UBA Church Consultant and Pastor of Higher Expectations Church Bryant Lee recently spoke in the Resilient Church Leaders webinar to help church leaders find footing in a wavering world.

We have to disciple our people. 2 Timothy encourages us to teach, to correct, to rebuke with great patience.

We have to have courageous conversations within our congregations and in our peer groups…. And those conversations don’t mean we’re going to land in the same place.

Very practically, we start with courageous conversations with our people and by how we can be civil in these conversations and how they can be Christ-centered. And then I think [we need] a lot of prayer…

I’ve seen pastor friends around the nation put up prayer prompts for their people to pray. Things we’ve gotten away from. And then they create spaces for us to have conversations.

We have to press into this moment and be both prophetic with our voice and pastoral locally. Not all of us are called to have a national stage or a national public platform. [But we need to focus on] shepherding the local church. If enough of us do that, we’ll see the group swell from it. We’ll see the national change in a way that we can discuss these issues in a way that’s both biblical and civil.

We are not each other’s enemy. There is an enemy, but we aren’t each other’s enemy. When we begin to understand that this country was built on differences. In many of our churches, what makes us thrive is our differences—different gifts, different callings. That’s something to be embraced in a way that advances God’s call on the local church and the call on the national church as we move forward.

How do we engage and recenter this fractured body of Christ in a way that doesn’t go against their brothers and sisters in Christ?

We start by turning people back to the Bible—back to the Scriptures. I’m not discounting that there are truthful things happening in our culture. But until we understand God’s moral authority, His law, His truth, that’s the whole deal about Romans 13. We start there.

Then, we have to disciple our people out of what Paul called ‘endless genealogies, endless myths.’ We as pastors have got to find the time to have these conversations—where people feel like they’re part of something bigger—and deal with this idea of randomness people have…

You don’t have to be into apologetics to do that. You just have to be faithful to the Scriptures and ask people questions: “Why do you believe that is true? Where’s the evidence for that at?” What you’ll find as you you start walking that back in on people, they’ll start walking it down and become more of a listener.

And that takes courage as a pastor. Often you’re having those conversations, not with people in your congregation who are your everyday people. You’re generally having those conversations with your more intellectual people… And you have to show up to do that. When I’m dealing with my more urban people, I’m dealing with conspiracies.

All that comes back to whether we’re going to root truth in Scripture or root truth in pseudo-scholarship.

In 2020, the church’s silence on issues was particularly heard in our African American communities, and that’s something we actively had to rebuild. Are we in another of those moments in 2021, where silence will cost us something?

I grew up in north St. Louis, and I joined the army. I left home for the very first time and had a good bunkmate from the mountains of Kentucky. He had never seen black people, and he and I were bunk buddies—friends to this day.

What we discovered in basic training—digging foxholes, crawling in dirt, and getting demeaned by drill sargents—is that we were not very different. We wanted something better. We wanted to go to college. We hoped to meet the right girl, get married, and live a great life.

I’m struck by Margaret’s slide that said, “See us. Notice us. Pay attention.” That’s what the marches in the summer said. That’s also what they said when they marched on the Captial.

I would encourage pastors with Paul’s exoration to Timothy, In 1 Timothy 4, he tells him to pay close attention to your life and your teachings, preserving thos things, in doing so you’ll save both yourself and your listeners. Ultimately, that’s what our congregations are saying, “Hear us. See us. We’re right here.’

There’s a danger that we can become so caught up on social media—how many views we get, how many people downloaded our sermon. We’re so busy trying to keep up with the Ed Stetzers of the world, who have been gifted to be on these platforms, that we’re not discipling locally. Then we just regurgitate whatever our tribe is saying—even if we don’t believe it.

I often challenge my pastors friends when they bring up whatever topic, I just say, ‘explain it to me,’ and they generally regurgitate soething they just read 15 minutes ago. If the pastor’s being discipled by social media, what is he passing on to the church?

At the end of the day, the cry we hear in America is, “See us. Hear us. Notice us.” And I believe they’re asking the church to see us, hear us, notice us, and respond.

Here’s what I want to tell pastors: tiny steps count. For a lot of our pastors, let’s just start locally. Pastors—myself included, let’s move our coversations from the social media sphere into our communities locally where we have influence.

Bryant is pastor of Higher Expectations Church as well as a church consultant for UBA. Bryant has a particular passion for mentoring bi-vocational church planters and pastors reaching urban areas.

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