your life.
It takes some intentionality, intent, take some time with valued friends around you that can help you in that.
But the thing is, right, this is out of a belief of that it's not us that changes ourselves.
It's God through His Holy Spirit that comes and changes us. He's the one.
And God sends his grace through each and every one of us to help us.
Do you know there is no place where it's just Jesus and me and no one else? God sent us, given us the church, so that we can be alongside one another.
We can be phrases meriting God's grace. We are vehicles of God's grace, channels of God's grace to one another.
There's so many stories in the room of people who said, these people were alongside me and held me when I went through a hard time and encouraged me and pointed out my flaws. So many stories in the room. And I just want to encourage you, that's what we're trying to do. Let's get on board with it. Yeah. Amen. Amen.
I just wanted to use this I know we've gone over time, but just use a song just to help for us to express it, you know, and to give praise to God. Let's, let's stand, let's praise God.
