A Church Without Walls

Challenged by one of my friends that all my guests and examples have been people in some form of ministry, I reached out to my friend, Eric Stelter, who has been in the construction business and run his family business along with other business ventures. Equipping and inspiring people who live and work outside of "professional" ministry contexts is one of Eric's passions. I regularl...

As we continue our journey with the Holy Spirit in hearing God, in healing and in deliverance, I want to take a step back to have a conversation with another Heidi (Hughes) to talk about how we discern what we are hearing is from God. Discernment is the common denominator in all our cooperating with the Holy Spirit. Heidi will share stories of getting it wrong, of our need to be regularly in Scrip...

This week we are diving deeper into the reality and weirdness of the spirit realm as we talk with my friend and prayer partner, James Kearny. James shares how the Holy Spirit "jumped him in" to this kind of ministry when he was delivered from an evil spirit. And we will talk about what is often a missing piece of this kind of work, and that is discipleship - walking out the new life and...

In the same passage where Jesus gives his disciples authority to heal, it is also authority to cast out demons and raise the dead. For most (church) people the idea that demons exist and that we have authority to cast them out is so far removed from our grid that we don’t know where to begin to enter in. This podcast may be your beginning.

After jumping in the deep end on healing with Bob Ekblad in our last episode, I want to explore some of the biblical foundations. We will look at Jesus as our model for what God's heart is about healing and what the healing ministry of the Holy Spirit looks like. And we will get prepared to step out with the Holy Spirit in praying for healing.

In this episode we venture into healing waters , talking with Bob Ekblad about his journey with the Holy Spirit in the ministry of healing prayer, in particular, praying for physical healing. People have all sorts of skepticism and questions about this topic so let me know what questions you have and we can pursue answers in future podcasts. For now, be encouraged that God does heal and be inspire...

As we are learning to hear God and be led by the Holy Spirit, one of the main questions I hear is, "How do I know it is God and not just me?" This is a good and really important question. We will see what Jesus has to tell us and explore some core questions to help guide us.

We've been exploring how God speaks and we hear, and how we are led by the Holy Spirit. In this episode we will look at one of the ways the Holy Spirit does stuff, what Paul calls "the gift of prophecy" (1 Cor 12:10) The most basic way I understand this is that prophecy is hearing God - for others. We will explore some of the layers going on in how we interact with a prophetic word...

Continuing with our questions about God the Holy Spirit, I talk with our friend, Drew Shih, about his journey with the Holy Spirit and his take on what the Bible means when it says "Don't quench the Holy Spirit," "Don't grieve the Holy Spirit," and by the haunting statement from Jesus that the only sin that won't be forgiven is the "blasphemy of the Holy Spi...

Buckle up for this ride with the Wild Goose of the Holy Spirit. My friend, Heidi Basley, has been called to follow the Holy Spirit since she was young and has known the Holy Spirit is always about mission -  leaving what is familiar and going to the least. For Heidi, being led means being surrendered and willing to follow. Follow vs. fear. Get ready.

Today you all to get to hear from my long-time friend, Libby Chapman. Libby brings a wealth of experience and wisdom, shaped with sensitivity and deep compassion, as she describes her own journey with the person of the Holy Spirit and brings her insights into our topic: what does it mean to hear God? In Libby’s work as a spiritual director she has accompanied many people who feel they don’t hear G...

How are we to be led by the Holy Spirit unless God is speaking to us in some manner? This brings up all sorts of issues and questions for people, including many who feel that God doesn't speak, or if God does, they don't hear. I'd like to suggest that you are already hearing in many ways, and we will explore some of them together and see what God is doing.

Supernatural (Holy Spirit) ministry is weird by definition. So says Jordan Seng in his book  Miracle Work. But one of the weirdest seems to be the Holy Spirit phenomenon called  speaking in tongues.  What is it and why is it so controversial? We'll explore the scriptures and some 20th Century history to see if we can better understand what the Holy Spirit is doing in this unique and strange g...

"I've got Jesus, the Church and the Bible, why do I need the Holy Spirit?" The world around us is desperate for encounters with God that bring healing, restoration and transformation, where they feel seen and known by God. I want to live a life and be part of a community of faith where things happen that can only be explained by God.

As we continue our exploration into the Person and Work of God the Holy Spirit, we look more closely at what the Bible has to show us about the empowering work of the Holy Spirit. The question for this episode is, "What changed at Pentecost?"

We are starting a new season exploring the Person and Work of God the Holy Spirit. There is probably as much avoidance, resistance, and misunderstanding about the Holy Spirit as there was in our previous series on God as Father. For an introduction, today we look at some of the obstacles and stories of how the Holy Spirit overcame them. We'll hear again from Bob Ekblad and I will share some o...

I'm so excited for this conversation with my friend, Willow Weston. She is the founder and directer of www.wecollide.net in Bellingham, Washington and today she allows us into her story of pain and healing with the Father and the journey of learning to be a daughter. She brings a much needed voice to this conversation. You will be ministered to by this.

I'm excited to share this interview with my friend, Drew Shih, as he brings a multi-cultural lens to our conversation about God the Father. Drew leads LED, a ministry catalyst for relational discipling and shepherding, and has been in senior leadership in South Korea, Taiwan, Canada, and now in San Francisco. Drew invites us to "taste and see" the Father's heart rather than sim...

Spiritual orphans function out of our experience of abandonment, rejection, isolation. These experiences create beliefs about who we are, what we are worth and how we must live in order to have security, significance and acceptance. It is a bottomless pit. We feel we have no name and so must work to build a name for ourselves. There can be a deep sense of lostness, ungroundedness, loneliness. They...

In this episode I share a prayer practice that has been part of going deeper in the Father's love - the Welcoming Prayer. I hope this will help frame our time as we seek to be still and make space to receive what God already wants to give us.

Today I talk with Bob Ekblad, founder and director of Tierra Nueva in NW Washington State, a ministry that seeks to share the good news of God's total liberation, healing, and transformation in Jesus Christ with people on the margins, especially those affected by immigration, incarceration, and addiction. Bob shares his approach to the Father of Jesus as it impacts our orphan hearts and the d...

I share a picture of my inward journey that has resulted from praying, "Father, take me deeper in Your love." David Banner, in his book, The Gift of Being Yourself,   frames what deeper looks like. “The self that God persistently loves is not my prettied up pretend self but my actual self – the real me. But, master of delusion that I am, I have trouble penetrating my web of deceptions an...

Our identity, as ones who have been born from above, is to come from what the Father says and must trump any other identity, every other value. An idol is anything that we have put in place of the Father. And whatever is in the place of the Father is calling the shots.

We are so wired for performance in every relationship. We get the job because of how we’ve performed in other places. We keep the job or get a promotion because of how we’ve performed in the job. Even our closest relationships have an element of performance. But our relationship with the Father is one of being loved by Him first, before we’ve done anything – no performance! We want to move from ou...

One of the greatest obstacles in our journey toward God as Father is our complicated relationships with our earthly fathers, especially when we've been hurt by them. If we’ve had no father or bad fathers, or even average or good but not perfect fathers, how do we get to the Father revealed by Jesus, who looks, acts, tastes, smells and feels like Jesus?