Neighborhood Church Podcast

Somebody in your life wears you out. Maybe it’s a parent, a grown kid, a boss, or the people on your payroll. These relationships get complicated because one person has more say than the other, and they follow us home, to work, and everywhere in between. In the final week of Ephesians, Brian Ross turns to Paul’s closing words on parents, children, and bosses, and asks what it looks like to let tho...

Most of us move through our days with our heads down, checking our phones, watching the clock, running late for the next thing. It’s not that we don’t care. We just don’t know what we’re looking for, so we walk right past it. In Chapter 5 of Ephesians, Forrest Jenan asks what we might be missing about the Holy Spirit and what Paul meant when he told the church to “be filled with the Spirit.” In Th...

There’s a frustrating gap between what we believe, what we intend to do, and what we actually do. We know we should sleep more, text less in anger, and let things go — and we keep doing the opposite anyway. In Chapter 4 of Ephesians, we move from Paul’s big, cosmic language about what God is doing through Jesus to street level: what does it actually look like when Jesus starts changing how you rea...

We all want more. More money, more time, more success, more peace. And the strange thing is, we can actually get what we wanted — and still find ourselves wanting more. In Chapter 3 of Ephesians, Dr. Gavin Adams explores Paul's prayer for the church at Ephesus and discovers Paul isn't praying for easier circumstances or more stuff. He's praying for something deeper: not more from Jesus, but more o...

Is coming alive something you do, or something that has to happen to you? Can you build the good life, earn it, work toward it — or does it have to be given, if you're willing to receive it? In Chapter 2 of Ephesians, Dustin Maddox walks through Paul's "but God" moment — the turn from dead in our own patterns to alive in Christ, by grace and not by works. In This Teaching Dustin's own story of com...

Rome had the soldiers, the prisons, the emperor. Paul had chains. And from a prison cell, he wrote a letter claiming that Jesus was actually the one who defined ultimate power. In Chapter 1 of Ephesians, we open a nearly 2,000-year-old letter written to a church in a city dominated by the massive Temple of Artemis and the authority of Rome ... and ask what Paul meant when he said God's plan was to...

We're not allowed to see the future, and honestly, that's probably a mercy. But at the very end of the Bible, in a strange, image-heavy vision on the island of Patmos, John gets a glimpse of ultimate reality — and it looks nothing like what most of us are anxious about day to day. In this message, Brian Ross walks through Revelation 22 and asks a simple but unsettling question: if what's ultimatel...

Everybody looks at the same world. Not everybody sees the same thing. Walt Disney once stared at a pile of leftover dirt at Disneyland and saw a mountain — years before anyone else could see it too. In the final week of Challenge Accepted, Forrest Jenan asks whether we can learn to see the world the way Jesus sees it — enemies as people to love, failure as a place for restoration, a cross as the d...

A 100-mph fastball reaches home plate in four-tenths of a second — too fast to think through. Hitters don't rise to that moment. They fall back on thousands of hours of repetition. In Part 4 of Challenge Accepted , Forrest Jenan explores what it looks like to train before life comes at us fast — and why the habits Jesus practiced were never about proving how spiritual we are, but about becoming li...

We've built a world designed to make sure we never have to sit with discomfort for very long. Phones, Netflix, distraction on demand. But almost everything that actually grows us asks us to walk into something uncomfortable first. In Part 3 of Challenge Accepted, Forrest Jenan tells the story of Esther — a young woman asked to risk everything without knowing the outcome — and asks what your next B...

We've gotten really good at having people around us without letting anyone get close. We know how to answer "how are you?" without ever really answering it. In Part 2 of Challenge Accepted , Forrest Jenan explores what Jesus meant by real relationships and why the way of Jesus was never meant to be walked alone. In This Teaching Why having lots of people in your life isn't the same as being known...

You already have a way... a way you handle conflict, chase success, treat people who disagree with you. You probably never chose it on purpose. It got handed to you, or you picked it up along the way. In Part 1 of Challenge Accepted, we look at what it actually means when Jesus says "follow me" — not an invitation to a few good teachings, but an invitation to trade your road for his. In This Teach...

Managing life on your own natural ability ... how's that actually working out? For most of us, not great. Not because we're failing, but because we were never meant to run on willpower alone. In the final week of I AM, Brian Ross unpacks Jesus's claim in John 15:1 — "I am the true vine" — and what it looks like to access a kind of power that goes beyond anything we can manufacture ourselves. In Th...

Success. The right relationship. The perfect body. The paid-off house. We're all chasing some version of the golden ticket... convinced that if we just find it, life will finally start. In Part 6 of I AM, Jordan Brokaw unpacks one of Jesus's boldest claims from the Last Supper — John 14:6, "I am the way and the truth and the life" — and what it means that the thing we've been chasing was never a d...

We live by an unspoken rule: forget you're going to die. Stay busy, stay young, stay distracted... anything to avoid the questions death forces us to ask. In Part 5 of I AM, Jordan Brokaw sits with the story of Jesus's friend Lazarus — the waiting, the grief, the disappointment — and Jesus's claim in John 11:25 that changes everything: "I am the resurrection and the life." In This Teaching Why our...

We all want the version of Jesus that only gives ... a caring shepherd, a safety net, someone in our corner when things go wrong. What we don't sign up for is the other half of what a shepherd actually does: stand between us and the wolf, even when it costs him everything. That's the tension underneath Jesus' claim in John 10... "I am the Good Shepherd." In Part 4 of I AM, Stephanie Benthin asks t...

We're all pretty good at building velvet ropes... deciding who's in, who's out, who belongs. Even the church has done it, trading the wide-open door of Jesus for membership requirements and fine print. In Part 3 of I AM, Jordan Brokaw unpacks Jesus's claim in John 10:9 — "I am the gate" — and how the way to God was never a system to master, but a person to walk through. In This Teaching Why Club 3...

Most of us are navigating life by feel … chasing what we think we want, following what looks like the right path, hoping it leads somewhere good. But what if the direction you're looking for isn't something you figure out on your own? In Part 2 of I AM, Brian Ross unpacks Jesus's claim in John 8:12 — "I am the light of the world" — and explores what it actually means to follow someone who says tha...

We all have a hunger underneath our hunger … a soul-level ache that food, success, relationships, and endless scrolling never quite satisfy. We press the lever. We chase the next thing. And the hunger comes back. In this first message of the I AM series, Jordan Brokaw unpacks Jesus's claim that he alone is the bread of life … and what it means that true satisfaction isn't found in what Jesus gives...

Bob Wiley had a plan. Take a vacation from his problems. The only flaw? Bob came with him. Most of us do the same thing every summer. We book the flights, pack the bags, and quietly hope a change of scenery will do what only real transformation can do. But escapism and real rest are not the same thing. In Part 2 of Searching for Summer , Jordan Brokaw traces the thread of escapism through one of t...

You've been looking forward to it. Planning for it. Quietly counting on it. But what happens when summer arrives and still doesn't deliver the peace, the connection, or the reset you were hoping for? Maybe the problem isn't the season. Maybe it's the weight we put on it. In Part 1 of Searching For Summer, Forrest Jenan unpacks what happens when good things carry too much weight … and what it looks...

A son leaves home, makes a mess of his life, comes back, and his father forgives him. But what if you've heard it so many times that you've stopped feeling it? In this message, Forrest Jenan unpacks the story behind the song Prodigals — and shows us that Jesus isn't just telling a nice story about forgiveness. He's introducing a complete paradigm shift about what God is actually like and how God m...

What does worship actually mean when the music stops? Most of us associate worship with what happens on a Sunday morning. In Part 3 of Playlist Theology, Darrin Cantrell traces the word back to its roots: worth-ship. Assigning worth to something. Darrin shares openly from his own story of addiction, loss, and the long road to recognizing that God was God and he was not. And he closes with a pictur...

The name of Jesus shows up in nearly every worship song we sing — but do we know what we're actually saying when we speak it? In this teaching, Forrest unpacks the power, the history, and the allegiance behind the name of Jesus. In this teaching: Why names in the ancient world carried authority, not just identity — and why the name of Jesus was anything but impressive at first How the Roman Empire...

Why do we sing? It's a stranger question than it sounds — and it's worth asking. In this first message of Playlist Theology , Forrest traces worship music all the way back to its roots: an ancient hymn fragment discovered in an Egyptian trash dump, written on the back of a corn contract, sung by Christians who were being arrested for their faith. At the center of that tiny, 35-word song is a claim...